[Jeff Higgins]

I'm glad your buddy made it, Jim; that really is good news. I realize there are those who can relate similar experiences. There are too many, however, who have had their lives ruined, not saved, by the legal system. Lives that would have been fine even in the presence of drugs; lives that may have drifted away from drugs on their own as long as opportunities remained open to them. There are a few of us right here that have those stories.

I'm not sure that any reasonable people would conclude murders would increase if they were "legal". It is still intuitively wrong. Comparing murder to drug use, and claiming our laws have the same deterent affect on both, is somewhat of a stretch. No one argues that murderers need to be punished. Your intoduction of an unrelated non-issue only serves to cloud the issue at hand. You are comparing apples to oranges.