the legalization appeals to Americans' sense of personal liberty and to the idea that government should not make anything illegal without an overriding reason so that such illegality becomes a social benefit. This measures the rights of the individual at some level against the rights of society. Opponents of drug laws feel that the balance has tipped in the wrong direction. At the present time, the idea of a war on drugs creates an adversarial situation in which society is placed on one side and drug users on another, as if those users were not part of society. The U.S. approach has been to try to eradicate the problem by eliminating all drug abuse. Yet the fact must be recognized, drug abuse will never be eliminated completely. Society may find drug use distasteful, but it will never be eradicated. Only organized crime truly benefits from the war on drugs (Edell, 1993, 2).
The second argument is economic, beginning with the savings to society in direct costs by the elimination of an entire branch of law enforcement, which frees up scarce resources for the pursuit of "real" criminals with the estimated $20 to $30 billion a year no longer spent on drug cases, and second with reference to the expected reduction in crime. This latter derives from the belief that legalization would eliminate the incentive for criminal behavior both in terms of the drug providers (since there would be no money in drugs any longer) and in terms of the addict's criminal behavior to raise money for his or her habit:
If drugs were legalized, their prices would fall to competitive levels, which would cover only the pharmaceutical cost of production, plus a normal rate of return for those who manufactured and sold them. Drug users, abusers, and addicts. . . would no longer require large sums of money to finance their habits. . . Moreover, the violence produced by turf wars and by drug dealers gone awry would fall to the level that exists in legal i...