a question, an answer

Someone asked, 'should we legalize opium?'. Here's my answer. You may note a hint of sarcasm:

No, we should continue to waste billions fighting a 'drug war' that has produced no results. We should continue to send recreational users to prison, where they become hardened criminals and get introduced to harder drugs. We should continue to support violent foreign drug cartels who kill not only US citizens who get in the way, but resort to things like slave labor to produce the most profit. We should lie to our children about the nature of drugs so that when they eventually do experiment, they believe nothing we say. We should ensure a certain level of instability in the drugs, so that many casual users are poisoned or OD, instead of offering a true dose alternative. We should continue to force the price of drugs to be outrageous, so that addicts must resort to crime to continue their habit. We should keep needles away from users, so that they resort to sharing gear and get infected with HIV. We should definitely not create a legal alternative that we could tax in order to provide money for rehab and educational programs. We should bury our heads in the sand and pretend that what we've been doing for the last forty years is working.