efficient ways to transport and conceal drugs, creating a larger supply and often making hard drugs more accessible and affordable to the common user. Although the government has succeeded in raising marijuana prices from $20 and ounce in the 1960’s to $200 an ounce today, the price of cocaine has fallen from $50,000 a kilo in the 1970’s to $10,000 a kilo today. Also, the potency and composition of these drugs is often unpredictable. If the government legalized these more minor drugs, as Milton Friedman pointed out in his essay “There’s No Justice in the War on Drugs,” they’d have the ability to regulate them and make them less dangerous than they would have been if they’d been sold on the street. Bennett’s arguments against the legalization of drugs are somewhat one-sided. This may have been why I was more convinced by Friedman’s essay, which relied more on concrete facts than on the pretense that the opposing argument was trivial. In “Drug Policy and the Intellectuals,” Bennett says, “To call it a ‘debate’ suggests that the arguments in favor of drug legalization are rigorous, substantial, and serious. They are not.” He also says that drug use “destroys human character” and that citizens would be in a “perpetually drug-induced haze” if drugs were legalized. This assumption is a fallacy, and can in no way be proven without generalizing an entire subculture. Bennett also suggests that the legalization of even minor drugs would have devastating effects on American society that include a loss in worker productivity, higher dropout rates, and hospitals filled with drug related emergencies and accidents. So far these claims are just speculation. To get an idea of what the effects of legalization could realistically have on a society, we can look to the Netherlands as an example. While the Netherlands haven...
