Yesterday's Guardian had a story about "legal highs" and how often they're popping up in the UK—one a week, which is way, way up from the old statistic of one every few years:

Roger Howard of the UK drugs policy commission, an independent organisation providing drugs policy analysis, said that when the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act was passed new drugs were appearing once every few years whereas now they were being marketed almost once a week.

"We have rapidly growing numbers of psychoactive drugs on the market, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for the police to identify the drugs they're finding," he said.

"Just adding a drug to the long list already controlled won't make much difference.

"The police and forensics are under too much pressure already to be able to offer much deterrent to potential users.

"We are deluding ourselves if we think that using existing controls like temporary bans will solve the problem."

As I've said before, this whack-a-mole cycle is entirely predictable:

Clever entrepreneurs find an intoxicant not covered under current law and begin selling it. People get excited about it and chatter online. Some user winds up in the emergency room—for reasons that may or may not be serious—and says its name to a doctor who's never heard of it. The doctor calls the poison control center, and the public-health bureaucracy scrambles to figure out what this exotic new drug is. Someone talks to a reporter, and soon newspapers and TV stations are all over it, hyperventilating over a "dangerous new high." Lawmakers see a chance to score some points by being tough on drugs and ban it. The drug fades away. A clever new entrepreneur finds a new drug, and the cycle begins again.

The funny thing is: these "legal highs" may be more dangerous than the old-fashioned, illegal ones. Human beings have thousands of years of experience with coca leaves, cannabis, and opium poppies. We barely even know what mephedrone and naphyrone are, yet we can buy those at the local head shop. That is completely backwards.

How to end this problem? Establish a safe, sane way to regulate drugs in the U.S (and the UK). They said it couldn't be done with alcohol, and look at us now. They said it couldn't be done with marijuana, and we're well on our way there. To bang the drum again: Take the billions of dollars we waste making life worse for people in the US and the rest of the Americas with prohibition and pour them into regulation and treatment, which will make life better.

I'm not suggesting that high-school kids be able to buy herion at 7-11. (Instead of the parking lot behind 7-11, which is where high-school kids buy their heroin now.) But there has to be a better way than this prohibition charade.

(The magical thing about this argument is that it pisses off cops and drug dealers. The DEA and the narcos only agree on one thing: drugs should stay illegal in the US.)

Prohibition creates market efficiency (not to mention gallons of blood and gore): make something illegal and people will produce it in a stronger form to minimize the risk. As drug-policy expert Sanho Tree pointed out when I interviewed him for the story on kratom, alcohol prohibition turned a nation of beer and wine drinkers into a nation of liquor drinkers, and "the war on cocaine popularized the poor person’s cocaine, which is crack, and the war on crack popularized the poor person’s crack, which is meth."

You want to get rid of crackheads? Make coca leaves legal. You want to get rid of junkies? Make opium-poppy tea legal. Drugs are never going away, despite all our wishful thinking—we will always have recreational users, addicts, and dealers, just like we'll always have drinkers, alcoholics, and distilleries. The question is how to deal with that fact in a rational, sane way that causes the least harm not just to users, but to their families and neighbors.

And prohibition ain't the answer.