An American voice raised for legalization

Businessweek posts a column by Christopher Farrell arguing for the legalization of all drugs as an antidote to the harms currently inflicted by the prohibition/punishment model. He's on the right track here although I think he's a little trigger happy with the idea of prohibitive taxes. If you make the drug too expensive the already well entrenched black market will continue to supply it at a lower cost and may have to solicit more addicts in order to maintain profit levels.

Otherwise the approach he suggests, "legalization, regulation, and taxation," is exactly what would solve the "human devastation, violent crime, corruption, disease, and wasted time and money embedded in the old approach."

As Farrell points out, it's not perfect but it's better than we have now as "there's nothing positive to be said at all about the current approach."