OK, so first, you bring up three points, which if they were sound, are good ones. However: 1. Has it? Jacob Sullum (for whom I have a great deal of respect)

OK, so first, you bring up three points, which if they were sound, are good ones. However: 1. Has it? Jacob Sullum (for whom I have a great deal of respect) addressed this fairly squarely in Saying Yes. That's over a decade old now. He also addressed this as one of his main points during his appearance on C-SPAN[0]. Are you saying that you have research to correct his work? Have you presented this to him? 2. Here, you presume that addiction is spread through a vector of casual use. But that has never been shown, except in the strange case of nicotine, which appears to be an outlier in this property. [1] In fact, in times and places of widespread drug use and in times of temperance and sobriety, addiction seems to afflict between 10 and 20% of the population. The evidence suggests that some people are pre-disposed to addiction, and that the act of drug use has only a small effect compared to this pre-disposition. So then the question becomes: why treat this segment of the population like an underclass? 3. Again, do you have evidence to support this claim? There are today many functional heroin users - see the medical field, for example. ...but even if you were correct on these three points, is that sufficient to justify such a repressive, immoral policy as prohibition? Don't you think that, in the absence of prohibition, people will generally be healthier and have better access to help? What do you say about prohibition psychedelic drugs? Isn't this an affront to religious freedom? Your points seem to assume that drugs as we know them will continue to be drugs as we know them in the absence of prohibition, but it's far from clear that that's the case. For example, we currently have access to alcohol (a drug which is as dangerous as any) in varying degrees of concentration, from beer (relatively benign) to grain alcohol (which can cause death quite easily). However, during alcohol prohibition, access to milder forms of alcohol disappeared, leaving people to drink mostly whiskey (and often horribly impure whiskey at that). James Gray talked about this quite a bit and quite convincingly I think. [2] Similarly, today, we have a very corrupted view of plant drugs because the benign forms (coca leaves, poppy tea) are unavailable, so people with a taste for those plants instead use cocaine and heroin. In the absence of prohibition, we will likely see more people return to use of the plant forms of those drugs, just as the end of alcohol prohibition has gradually pushed the slider toward beer and wine (although liquor use still hasn't returned to pre-prohibition levels). Finally, the best argument against prohibition is probably that it funds incredible evil in the world. Illicit drugs are a market of over $400 billion at the wholesale level. A great deal of this money in turn funds criminal gangs or third-world dictators. Why allow them to continue to corner this market? [0]: https://www.c-span.org/video/?176758-4/us-drug-policy https://www.c-span.org/video/?176758-4/us-drug-policy [1]: http://drugwarfacts.org/node/3343 http://drugwarfacts.org/node/3343 [2]: https://youtu.be/xEC2IK4piwI?t=5067 https://youtu.be/xEC2IK4piwI?t=5067