I just can't fathom the people who don't get this.

Starts out good, gets even better...

Hit & Run ; Mother Jones on the Drug War: Totally Wasted! - Reason Magazine:

"...we've been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, and counterfactual claims of success. (To wit: Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who've seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.)...

What would a fact-based drug policy look like? It would put considerably more money into treatment, the method proven to best reduce use. It would likely leave in place the prohibition on "hard" drugs, but make enforcement fair (no more traffickers rolling on hapless girlfriends to cut a deal. No more Tulias). And it would likely decriminalize but tightly regulate marijuana, which study after study shows is less dangerous or addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, has undeniable medicinal properties, and isn't a gateway drug to anything harder than Doritos....

So why don't we have a rational drug policy? Simple. Forget the Social Security "third rail." The quickest way to get yourself sidelined in serious policy discussion is to stray from drug war orthodoxy.

...As the excerpt above suggests, libertarians will find much with which to disagree in MoJo's analysis and policy recommendations (a truly fact-based drug policy would not, IMO, create an arbitrary classification of hard and soft drugs but would focus on whether subsequent behavior was legal, violent, harmful to others, etc....is it too much to ask that pot simply be legalized rather than decriminalized, since the latter skirts the basic issue of how pot gets distributed?, etc.)...

The drug war is one of those things that is such a thoroughgoing disaster, a set of policies that harms everything it touches (medicine, education, foreign policy, you name it), that it remains mind-boggling to the point of despair..."