[catzaa]

> even though every sane person has to acknowledge that legalizing drugs in part is more effective than enforcing more rigid controls,

No it is not. Two examples of this are Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.

In both these countries there are zero tolerance for drug users and drug traffickers and the results show. Smoking Marijuana almost teenagers in Japan is basically unheard of.

It seems that laws in the USA and Europe are not strict enough to act as a deterrence. If many of these countries adopted the death penalty or similar penalties for trafficking, then perhaps something could be done about it.

(Singapore executes drug traffickers. I don't know what legal punishments there are for traffickers in Japan, but I know the social punishments are severe. A family will often cut contact with a relative if he is sentenced for a minor crime. Sports stars, tenured professors and celebrities will loose their jobs if they had a criminal offence even for something completely unrelated to their career. Quite different from the attention that washed out American celebrities get.)

[njs12345]

Anecdotally, speaking as someone who knows a number of young people from Singapore, they certainly smoke weed just as much (perhaps even more) than people I know from the UK. Have you considered that perhaps a zero tolerance approach just drives use further underground? I doubt the official figures are accurate, and it's probably not sensible to compare an authoritarian dictatorship with liberal Western democracy.

Japan just has a low crime rate across the board, largely for the reason you mentioned. Again, this probably isn't helpful - inducing a general respect for the law into a society is a difficult proposition, or every nation in the world would be doing just that.

[jcfrei]

essentially we're a drug driven society (caffeine, taurine, aspirin, adderall, etc.) hence a death penalty for trafficking might ultimately be effective but at the same time seems totally ludicrous to me.

furthermore I don't think drugs themselves are the problem but the underlying mechanisms of society that drive somebody into drug abuse.