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.
It doesn't make sense to say that the prohibition of a thing is it's cause. Regardless of what prohibition and law exists organized crime remains. It doesn't take an Einstein to suggest that criminals are untrustworthy, so I have no doubt that the most corrupt individuals could for the right price, be involved in smuggling a nuke into the U.S.
If 50,000 people die in drunk driving accidents a year that really suggests that maybe the prohibitionists were on to something, and not that it fueled crime, since I defy you to come up with the stats that gangsters killed that many people in a year during the prohibition.
And if you think that kids will have more reason to trust adults after more adults are getting wasted, you have another thing coming. Of course everyone wants to be free, but in order to maintain and expand freedom to where it is really lacking, you must also stop looking at the world through a "me me me" lens and see what consequence your actions have on the rest of the world.
I do have to admit that your argument that its inconsistent to support a prohibition against all drugs while not supporting an alcohol prohibition makes some sense. What doesn't make sense is to equate them. And to take the step to actually legalize drugs means that you have to equate the impact that of legalizing drugs would have with legalizing alcohol. That's like equating being homosexual to being black. I really don't see a reason to be pushing for drugs with everything else going on in the world. So if you are a supporter of drug legalization you're probably better off on some lib site, where other people will have no problem pushing drugs, corruption, selfishness and immaturity.
I have to know. Did you vote for Bush or Kerry? If you have to lie, then that should tell you something.