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I wrote the article.

The way I see it, other people's drug use shouldn't be costing us money at all. Yet, because it's illegal, we pay for incarceration. We pay for treatment. We pay for the additional cops needed to enforce the laws. We pay for the war that results when terrorists gain power through the drug trade. We pay for the state colleges that socially engineer their student populations based on race, to make up for all the poor kids who aren't making it to college because their dads aren't around to help them with math homework all their lives.

My take is that we shouldn't be paying for any of this stuff. Whether drugs are legal, whether they're illegal -- we shouldn't be paying for other people's crappy decisions with our own hard-earned money. I know it sounds callous, but maybe people will stop screwing up when they realize the system's not going to save them every time around.

"we shouldn't be paying for other people's crappy decisions with our own hard-earned money."

I agree.

But you can't unleash legal drugs on a nanny state like ours without expecting to increase costs to the taxpayer. As Ann Coulter states in an excellent piece, "It's not as if we live in the perfect Libertarian state of nature, with the tiny exception of those pesky drug laws."

This country of ours has a ways to go in the areas of personal responsibility, tort reform, and the dismantling of our socialist-leaning government before I'm comfortable with supporting a relaxation of our current drug laws.