Should hard drugs be legalised

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This is a controversial subject, one that tends to bring out strong emotions and beliefs, so I can only hope we can keep it calm. I am pro-legalisation, but before I discuss it I should make the point that I have lost a son to heroin: I am not coming from an abstract theoretical position. A very useful heuristic (analytic) tool can be found in the statement, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those who ... and those who...." In this case, there are those who believe that others should be controlled and managed for their own good, and those who believe that people should be responsible for their own decisions. The problem with the first groupo is that they inevitably define the term "good" according to their own ideology, and then impose that on others. The euthanasia debate is a perfect example. But I am not here to argue the ideological differences between these two approaches: that might be the subject of another thread. What I want to point out is the discrepancy between what the "controllers" are trying to achieve, and what actually happens. I personally believe that the true motive of a lot of this group is some variation of Puritanism, but the justification lies usually in "protecting" the lives of the vulnerable by preventing them from getting involved in hard drugs. The methods used are education, which I completely support even if it does appear to be somewhat ineffrective, and criminalisation. Why ineffective? Because no matter how much we wish that the "should" happens, the "what is" is that there will always be people attracted to the risk, the thrill, the oblivion, even the illegality of prohibited substances. No education, and no criminalisation, stops them. All criminalisation does can be seen in the effects of the Prohibition experiment of the 1930s, which not only did not stop people drinking, it provided the base and starting point for today's world-wide organised crime empire. And what is the cost? Researching a paper on crime some decade ago I came across the statistic that 80% of Australia's jail population is there on either direct or indirect (e.g. stealing to feed a habit) drug offences. This represents an enormous economic strain in the amount of stolen goods that have to be replaced, the increased insurance permiums because of it, the huge costs of catching, trying, and incarcerating all those people, plus the tremendous cost involoved in the war against drugs. And for what? The latest statistics I could find with a quick glance are also ten years old, but that year in Australia, the total number of deaths from opiate overdose represented 3 in every 100,000 people in the Australian population (19 million at the time). A drop in the ocean, for which the cost of prevention would appear to be grossly disproportionate. I don't want this to turn into an essay, so I won't go into my suggestions for how to deal with all the obviously difficult aspects of managing a legalised drug regime, but I would point out that we can put a man on the moon, surely we can work this problem out. The people who take to drugs may well have been led to it through poverty, peer pressure, hoplessness, etc., but in the final analysis they made the choice themselves, and I believe the responsibility is primarily theirs, although society surely must accept some blame. I also believe that a lot of the attraction for or need for drugs is actually created by criminalisation itself, in that it creates the element of risk and thrill without which a lot of youngsters would not be drawn to it. Comments? Lash