Prohibition has failed before in America, and many believe that the war on drugs is failing now. Champions of legalization, including this newspaper, argue that if it is done properly governments could take the world's largest untaxed industry out of the hands of criminals and start to exercise workable controls. The Economist, Jan. 29, 1994. Yes, legal drugs, even if heavily taxed and extensively regulated, would no doubt be cheaper than illegal ones, which could mean more people sampling them out of curiosity. But this danger has to be weighed against the insidious marketing dynamic of illegal drugs, whose wildly inflated prices compel the low-income user to become a pusher and recruiter of new users.
Drugs can kill, of course.
But drug prohibition kills too. In Washington, an estimated 80 percent of homicides are drug related, meaning drug-prohibition related. It's gunshot wounds that fill our urban emergency rooms, not ODs and bad trips. Before gaining a seat on the Federal District Court bench in San Francisco, Judge Vaughn R. Walker had been a long-time Republican fund raiser and partner with a prominent law firm. New York Times, March 4, 1994.