Well, Kendall, it's a complex situation. One actually has to deal with each drug on its own merits, bearing in mind the particular characteristics of that drug, and how entrenched its use is already in a given culture.examples:
alcohol - much too thoroughly entrenched to make illegal, either for sale, use or manufacture. Therefore, you need laws which take that all into account, and I believe we have those fairly well worked out at present.
caffeine and sugar - too deeply entrenched to be made illegal. Give people more health information and provide them with more alternatives at the grocery, the restaurant, and the school cafeteria.
marijuana - anyone can grow it at home with absolute ease, and harvest it! Therefore, I suggest that it should be legal for adults to grow and use their own, and that that in itself would totally eliminate any lucrative field for organized crime to get involved in the marijuana trade. This would cause barely a ripple in society, since most of the people who are already strongly inclined to smoke grass are already doing it anyway, as a matter of course...
tobacco - harder to grow and harvest, so it wouldn't work as a homegrown too well at all. I suspect it is also too deeply entrenced to be eliminated entirely as a business, so education and certain restrictive laws would seem to be the best route to follow. That's basically what is being done now.
cocaine - again harder to make, and extremely addictive over time. Costs a bloody fortune, therefore is highly attractive to criminals. Make it illegal to market the stuff, but provide a legal medical prescription to users, plus medical treatment to help cure the addicted. Again, you have eliminated a lucrative field for organized crime. Plus, you have eliminated desperate addicts from the need to commit crimes simply to support their expensive habit.
shopping mall addiction - Stop issuing credit cards to people who obviously can't control themselves, and have proven that again and again! :-)
Mudcat addiction - Ummm... Well, I...
Forget it, there is no cure.
And so on...each drug merits a solution all its own. It is silly to treat users as criminals, and it is silly to provide large scale criminals with a golden opportunity to get rich.
If what you say about Prohibition is correct (that it was legal to drink, but not to market alcohol), there must have been a lot of people making home brew of various kinds...was that the case or was it illegal to make home brew as well?
- LH