You make a good question, because it cuts to the heart of *why* certain behaviors are legal, illegal, or should be legal, or should be illegal.
Robbery, rape, murder, terrorism, fraud, arson, kidnapping, sexual abuse of minors...these things HAVE to be illegal in order to preserve the Social Order, in order to preserve civilization. If outright murder is legal (and I'm going to avoid the abortion sidetrack right now), if it was legal for you to get up, break into your neighbor's house, and slit his throat...well, things such as neighbors and houses wouldn't exist, because the anarchy would prevent people from living civilly. If your neighbor could kill you without recompense, and he knew he could, then you wouldn't leave your house for suspicion that your neighbor might harm you or your family. We need the belief that those who would harm us and our property are either A) already weaned out of the population or B) at least deterred by the threat of imprisonment if they tried such a thing. Heck, you wouldn't have a house, because without an arbitrary force out there separating murderers and arsonists from society, each individual has to be his own law enforcement officer, protecting his family and property and life 24/7--there would be no specialization of labor, thus no economy worth preserving, thus no civilization of any value. No lumber yards, no electricians, no oven manufacturers, no architects, no carpenters, no highway builders, no internets, no economy, just chaos and a hellhole, not unlike most of Africa, Latin America, and Arabia, with corrupt or nonexistent Rule of Law.
And there's the keyword, Rule of Law, a set of boundaries that all are accountable to, and that all citizens know all other citizens are held accountable to. A set of regulations defined by restraining those behaviors that disrupt the civil process, and thus allows people to live confidentally that most of the defrauders aren't in the business world (thus the need for contract law), that child molesters are in prison, that arsonists are deterred from burning down your house. These things aren't illegal because they are wrong or evil or sinful--they have those qualities and its a convenient overlap, but those qualities aren't what make those behaviors illegal or we'd have alot more laws and alot more criminals cause there are lots of evil and sinful things that are legal right now--those specific behaviors are illegal because civilization is contingent upon their illegality. So it isn't a matter of "winning the war" on robbery, or rape, or murder, or terror. These things HAVE to be illegal, in every society or there is no society. It's comparing apples to hippopotamuses.
If the War on Robbery is necessary, than the War on Drugs is voluntary--drug use is a different behavior that rape, at least in the context of having certain drugs (like booze) legal and others illegal. If someone shoots heroin, it has no more bearing on anyone else than if someone gets drunk or reads 'Catcher in the Rye'. That drunk person might sulk in his house, or he might drive and kill someone. That person might read Catcher in the Rye and go to bed, or he might get a gun and shoot a singer or a President. Its when the behavior carries over to someone else that it becomes a problem. If we can have a civil society where booze is legal, and only have certain boundaries for the behavior--don't drive drunk, for example--than those same boundaries can be put in place for pot smoking or snorting cocaine--don't drive while high.
Drug use, in and of itself, does not disturb the Rule of Law anymore than any number of other self destructive and stupid behaviors. If anything, it hampers the effectiveness of the Law by diverting needed tax payer money from chasing down terrorists to chasing down drug dealers. It makes the notion of Law look ineffective, and thus the Law is flauntable. Bad laws don't save society, they hasten the destruction of it, by turning the governing authority into a Paper Tiger, one that can't win its self declared "War on Poverty" or "War on Drugs". Its why it is so important that whatever law is on the books, either MUST be on the books so that we have civilization, or it must be enforcable. Drug use is wrong, but there are plenty of things that are wrong--stupidity, bad parenting, laziness, insufferable ignorance about economics, George Clooney. Illegality does not equal wrong, and Wrong doesn't equal illegality.
I honestly don't know what to do about drugs. Drugs and the death penalty, I can't give a strong answer either way. I don't pretend to have all the answers, nor do I think one needs to take a definite side on every idea and every position and every concept in the history of man. But when comparing the War on Murder, the War on Rape, and the War on Drugs, one doesn't fit, one isn't the same as the others.
"I honestly don't know what to do about drugs. Drugs and the death penalty, I can't give a strong answer either way. I don't pretend to have all the answers, nor do I think one needs to take a definite side on every idea and every position and every concept in the history of man. But when comparing the War on Murder, the War on Rape, and the War on Drugs, one doesn't fit, one isn't the same as the others."
The War on Drugs is different too in that the standard lock up as many people as possible approach is not nearly as effective as it is with other types of crime. If we get some serial killer or serial rapist off the streets, we've really done something. We're protecting his future victims. Most drug users fool around with the stuff for a while and then grow out of that phase in their lives without hurting anyone. We aren't protecting future victims imprisoning a drug user for being involved with drugs unless he happens to be one of the few who will go off the deep end and cause a lot of problems. We aren't doing much even when we put someone in prison for selling drugs because those who would have bought from him will just buy from someone else. There is a never ending supply of people willing to sell you drugs. Filling our prisons with these people helps a little in that with this shotgun approach we do take some people off the streets who are a real threat, but we've now filled our prisons so much with so many who aren't that big of a threat that we are having to start letting them all out earlier and earlier to make room for the new people sentenced to prison. I would think maybe it would be a better idea to focus on putting those we know for a fact are out there raping and killing and stealing in and keep them in longer. That would be benefit us all more and be a much better use of our limited resources.
