Jonah, taking your arguments by the numbers:

1. Um, this is a bit of a straw man. As you indeed recognize, I’m not claiming that it is “sufficient” to argue that the war on terror is by itself reason to scrap the war on drugs, and I don’t think there many on the legalization side who would. There are countless reasons to scrap the war on drugs. Its immensely unhelpful contribution to the war on Islamic extremism is yet another.

2. Actually, opiate producers are legitimate businesses already. That’s where prescription opiates come from. My point (and I’d guess Christopher Hitchens’ ) is that prohibition has generated something else altogether – a blackmarket trade in opiates. The extraordinary profits that this generates encourages dealers to push their products wherever, whenever and however they can. Legalization which is (conservatives should note) merely a reversion, roughly speaking, to the legal situation that prevailed in the early 20th Century, would stamp out the black market. With that market gone, its perverse incentives would die. As a result, I suspect that consumption would fall, and what consumption there was would be in safer form. Most people simply are not that self-destructive. They weren’t a century ago. They aren’t now. Sadly, there’d still be some junkies. There will always be junkies, but with a small fraction of the billions in law enforcement dollars saved by the abolition of drug prohibition, there will be plenty of cash to help them. There isn’t now.

3. You’re right, of course, that Afghanistan would lose its competitive advantage if the trade in opiates was freed up, but let’s be honest, that change is not likely to happen any time soon. We’re talking about the real world now, a real world in which prohibitionists have to explain how destroying the Afghans’ only source of income is going to win them over to the West.

4. Hitchens is right. Tough talk about crushing the mafia may be fine, and crushing them may be even better (as you say, they are bad guys) but it does nothing to address the effects of the impoverishment that will result from the destruction of a poor country’s only cash crop.

We could argue this forever, but I do think that the war on Islamic terror has added a new dimension – and a new urgency – to the debate over drugs. With the exception of a few pieces of crass – and spectacularly dishonest – propaganda, I see no sign at all that this has occurred to the Bush administration. And that failure is, quite simply, unforgiveable.