not an easy question

"Sometimes I think that the legalizers and the drug warriors have a secret arms control treaty, in which each side renounces the use of factually and logically sound arguments," writes Mark Kleiman.

Kleiman is an expert on public policy and crime and drugs; he knows what he's talking about.

He has previously pointed out that the estimates of the revenue California would make from legalizing marijuana are ridiculously inflated by proponents of that policy. Either that, or the estimates assume that everyone is going to start smoking ten joints a day.

According to Kleiman, "legalizers" (as he terms them) often make arguments in a free-lunch sort of way: legalize drugs and all the bad goes away--the crime, the underage use, the exploding prison populations, etc. What they tend to ignore is the following problem:

Legal drugs are cheap.

Unless you tax them at very high rates, rates of abuse will likely increase. (the opposite of the observation that drinking declines when you increase alcohol taxes).

But if you raise taxes to make drugs cost as much as they do now, you'll create all sorts of black markets, with some of the same problems of law enforcement we have now.

There are real tradeoffs to legalization. You may get less crime, but at the risk of worse abuse.

Now, I still tend to think legalization of marijuana is a good idea. It frankly is no worse than alcohol. As for the other drugs, I'm still on the fence. There is much to be said for ending the drug war, stopping the militarization of police departments, etc. But I worry about the effects of having very powerful, very addictive drugs widely available. As Kleiman points out: "Alcohol - the drug we decided to legalize and regulate - kills about 100,000 people a year: several times as many as all the illicit drugs combined." Decriminalization (but not legalization) seems the best option for now.