Yup, prohibition was a dumb idea, I agree. Just like the recent bill prepared by Dems to ban over 150 different guns (shameless advertisement of my blog 😎). I don't think the guns are the problem (they're just tools), people are, although I wouldn't advocate for making nuclear bombs available to the public ;) There need to be some regulations, imho.
In case of alcohol, if the excise was dropped, the 0.5l (16.9oz) bottle of vodka in Poland would cost below 2$ instead of current 6$. Surely extra money in my pockets and smaller government would be cool (although not so much for beer and wine producers), but I wouldn't call that price drop moral.
If Your government decided to deregulate all drugs, leaving the responsibility to the citizens (drug producers and potential customers), the low production cost, high supply and competition would inevitably bring more users and more addicts. In the current state I bet if You wanted to do e.g. heroin, the government regulations wouldn't stop You. The responsibility is on You. It wouldn't change if goverment agreed on more drugs and at the lower prices to flow on the market, it'd make it just more tempting (imagine <$5/gram instead of current ~$400).
I think we both agree it's government's job (to some extent) to keep it's citizen's safe. The question is, should it be limited to just providing military, simple laws and efficient law enforcement or rather go further. I consider myself a libertarian-leaning conservative, so I guess we don't differ much. I just don't think deregulation of hard-drugs would be a responsible nor moral thing to do, as it's consequences (at least until society adapts to the new situation and learns doing some drugs, no matter how cheap or well advertised would they be, is not worthy) would be bad. And not only drug-users would be affected (family members, victims of crimes commited under influence, etc). I think at least some drug regulations should stay, just like there should be, imho, anti-monopoly regulations in the economy.
Thanks for sharing Your thoughts, newtreehints. Cheers!