Sex at Dawn

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...his "demolition" of the legalization argument hinges on the fact that alcohol's legality increases it's lethality—a relationship he then generalizes to other substances somewhat unthinkingly. But it's not alcohol's legality (and resulting accessibility) that kills people, but the nature of the substance itself, when used in excess over time (or in acute episodes).
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No, legalization doesn't increase lethality: the reverse is true insofar as legal alcohol is less likely to be adulterated. Legalization increases the volume consumed. For any drug, the total damage done equals the volume times the harm rate. So a decrease in lethality can accompany a large increase in the number of deaths.

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Marijuana—the main candidate for legalization at this point—doesn't have anything like this lethality, whether legal or not. No one has ever—in the history of the world—died of a marijuana overdose.
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Correct. I have no objection to legalizing cannabis, though I'd prefer to do so on a non-commercial basis. But it's not cannabis that's filling the morgues with gunshot victims and the prisons with dealers. "Ending the drug war" means legalizing, not cannabis alone, but heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine.

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....his premise is that legalization necessarily leads to increased use (not the case in Holland), and that increased use necessarily leads to increased medical problems (not the case with something as harmless as marijuana).
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Legalization leads to lower price and greater availability. Lower price and greater availability lead to increased use. Cannabis use roughly doubled after the opening of the "coffee shops," albeit to a level below the U.S. level. (See MacCoun and Reuter, Drug War Heresies.) Again, that's not a terrible result. But it would be for any of the three drugs that supply the bulk of the illicit revenues, drug-market violence, and drug-dealer incarceration

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Kleiman assumes there's no moderate, middle-ground taxation scheme that would raise substantial money while not inflating the price enough to make it worthwhile to engage in large-scale illegal production/importation. But of course, there is. How much alcohol or tobacco are produced or imported illegally? I don't think moonshining or bathtub gin are major national issue these days, despite substantial taxes on alcohol. And I've never heard of anyone growing illegal tobacco plants in their closets or in clandestine warehouses in Oakland.
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But the point isn't to raise revenue, it's to prevent a huge increase in consumption. Any tax high enough to suppress consumption is high enough to be profitably evaded. Smuggled tobacco products are a huge illicit market in Europe, in which various organized crime groups play a major role.

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Kleiman ignores the differing toxicity of various substances. Again, the alcohol=all drugs equation is misleading and factually inaccurate.
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The claim in the article I was criticizing was that all cocaine and heroin overdose deaths result from prohibition. Heroin and cocaine both have higher rates of overdose death than alcohol because they have lower therapeutic indices: i.e., the lethal dose is closer to the effective dose. You can kill yourself with acute alcohol poisoning, but you really have to work at it: e.g., by chugging a fifth of whiskey.

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4. Yes, street gangs do some drug dealing. But it's absurd to imagine that the gang killings would disappear if the drug market became legal.

Tell it to Al Capone, Professor. It's equally absurd to assume that cutting the #1 source of revenue to street gangs wouldn't have some substantial and negative effect on them—especially as other rackets like prostitution and gambling are already firmly in the hands of older, more established criminal organizations.
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The claim in the article I was criticizing was that half of all homicides were attributable to prohibition. Street gangs aren't fundamentally money-making enterprises, and most gang killings don't directly arise from drug dealing Depriving their members of one source of illicit earnings would do some good, but it wouldn't eliminate gang homicide.

Here is a question that does not get asked often enough:
Who controls your bloodstream?

Who has the right to control the chemical composition of your bloodstream?

You?

... Or local and federal politicians? Or the police? Or a domineering dictator?

... And especially when a certain type of drug use has a legitimate spiritual, ritualistic, or "religious" purpose for some people, for many people, why doesn't a truly "strict constructionist" reading of The Constitution absolutely protect that activity? All of the Founding Fathers of the USA would agree with that. Why do we stand for a handful of judicial hacks and political tyrants insisting otherwise?

BECAUSE THEY VALUE their own freedom, people who are really free will not accept that any government is allowed to dictate the chemical composition of the bloodstream of any of its citizens.

But this is what the criminalization of the mere use of certain forbidden, naughty drugs attempts to do. If you can be charged with breaking the law the instant that you modify your own bloodstream, you have lost control of your own body and you are a robot for the state.

Among the many other problems we face, a large number of people here in the USA, and in many other countries, have accepted being placed under this type of 21st century–style slavery.

Free people will not accept such an invasion into their private life by the state, even if they think they are not personally affected at the moment. Free people must be guaranteed that every citizen owns absolute and uncontested control over their own bloodstream.

In contrast, a supposed citizen who would allow any government that
kind of control over their most private and sacred possession, their own body, is actually a willing slave of the state.

Surely, everyone who honestly believes in freedom, must affirm that all citizens, all real citizens, must own exclusive control over their own bloodstream. Otherwise, I say to anyone who would disagree with this requirement, "You are not a real citizen at all." You are either one of the robots who are servants to the "bad guys", or else you are one of them; one of the bad guys. The "bad guys" are the people in positions of power and influence who are working to enslave their fellow humans, and are using drug laws fashioned under hysteria to help effect that vile purpose.

TODAY, for reasons of personal freedom, and because the "war on some drugs" has done far more harm than good, I am an advocate of the decriminalization of the use of all drugs.

However, I am not an advocate of the legalization of the use and sale of all drugs. Many drugs, such as alcohol, tobacco, crack & powder cocaine, crystal meth, opium and its strongest derivatives, and a number of other problematic substances, are directly implicated in so much illness, death, and mayhem, that they should be intelligently and ethically regulated and monitored to some degree.

If it is the real, but overblown, potential for death and injury that is sometimes conflated with "illegal" drug use that motivates the pro-slavery position, then I insist they start with alcohol and tobacco.

After those two are banned, under pain of imprisonment, they will have a little credibility to tackle the others. Continue then with prescription drug abuse, which kills more than any currently "illegal" drug.

And don't forget to volunteer to raise your taxes enough to pay for all the extra cops and jails that will be needed to do this. Otherwise, you aren't being serious at all and you don't deserve the courtesy of being listened to at all. Go turn on the radio and listen to your favorite drug addict, Lush Rimjob.