I am a little bit appalled that the president of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy believes that the answer to our drug problem is to legalize everything. He said that we need to treat these as medical issues, but addiction is the only medical issue he wrote about. Recreational drug use has no medical benefit, and although by regulating industries such as meth, heroin or cocaine we can ensure a cleaner substance for people to ingest; they are still ingesting meth, heroin and cocaine. Nothing about that is beneficial and they all wreak havoc on our society. Marijuana is one thing, because the damage inflicted upon the user is comparable to alcohol which is a social standard of drugs today. You may run into a slippery slope when you legalize one illegal drug but not the rest, but it is also naïve to think that by legalizing drugs you will end the war on drugs. When prohibition was ended did it end the production of moonshine? If we legalize drugs are drug lords outside our borders going to be happy? One surely canâÄôt think that they will just walk away when our government steals their customer base. It is going to create more problems. Although there may be less gang violence, there will still be hundreds of lives lost. So unless one is proposing that the government buys drugs from the current cartels, taxes them and redistributes them to shops whose owners will raise the price so they can make their profit âÄî in essence a government takeover of the current profit-focused drug hierarchy âÄî one will have accomplished nothing. We will be receiving the same shady drugs, only then we could blame addiction on the government. Mathew Chirhart University undergraduate student