John misses the flip side of his point here that the damage done by
prohibited drugs is partly a function of prohibition. By the same token,
the damage done by legal drugs is partly a function of legality, and the
resulting interpenetration of drug use, commerce, and day-to-day social
interaction. Nicotine kills many people because it is widely used, and
because it is marketed in its most deadly form: cigarettes.

When John says: "I seriously doubt that if a quarter of the American
population used legal heroin that the mortality rate from it would be any
perceptible fraction of that," I agree. But the the number of corpses is
not the only measure of drug-related damage. The misery of heroin
addiction is of a different kind than the mortality of cigarette smoking,
but if I had to choose a habit for myself or a friend, I'd certainly choose
nicotine over heroin. Wouldn't you?

Where John says:

"Of course, there would be social and economic consequences of having a
quarter of the population on the nod, but I think they would be balanced by
taking that same quarter off the more socially disastrous legal sedative,
alcohol."

He assumes that heroin and alcohol are substitutes in the economic sense.
That may be the case for heroin. It certainly isn't the case for cocaine,
which is strongly complementary with alcohol. (That's part of the problem
in measuring fetal damage from cocaine: it's hard to tell how much ought
to be attributed to the alcohol the mothers drank.)

The relevant statistic, surely, isn't total damage but damage per dose or
per heavy user. It's not surprising that 10 million problem drinkers rack
up more total violence than 2 or 2.5 million heavy cocaine users. If
alcohol were made illegal again, the violence associated with drinking
would decrease, while violence associated with alcohol dealing would come
back into being.

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