From the HUFFINGTON POST:
…Here are a few excerpts from a column [Gore Vidal] wrote 42 years ago in the New York Times – just one year prior to President Nixon’s launch of the war on drugs.
“It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect–good and bad–the drug will have on whoever takes it. This will require heroic honesty. Don’t say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know–unlike “speed,” which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which is addictive and difficult to kick…
“It is a lucky thing for the American moralist that our country has always existed in a kind of time-vacuum: we have no public memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls what happened during the years alcohol was forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought it had a divine mission to stamp out Demon Rum and so launched the greatest crime wave in the country’s history, caused thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and created a general (and persisting) contempt for the laws of the United States…”
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