[betterunix]

"If we want people off the harder drugs"

If we want that. That is not really the goal. The goals of drug prohibition today are:

1. Creating favorable markets for the pharmaceutical industry

2. Expanding the size and power of the police

3. Artificially inflating the market for paramilitary police gear

4. Protecting the market for alcohol and tobacco

5. Attacking certain minority groups

6. Expanding the prison industry's profits

No amount of logic or reasoned argument can override the amounts of money and political pressure at work here.

[dragonwriter]

> No amount of logic or reasoned argument can override the amounts of money and political pressure at work here.

The gradual erosion of prohibition through popular referenda in the states argues against the truth of this claim.

[betterunix]

We have only seen the erosion of prohibition of a single drug. For everything else we are still seeing more of the same -- in the same period of time where states have relaxed marijuana prohibition, numerous other drugs have been made illegal.

[dragonwriter]

> We have only seen the erosion of prohibition of a single drug.

Everything starts somewhere. If the factors that were posited as insurmountable in the defense of drug prohibition really were, we wouldn't see legal progress against prohibition at all. The fact is that is that those factors, even if they are accurately described as the motivations behind legal prohibition, are demonstrably not insurmountable.