Legalize It All

"It’s possible, of course, that one reason we have a relatively small number of drug addicts is precisely that the most addictive drugs are illegal. If cocaine were to be legalized, says Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University who has been a critic of the war on drugs since the 1970s, there’s no evidence indicating that the number of cocaine abusers would be less than the number of alcoholics, or about 17.6 million. Moreover, legalizing cocaine might worsen both cocaine addiction and alcoholism, Kleiman adds. “A limit to alcoholism is you fall asleep. Cocaine fixes that. And a limit to cocaine addiction is you can’t sleep. Alcohol fixes that.”"