That odor you smell is coming from all the folks talking these days about drug legalization. Luckily, we have John Walters to set them straight:
What is the alternative to the progress we are making? We have made the kind of compromises with alcohol that some suggest making with illegal drugs. Nonetheless, roughly one in 10 of the more than 100 million Americans who drink each month suffer from alcoholism. Illegal drug use touches roughly 19 million Americans each month with more than one-third of those suffering from abuse or addiction. Will these people be better off if drugs are legalized? Those who propose abandoning control efforts never face up to the consequences of an America where upwards of 50 million or more people use drugs regularly. Nor do they consider the consequences to Latin America if such a vast number of people in the U.S. use drugs. Alternative regulatory schemes give little attention to how a free society will function when it sells known disease-causing poisons that are more powerful than alcohol and that profoundly attack the user's capacity for free action. The policies that drive down drug use attack both demand and supply. Controlling supply reduces consumption as it chokes off access to all types of drugs. No nation that has tried to avoid controlling supply has been able to stand by its permissive approach. Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have all experimented with being more accepting of drugs, only to backtrack later when the resulting destruction was clear. The U.S. has also been more permissive in the past than it is today, only to pay a huge price for the mistake. The predictable costs in addiction and disease are unsustainable.
Read the whole thing, as they say.