This laissez faire attitude leads to too much permissiveness on the subject of drugs. And permissiveness on drugs imposes terrible moral and psychic costs on America's youth. In fact, much of our current predicament stems for the permissive attitudes that emerged from the 1960s. The decay of enforcement that began in the 1960s helped to cause the problems of the succeeding decades. Make no mistake.
Enforcement is an extremely effective tool in diminishing drug use.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the period coinciding with the dawn of this country's second great drug crisis, incarceration rates plummeted from 90 per 1,000 arrests in 1960 to only 19 per 1,000 arrests by 1980. Laws are what protects society from anarchy. And when we choose not to enforce our laws, our laws lose their effectiveness, and the bulwark against anarchy withers. While our society too often tends towards laxness, we also have a history of responding to challenges. America has never faced a problem that has proven too great for us to meet or too big for us to tackle.