Analogous to making more money by lowering the price of the product...

I thought this piece, Rethinking the War on Drugs - WSJ.com, was very interesting. I don't have any policy recommendations, but I'm glad people are thinking in new ways...

...Larry Long, a district court judge in South Dakota, developed one promising approach, called 24/7 Sobriety. Started in 2005, it requires people who commit alcohol-related crimes—originally just repeat offenders for drunken driving but now other offenders—to show up twice a day, every day, for a breathalyzer test as a condition of staying out of jail. If they fail to appear, or if the test shows they have been drinking, they go straight to jail for a day.

More than 99% of the time, they show up as ordered, sober. They can go to alcohol treatment, or not, as they choose; what they can't choose is to keep drinking. According to the state attorney general's office, some 20,000 South Dakotans have participated in 24/7 Sobriety (a large number for state with just 825,000 residents), and the program has made a big dent in rearrests for DUI.

By distinguishing sharply between people who use alcohol badly and the larger population of non-problem users, 24/7 Sobriety moves past the simple dichotomy of either banning a drug entirely or making it legal in unlimited quantities for all adults....

The interesting ting is that the penalty is minor--one day in jail! So there is no hesitation or difficulty in applying it.

...Having to call in every day to find out whether it is your day to be tested turns out to be powerful help in staying clean. As one probationer told a researcher, "Knowing I had to make that phone call the next morning ruined the high." Leighton Iles's Swift program in Texas has recorded equally impressive results, and there are promising pilot efforts with parolees in Seattle and Sacramento.

Substantial progress in suppressing the drug use of arrestees would be a great boon. It would deprive the illicit drug markets of their most valuable customers, which would, in turn, reduce violence in inner-city neighborhoods and take the pressure off Latin American countries now racked by drug dealing...