Within the last decade, however, the repeated failures of the war on drugs at home and overseas, and the rising tide of criminal violence associated with the huge profits in drugs, had caused some of these law and order types to change their thinking. The mayors of Baltimore and Philadelphia, the police chief of San Jose, former Secretary of State George Schultz, conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., and a surprising number of other public figures have now expressed their belief that legalization would have to be an improvement upon the present situation, so desperate has it become. As a small start, said drug policy critic Morton Kondracke in The New Republic, "marijuana might be legalized so that law enforcement could concentrate on cocaine and heroin." (Kondracke, 1988:19) The third and most important reason why drugs should now be legalized is that drug abuse could be more effectively controlled and treated if the problem were taken out of the criminal realm and treated as it ought to be-- as a social and medical problem that requires treatment. Our country now has tens of millions …show more content…
The historical lesson of prohibition proves that where a demand for an illegal substance exists, someone will supply it; efforts to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages failed because bootleggers and speakeasies sprang up overnight to satisfy the public's thirst. In the same way, we have seen that prohibition of drugs does not and cannot work. The public is apparently willing to pay almost any price for an illicit "high," and the amounts of money involved insure that suppliers will always be on hand to meet the demand, and there will always be police and customs agents willing to look the other way for a share of the profits. So even if legalization were extremely undesirable for other reasons, the simple fact that prohibition doesn't work would argue strongly for