accounting from their critics.  People like George Soros and Lester Grinspoon are accused of advancing some dark agenda without regard for the consequences. Says the DEA’s Thomas Constantine, “Those who advocate legalization have many motives. But they frequently do not have answers to a lot of the questions we are asking.”^[19] Questions like: How many new drug addicts will you create under legalization? Who’s going to give them their drugs? How will they be handed out?  Who’s going to pay all the social and criminal costs? And finally, what drugs would you legalize? Heroin? LSD? Crack?  These queries are assumed to be argument-terminators for which no acceptable answers exist.

But lately answers have been coming anyway. Independent scientists, swimming upstream against the flow of government largess, have been digging into these issues in detail and they’re coming up with interesting information.  For one thing, they point to a University of Maryland survey of high-school students, which contains an amazing revelation. The hardest drug to get, say the kids, is not reefer, but alcohol.^[20] And if you think about it for a second, it’s not so amazing after all. Alcohol distribution is controlled by the government. Drug distribution is controlled by the mob.

Ethan Nadelmann—sometimes referred to as the Johnny Appleseed of the drug reform movement—is a former Princeton professor who heads the Lindesmith Center, a New York think tank that is now at work on the problem.  For Nadelmann and his colleagues, the central objective of any drug policy should be harm reduction—cut the damage caused by both drug addiction and drug prohibition. To begin with, he says, marijuana must be available to adults under tight regulatory controls, and some form of drug maintenance has to be established for the incorrigible. Any solution that leaves gangsters in control of the market will not cure the cancer, and no matter what short-range problems may be solved, the corruption will only be fertilized. The only way to destroy the black market is to underbid it. If that means drugs have to be given away to serious addicts, so be it. Anyone who’s determined to use heroin regardless of the consequences must be