Another thing we should consider is that the deterrent effect of laws with harsh punishments isn't nearly as powerful when it comes to drugs. Nationally, better than two out of three murders will be solved. I don't know the statistics on rapes, but probably a very high percentage of them will result in the culprit getting caught. Contrast that to drug crimes where the vast majority go unprosecuted. How many pot smokings or meth or coke or heroin snortings or shooting ups result in an arrest? One in several thousand. People know that the chance that they will get caught fooling around with drugs is minuscule. Those who do drugs all tend to feel like as long as they are a little careful there is almost no risk of getting caught. Law enforcement will never even know they've done the drugs. There won't be victims and witnesses who weren't involved to pressure the police to solve the crime. They can sneak off to the backroom with their buddies and get high and the only people who will know about it will be others taking the same risks who tend to keep their mouthes shut about it.
The same applies to those selling the drugs. They have fairly good reason to believe they won't get caught. The risk of getting caught may be higher than for simple use of drugs, but it is still much lower than with most other crimes, and most of the people selling drugs at the retail level at least tend to be addicts anyway who won't be deterred because the most important thing in the world to them is getting high again. It's those selling at the retail levels who take the greatest risks, even though most will get away with it. They are the ones we are filling our prisons with though because that small percentage of people caught selling drugs adds up to a lot of folks to have to warehouse in our prisons. The farther up the ladder you go in the distribution networks though the more you find people who are extremely careful to keep a good bit of distance between them and the drugs they are trafficking in. They keep a buffer zone between them and the drugs of people who will take the fall if the police get involved. They make tons of money and their greatest risks come not so much from law enforcement but from the competition or those who would rip them off, kill them, whatever. If they aren't deterred by the risks inherent in working with organized crime in a black market industry, they won't be deterred by the slight chance of getting caught and getting sent to prison.
People seem to think that the answer is always to raise the punishments and lock more people up with longer and longer sentences. The thinking behind this is that the longer the sentences, the more people will be deterred from breaking the law. What people aren't taking into account with this line of thinking is that the level of deterrent effect of a law is directly proportional to the level of risk of getting caught perceived by the person contemplating breaking the law. If people don't think there is any real chance of getting caught, they aren't going to be too worried about how severe the remotely possible punishment could be.
Personally, I'm not for legalizing all drugs, although I would legalize marijuana and regulate it similar to alcohol. With the rest of this stuff though we need to get it through our heads that drugs have always been here and they always will be here. We will never "win" the war on drugs. We can't make the drugs go away entirely. The best we can really hope to do is keep the prices up so high that relatively few people will try them, and not so many of those who do try them will be able to afford to do them frequently enough to become addicted before they are able to grow up and leave the stuff alone. If we can do that, and try to get a handle on the few users/addicts cause us the most problems, we'll be accomplishing about all we can accomplish.
The way to keep price up, is to shrink the supply and make it more expensive for those distributing the drugs to operate. We do that by disrupting production, seizing huge quantities of drugs that do get produced, and shutting down major smuggling routes. Instead of rewarding law enforcement for busting and imprisoning as many people as possible, which leads to us imprisoning hundreds of thousands of inconsequential minor players at great expense to us all with little return on our investment, we should be funding and patting those on the back who seize the really huge loads of drugs, shut down tunnels under our borders and other smuggling routes, locate and shut down the big drug factories in all parts of the world, and so on.
You know I was reading that there are really only about nine factories in the world that supply almost all of the pseudoephedrine diverted for use in meth "superlabs" that produce the lion's share of the meth consumed in this country. We should be and are to some extent focusing on forcing these factories to account for where their product goes, and exerting extreme pressure on major meth manufacturing countries like Mexico to limit and control their pseudophedrine imports. We could put a big dent in the meth supply that way. I know the controls on pseudoephedrine at the consumer level are putting a big dent in the number of little tweaker labs in my area. If we can put the hurt on the superlabs that produce most of the meth consumed in this country, supply will go down, average meth purity will go down, and fewer people will become addicted to that drug. It seems from my vantage point working in the criminal justice system that we seem to focusing most all of our energy and money on busting all these little guys with tiny amounts of dope and locking a lot of them up for a long time. We're spinning our wheels with that, wasting billions of dollars. The only good that comes from that is that some of these hundreds of thousands we lock up are actually really bad guys and we're getting them off the streets for a little while and away from the rest of us. It's an extremely inefficient way of achieving that end though to lock up more people than any other country in the world in total and on a per capita basis to achieve it. Our crime rates and drug use rates are still among the highest in the world. If we'd just get smart with our criminal justice and drug policies we could achieve so much more.
I don't know all the answers either, but what we are doing doesn't seem to be working worth a flip from where I'm sitting. I think that in the future when people look back in history at our present version of the war on drugs, they'll think we were pretty stupid. Hindsight is 20/20 though. It will be interesting to see how things unfold.