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Actually, cocaine was legal in your grandfather's grandfather's time.

True. It would be interesting to compare addiction rates in 1900 vs 2000... ...in fact, I did!

By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict.

--www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm

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"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."

--www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm

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"The demand for both powdered and crack cocaine in the United States is high. Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."

--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm

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That works out to a rate of about 1.3% for cocaine in 2000 vs 0.5% for either cocaine OR opium in 1900. If you add in the heroin addicts, the addiction rate in 2000 to either cocaine OR heroin was about 1.6%.

So if the DOJ is to be believed, the addiction rate has roughly tripled. Sounds like a century of failure.

[I used a population figure of 280,000,000 for 2000]

So, as I have said before, regardless of the laws, you'll still have a certain segment of the population that will use drugs or alcohol or tobacco. We have the choice

1. to have variations on this percentage and spend money to help them deal the consequences of the addiction or

2. to have variations on this percentage AND we can pass thousands of draconian anti-drug (or anti-tobacco or anti-alcohol) laws, create the economic environment that makes it possible for the growth of multi-billion dollar illegal drug operations, gang activities, a large percentage of the yearly murder rate, a multi-billion dollar drug interdiction business on federal, state, and local levels (with attendant corruption and property confiscation), together with lots of time and money wasted in school anti-drug programs, and the resultant rise in taxes at all levels of government to fund it.

#2 doesn't sound like value added to the problem of drug addiction.