[I Shall Endure]

Society might survive legal marijuana. But legal hard drugs? Look at the societies that tolerated them: America in the 19th century, pre-communist China, Iran until the late 1950s. All had HUGE addict populations - the Iranians still do.

The drug war is a necessary evil. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.

[Ken H]

What is your source for claiming that 19th century America had a huge addict population?

How do you justify support for trampling the Tenth Amendment by use of the expansive Commerce Clause?

[BlazingArizona]

To the extent that drugs kill, they also put an end to the problem. If you don't like that scenario, then we need to recognize addiction as a medical problem and look for treatments. The addictive personality will abuse anything, including food, so banning what addicts use does not fix the problem; it just feeds the cartelistas. Such people can be addicted to behaviors, like gambling. Governmental suppression of these is even less likely to succeed.

[Ken H]

We do have current and historical estimates of addiction rates from the US government. The DEA says that 0.5% of Americans were addicted to either cocaine or opium in 1900:

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

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

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...the Office of National Drug Control Policy pegs the current number of cocaine addicts at around 3.6 million people.

http://www.thecyn.com/cocaine-rehab/cocaine-addiction-united-states.html

"For example, numbers like heroin addiction. You can find numbers that go from 255,000 up to the one I'm currently using, 980,000, if I remember the last time we updated it, and those are all valid scientific studies." --Drug Czar Mcaffrey

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/symposium/panelmccaffrey.html

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Adding the ONDCP numbers for cocaine and heroin addiction together yields an addiction rate of about 1.5%. So after a century of increasingly aggressive prohibition, our own government is telling us that addiction has gone from 0.5% in 1900 to 1.5% in 2000.