Many drugs are horrible and ruin lives. But they ruin fewer lives than do the laws making the sale and purchase of drugs illegal. If every penny spent on enforcing drug laws and incarcerating drug sellers and buyers were spent on education, treatment, and poverty programs, drug use would fall in the United States by orders of magnitude.

One of the more pernicious effects of making the sale and purchase of drugs illegal is that people who sell and purchase drugs are sent to prison. Most people sent to prison for these offenses are themselves addicts either trying to feed their habit, or to pay for it. These are the people that the drug laws are intended to protect, no? But as a result of going to prison they:

* are frequently denied effective treatment for their illness, and therefore continue as addicts inside and outside of prison;

* are effectively exiled from the legitimate economy, becoming a burden on society both before and after incarceration, and increasing the likelihood of continued drug use;

* cannot take care of their families, increasing the burden that we all carry that we would not otherwise carry;

* are mixed with a violent element, whose influence will certainly cause many to commit non-drug crimes that they otherwise would not have.

The prisons turn users into addicts and addicts into career criminals.

Some people seem to believe that we need these harsh laws in order to catch, as you put it, "cocaine pushers" who are "in the business of destroying people". In fact, narcotraffickers are entirely the creation of US "Drug War" policies. Decades of supply-side enforcement has made these people so wealthy that they can purchase entire governments. The government of Mexico, the world's 14th largest economy, is populated in some percentage at almost every level by agents of the cartels. It is "Drug War" policies that create the profits to pay for this corruption.

Demand-side policies along with controlled and regulated distribution of drugs in the US will decimate the narcotraffickers. Without customers willing to pay ridiculous margins for their product, they will simply go out of business. Although some former narcos will attempt to leach off of society through kidnapping and other crimes, a lack of local community support, money and political cover will mean that aggressive policing will finally be able to stomp them out in time.

Also consider the case of Oxycontin, a legal narcotic manufactured by Perdue Pharma, "a privately held pharmaceutical company founded by physicians and now located in Stamford, Connecticut". Oxycontin is among the most destructive drugs today. Oxycontin is primarily acquired by addicts either by getting doctors to legally prescribe it, or by purchasing excess pills from individuals to whom it was legally prescribed.

"Drug War" policies are entirely ineffective a combating this kind of practice; as a result, prescription drug abuse is growing at a faster rate than nearly all other forms of drug abuse. However, it is almost certain that addiction-treatment regimes instituted to reduce the use of currently-illegal drugs will also be effective at reducing the illicit use of currently-legal drugs.

And if for some reason you think that education and treatment programs can't have a significant (if not massive) effect on addiction rates, I would ask you to take a look at the following two data points:

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/12/science/la-sci-sn-ci...

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...