The unhealthy dependency of the good-citizen types (like you?) or the largely healthy and responsible (regardless of criminality) recreational users wouldn't offset the total decadence and irresponsibility that the legalization of narcotics and other mind altering drugs would unleash.
By the way, most of the "good-citizen" types, despite everything else, in their involvement in the drug trade are supporting criminals and crime. As regards the tiny minority that can independently produce their own drugs, when they are not going into rehab, or seperating themselves from reality, they can conceal their activities, yes. Most of them probably feel guilty for getting away with what they do, they can afford it. They are the limo-libs, and to feel justified they then go ahead and try to rationalize what they do by trying to legalize drugs etc. Its like with Michael Jackson and NAMBLA.
Its up to responsible citizens to stand against the degenerates and their sometimes well-intentioned agendas.
If you would look past the official propaganda you would see that it is the prohibition itself that causes the drug trade - just as the alcohol abolitionists found out about organized crime.
Unless you're totally pure and have no vices at all - in which case you'd be so different from the average guy as to be unqualified on that basis alone to make policy from your personal preferences - supporting a drug prohibition is a complete double standard, unless you also advocate alcohol prohibition. There is no consistent principle upon you can stand - not tradition, not history, and not societal impact - upon which you can advocate one and not the other.
Drunk driving alone kills 50,000 people every single year - just one of the ways alcohol can kill. Many also drink themselves to death. Society has determined that that level of impact is more than acceptable - and also that to eliminate alcohol requires a Constitutional amendment. It is entirely outside the bounds of logic or legitimate law to say that others who prefer their intoxication from a different substance are criminal for doing so. Every attempt to attach some harm to the act only further emphasizes that it is the prohibition itself - not the use - which creates the harm.
Drug dealers in the neighborhood? (I mean besides the Kwikie-Mart selling beer and cigs?) Put them in the pharmacies or the wine and cigar shops instead, and they're off the streets, and you can enforce a minimum-age law, gain taxes, and so on. Kids doing drugs? It's easier to teach them not to when they don't know with complete certainty that the people who are saying not to aren't lying. Got junkies? Use the excise tax money to rehabilitate (instead of hitting me, the taxpayer, up yet again for money). In exchange, not only do we get a tax windfall and extra jobs (no different in kind than a brewer's, or a farmer's), but we clean up the streets and eliminate channels for other, far more dangerous criminal activity.
Just like organized crime expanded far beyond alcohol trafficking, the organized crime that arose to defeat the current prohibition has done the same. I have no confidence that they would not participate in nuclear trafficking, knowingly or unknowingly. (The border issue also factors heavily into the security question.) Thus these Puritan instincts might ironically and tragically facilitate nuclear terror on our own soil. It's also spurred the invention of nasty chemicals like crack and meth - replacements for the prohibited.
Would you rather someone smoke pot, or do meth? Snort cocaine, or smoke crack? Which one is less harm, less societal impact?
See, people aren't the willing slaves of the government, and it's not a crime not to want to be one, and to make one's own decisions - for better or for worse - about oneself. It's human nature to want to do so - that yearning for freedom that is in every human being's breast, whether they have ever known it or not.
Certainly the record of governments in making decisions is no better than that of the average man.