People who want to see tighter enforcement of our drug laws are unwittingly in league with the gangsters who profit from drug prohibition, the ultimate de-regulation policy.

Drug dealers do not see our drug policies as deterrents to their underground enterprises, but rather as incentives. Those who manufacture and sell outlawed drugs are among the staunchest of prohibitionists. The notion of “legalization” is as much an anathema to them as it is to the families and friends of people whose lives have been lost or ruined by drug abuse and/or addiction.

Without drug prohibition, there would be no unregulated, unlimited, and untaxed underground drug market and potentially destructive psychoactive substances would be far less accessible to children.

Drug policy reform advocates do not actually wish to see illegal drugs “legalized,” we want to see unregulated drugs regulated because our nation’s drug problem is far too complex to be dealt with via an oversimplified policy of prohibition. If we are to ever have any hope of re-gaining control of the market in certain psychoactive drugs, that market must be brought out of the shadows and into the light.

Drug policy reform is not a matter of some “right” to recreational drug use; it is a matter of wresting the control of a multi-billion dollar enterprise away from gangsters and placing it into the hands of responsible businesspeople.

My question is: Will society continue to be duped, by the false promises of drug war rhetoric, into sacrificing the lives and futures of its children in order to protect and defend the special privileges that drug prohibition affords to gangsters?