Mr. Stossel, on your exclaiming to legalize drugs:

I disagree, partly or even mostly.  I see two vastly different views before me in this thread; one a straight talking person w/strong personal connection w/the drug problem re: his childhood w/his mom on drugs, the other, a political/emotional stance person being a bit self-righteously shallow re: the destruction of other people's children.

As a teacher here in Sac. Ca. having worked in rough schools, I strongly disagree with the impetus of Stossel's remarks.  I've seen great kids go down by the tens each year in our high school.  The adults you reference, yes can make a slightly better set of choices in this area, but the vague-ness of your concept doesn't seem to notice or care that the kids will merge in with this chaos-ridden "adult" diversion which will-go-devilish w/unguided kids.  A great young man I ran across in a bank spoke of the "gift" our local school system gave his family (in addition to not educating his sibkings); his sister got addicted to hard drugs within the school system, under the tuteledge of the rough high school's primitiveness guided by permissive imperatives.. 

Stossel is full of it on this part of the issue, which is hopefully because he has no idea of the pure roughness of it all; and how far, how fast and how permanently drugs can do their thing.  But, hey it's only other people's kids, right?  He is right, though, on the drug war not achieving the desired goal, in fact, totally unintended results.  I would suggest he attend narcaholics' anonymous meetings a few times to see the heroics required to even begin to handle these addictions.  Or talk to sports docs who are paid monster bucks to get big athletes off these drugs, when it can be done.

Since we can't go the way of the Euro-weaklings who won't have their countries much longer because of that very impulse (legalize everything where there is contention); we must act differently, hunting for effectiveness.  I'd suggest a mix of more involved police, fathers, teachers, Boy Scouts, Church groups, et al with the youth of America.  Since the teachers unions would refuse any useful change and the school system's job is to screw up education wherever they find it, they won't help and would also fight the Boy Scouts or Church groups helping the kids, especially at "their" schools.  The dems would scream and hollor that the kids were being hurt by the help they might be getting.  P.C. feminist activists would demonize fathers or males in general as bad influences.  So much for civilized methods.

Among other possibilities is the enforced quick death of drug gangs/their leaders.  After a few thousand of them were just plain killed, possibly some of the affected communities (that haven't been slow motion destroyed these last few decades) may be able to come together and save their remaining most precious possessions, their children.  It's gone past he time when hopefully smiling, over-optimistic citizens can just throw more money at boondoggling school systems in the hope that someone else can fix their problems.