ue---that the legalization of drugs flies in the face of the moral code of the nation. These general and specific weaknesses and failings in Carter's argument make it unlikely that he has persuaded many readers to favor legalization.
Carter's argument that the illegality of drugs and the accompanying "war" on drugs leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials is typical of the essay in terms of both its effectiveness and its fallacies:
Al Capone would have been proud of the latitude that bootleggers were able to buy with their payoffs of constables, deputies, police chiefs, and sheriffs across the state. But . . . Prohibition-era corruption . . . was penny ante stuff compared with what is happening in the United States today. From Brooklyn police precincts to Miami's police stations to rural Georgia courthouses, . . . sheriffs, other policemen, and now judges are being bought up by the gross (9).
Worse, drug money "is also buying up banks, legitimate businesses and, to the south of us, entire governments" (9). This seems to be a reasonable analogy between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition, and it gives Carter an historical grounding for his argument. Aside from that historical analogy, however, Carter gives no substantive statistical evidence for these claims, relying instead on the general social awareness of such corruption as it has been regularly publicized in headlines and TV news in recent years. Carter makes the assumption that legalization of drugs would result in an end to this corruption of the law enforcement agencies in this nation. This would seem to be a logical assumption, to a degree, for the end of prohibition, by definition, did indeed cut back on crime associated with the illegal alcohol business. With legalization, police, judges and other officials would not be vulnerable to corruption---however much corruption actually exists---because corruption is rooted in the illegality of drugs and th...