Is it Time to End the War on Drugs? Is That the Same as Legalization?

Seriously, what are your thoughts?

Libertarians and many old-style conservatives do not want the War on Drugs to continue. It's been a financial disaster and it's done little but give us worse drugs. For example, methamphetamines are a toxic brew largely developed in rural areas by people who felt they could cook it themselves rather than take the risks of buying other drugs on the street.

I used to believe that drug legalization was a bad idea because it basically would say, "We give up." I believed it was society's responsibility to limit the availability of substances that could damage its citizens.

Now, I happen to come from a family of alcoholics. It's rather amazing I got through my teenage and early adult years without developing dependence on drugs or the liquid one: alcohol. But the older I get, the more I realize that it was the overall availability of drugs and alcohol to me that - strangely enough - kept me from pursuing them. I was probably offered pot a slew of times over 4-5 years before I ever tried any and was pretty disappointed in the results. Likewise with alcohol. On my 18th birthday, my mother - who became an alcoholic for a short time just before I was born following the infant death of the son born before me - went out and bought me a bottle of cheap wine as my "rite of passage" into adulthood. A couple of sips, and yuck. To this day, I can take no more than a sip off a beer and only rarely get through a small glass of wine.

But if pot and alcohol had not been around, had I not been able to try them and be disappointed by them, I wonder if I would have been so fortunate. As humans, we tend to want what we can't have. If it's illegal or expensive, hey, that makes us want it all that much more.

I find myself now not just wanting to end the failed failed failed War on Drugs, but also considering fighting for legalization. We've tried prohibition for decades now and it has not worked. We've demonized pot - which is many things, good and bad, but a demon drug it's not - only to have it more sought after.

If we legalize, what do we legalize? I feel that pot could be treated like alcohol and cigarettes, meaning not available legally to minors. But I don't think I'd be willing to legalize heroin, meth, or cocaine, which are an order of magnitude much worse than marijuana. But is that a prescription for disaster?