Decriminalize Drugs

To the Editor: 
In the 60’s, we had a marijuana, acid, and peyote crises. In the 70’s and 80’s, we had a cocaine crisis. In the 90’s, it was meth. In the 2000’s, it was designer drugs. Now, we have the opioid crisis, which everyone finally admits was fueled by the pharmaceutical industry in concert with physicians. 
People get hooked, then turn to heroin because it’s cheaper and easier to obtain. In my lifetime, the “war on drugs” has been a complete failure, just like prohibition before it.
The only thing prohibition accomplished was to make the mafia richer, and consequently more powerful, just as the “war on drugs” now does for the cartels.
As long as mankind has been on this planet, he has indulged in alcohol and drugs in one form or another. Not everyone, of course, but enough to support a very large industry.
We’re not going to legislate it out of human nature. Demand dictates supply, not the other way around.
Availability is not the problem. Any 15-year-old child who lives in a ghetto can probably tell you where to buy drugs, but that doesn’t mean he and everybody else in the ghetto use drugs. Indeed, most do not.
Prosecutor Web-McRae was on the right track when she said, “We can’t arrest our way out of the epidemic. We have to… address addiction as a health problem before it becomes a criminal justice problem.”
I would take it one step further, decriminalize it, and make it a health problem, not a criminal one. Get a script from your doctor, go down to the pharmacy, and get your drugs if you must.
The government would save billions a year in interdiction, apprehension, prosecution, incarceration, and parole. If even a third of that savings was funneled back into education, counseling, and rehabs, it would address the reasons people resort to excessive use of drugs and alcohol far more effectively, and further reduce the incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction, and the same thing that happened to the mafia would happen to the drug cartels.
The president’s recent notion that drug dealers should be executed is simply more of the barbaric rhetoric that propels the abject failure of “the war on drugs.” If he’s really serious, maybe he should begin with the pharmaceutical industry, which has been driving the epidemic and contributing to his election fund.