Last Saturday, October 28, the actor Matthew Perry died in his hot tub. Best known for playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom Friends, since the show ended he'd become almost as famous as a celebrity addict who very publicly struggled with substance abuse, recovery, and relapse. His untimely death offers an opportunity to think about both drug use and drug prohibition, as he took both legal and illegal substances throughout his life.
Does his life support continuing the federal drug war—a broad-based, overlapping series of policies that has given rise to high levels of incarceration over the past half-century, a $3.2 billion annual budget for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and record levels of overdose deaths?
