by Erich Goode

About the author: Erich Goode is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of Between Politics and Reason: The Drug Legalization Debate.

The political landscape is a maze of contradictions; politics, we are told, make for “strange bedfellows.” Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue of drug legalization. In a letter to the editor to The New York Times, anti-drug crusader William Bennett charged the pro-legalization forces with being “strange bedfellows.” What Bennett does not say is that advocates of all positions on the drug legalization question crawl under the sheets with ideologies they would reject in other areas. Positions that are very close to one another in general may actually have drastically differing views...