able to get the stuff from a legitimate source at a price that doesn’t require stealing car radios. A tightly controlled legal market, offering clean unadulterated pharmaceuticals, would quickly erode the cash flow to the street bazaar, and the river of money that has fueled the most brutal collection of criminal combines in the history of the planet would dry up like a Mojave arroyo on Independence Day.

The prohibitionists insist that the black market would still exist because drugs would obviously be illegal for children, but the experience with alcohol after Prohibition suggests otherwise. While it’s possible for a marginal operator to make a few bucks selling booze to kids, there’s not much money in it and the risk is substantial. There are no beer pushers hanging around the playground. You can’t make a living at it.

Crack cocaine, of course, is an unparalleled menace, but the prohibitionists hardly have clean hands on this issue.  Crack is a creation of the black market. The only reason for its existence is economic. It’s cheap. Unfortunately you get what you pay for. The high lasts only seconds before the bottom drops out, but low cost makes it available to the blue-collar market. There are few crack addicts on Wall Street. The traders prefer the smoother ride of the pure powder, and they can afford it.  If prescription cocaine were available to serious addicts, there is every likelihood the demand for crack would disintegrate. In Liverpool, where John Marks gave addicts cocaine by prescription, nobody asked for crack.

As for who would supply these drugs to the addicts, it would be better for all concerned if they got their stash from a pharmacist instead of a fourteen-year-old.

The overarching case against drug policy reform has always been the number of new users that would be created if criminal sanctions were set aside.  When Prohibition ended in 1933, say the drug warriors, there was a significant jump in alcohol