patrick.net

http://www.jsonline.com/features/advice/drug-addiction-is-medical-issue-not-criminal-one-rv51b3d-148534945.html
In sufficient doses, alcohol and nicotine rival crack cocaine in terms of toxicity. Meanwhile, marijuana has no known toxicity. If you consume too much pot, you pass out and wake up groggy. Consume too much booze and you may not wake up at all. So, within our drug policy, lethality is rewarded with legality.

This was not lost on legislators who, in 1919, passed Prohibition, outlawing alcohol. But the criminalization of booze worked about as well as our criminalization of today's illicit drugs - not at all.

So, Prohibition was repealed and, as a society, we decided to regard those hooked on alcohol as needing treatment, not jail. And that was entirely sane, because the research is clear. Treatment, rather than incarceration, is both more effective in promoting recovery and far less expensive.