well, no, because they approach different objectives completely.

If you buy the stated goals of the war on drugs, then eliminating drug use = safer/better society and your suggestion of harsh penalties to eliminate demand would fix it.

VS' goal is to say the eliminating drug use has nothing to do with a safer/better society, so normalize the illegal things with our system and let everyone get what they want (drugs, taxes), except for the rabid anti-drug folk.

What I said was that drugs have nothing to do with the war on drugs, just the undesirables associated with them. It's approached the same way as Atmosfear's logical extreme, but with a different motivation and objective.