The US needs to end the war on drugs...

James Gray is a judge in the Superior Court in Orange County, California. He has written extensively on the drug issue.

History is instructive. Consider that when alcohol prohibition was repealed in the United States, homicides went down by 60% after only one year, and they continued to decline each year thereafter until the beginning of the Second World War. There is no question in my mind that we will experience similar results when we finally repeal drug prohibition.

In June of 1994, the RAND Corporation released a study that found we get seven times more value for our tax money by drug treatment programs than by the incarceration of drug addicts. So let's make drug treatment available upon demand, and get the non-problem users of drugs out of the criminal justice system. This will enable us to focus our scarce resources upon the problem users -- men and women who are driven by drugs to commit violent crimes.

Further, let's do what we can to take the profit motive out of the sale of drugs. Programs of decriminalization and medicalization are working effectively in countries like Holland and Switzerland. They can work in the United States and Canada as well.

I favour the complete legalization of drugs.