[Lester Moore]

So if pot were legal, we'd see no increase in the number of users.

Even you can't believe that.

I didn't hunt them down, but I've seen the stats that show that the %'s of cocaine users now is no less than before cocaine was banned in 190whatever and the numbers of ethanol users didn't increase with the repeal of prohibition, however, the violence associated with the gang warfare over ethanol distribution did end with making it legal, (didn't Al Capone invent drive by shootings), and I know I'm not going to go start smoking pot if it became legal. Are you?
And right now, everbody that wants pot can get it and nobody can stop them. Everyone that wants to smoke pot now is smoking pot now.
There is the gang violence over turf with the drug running. What if we made it a legal product and controlled & taxed the hell out of it like ethanol?

[robertpaulsen]

"What if we made it a legal product and controlled & taxed the hell out of it like ethanol?"

Nah. Let's tax the hell out of it like tobacco and drive it back underground. Then it'll be legal AND we won't get any revenue.

[robertpaulsen]

"... but I've seen the stats that show that the %'s of cocaine users now is no less than before cocaine was banned in 190whatever ..."

Yeah, I questioned those statistics at the time -- I didn't think that a comparison of 1900's cocaine addicts to current cocaine users was a fair comparison.

[Ken H]

I've seen the stats that show that the %'s of cocaine users now is no less than before cocaine was banned in 190whatever

Excerpt from the USDOJ website, my comments [bracketed]:

In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S. [50,000,000 census in 1880 =0.8% addiction rate] That is twice as many per capita as there are today.

By 1900, about one American in 200 [=0.5%] was either a cocaine or opium addict. [that is a 37.5% DECLINE. The declne would be even greater if cocaine addicts were not included in the 1900 figure]

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm

______________________________________ Now on to 2000:

"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

"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

_______________________________

Using figures from the USDOJ, and a population of 280,000,000, the rate of addiction to either cocaine or heroin in 2000 is about 1.6%, or just over 3X the 0.5% rate in 1900.