Posner Comes Out Against The Drug War

Having declared Judge Posner the loser (for now) of the Posner-Scalia dust up, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Posner recently said some stuff I agree with wholeheartedly:

I don’t think we should have a fraction of the drug laws that we have. I think it’s really absurd to be criminalizing possession or use or distribution of marijuana... I can’t see any difference between that and cigarettes... But also I’m skeptical about the other drug laws. The notion of using the criminal law as the primary means of dealing with a problem of addiction, of misuse, of ingesting dangerous drugs — I don’t think that’s sensible at all. [Drug laws are] responsible for a high percentage of our prisoners. And these punishments are often very, very severe. It’s all very expensive... [Drug laws] waste of a lot of high quality legal minds, and it’s also a waste of people’s lives who could be as least moderately productive with having to spend year after year in prison. That is a serious problem.