As Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of neuroscience at Dartmouth Medical School, puts it, There is a base rate of drug abuse, and it is [presently] achieved one way or another (121). Gazzaniga and those who share his views place their argument heavily upon the point that legalization would not cause current non-users to begin to use. (Duke 118-125) A secondary point made by legalization proponents on this issue is that while the cheaper prices of narcotics under legalization may cause an increase in consumption, these lower prices would deter people from using alcohol. No longer deterred by high prices or criminalization associated with narcotic use, users would use cocaine over alcohol because while both produce similar psychological effects, alcohol is responsible for more annual deaths than all narcotics combined making narcotic use or abuse the lesser of two evils. The argument made by legalization advocates is that getting current alcohol abusers to switch from abusing alcohol to abusing narcotics would be all-in-all beneficial to society. (Duke 119-120) Controversially, legalization adversaries such as Robert DuPont argue that the inevitable result of legalization would be increased drug use, along with increased addiction and death rate. DuPont, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, provides evidence in pre-prohibition experiences as well as more current experiments with legalization. DuPont states that since the main goal of legalization would be elimination of the black market, drug prices under the system of legalization must be kept much lower than they are now. When most commodities become cheaper, more people use them and those who used them before use more of them. This has been proven true with narcotics and other pleasure drugs. For instance, when crack was introduced in the mid-1980s, the price of cocaine dropped significantly, and the number of users nearly tripled as a result.
