Commentary
April, 1987
Shortly before the November elections, the President went on TV to announce a crusade against drugs. He told the nation that drug abuse cost society 60 billion dollars a year--a figure that soon became engraved in stone.Hodding Carter III, in a Washington Post viewpoint, commented on the exorbitant "social cost" numbers:"There is a weird lack of proportionality in all this.... They say that smoking costs might have been as high as 95 billion dollars last year. The societal cost of...
