Back in July, National Review featured a cover story by Drug Policy Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann on marijuana legalization. None too happy about it: drug czar John Walters.

Now National Review is running a piece by Walters attacking Nadelmann and defending the drug war. The magazine has also kindly given Nadelmann a chance to rebut the drug czar's charges.

Here's an excerpt from Walters' pro-drug-war pitch:

The legalization scheme is also unworkable. A government-sanctioned program to produce, distribute, and tax an addictive intoxicant creates more problems than it solves.

Nadelmann replies:

The real question here is not what one thinks of marijuana, or whether one wishes it could be eradicated from our society, but rather what the government should do about it. Even as Walters grossly exaggerates marijuana's harms, he ignores entirely the harms occasioned by marijuana prohibition: billions of taxpayer dollars down the drain each year; 700,000 people arrested annually; private properties confiscated; and other basic freedoms violated by government agents futilely trying to enforce paternalistic laws. Millions of Americans who don't like marijuana nonetheless support an end to marijuana prohibition for precisely these reasons. When a government prohibition proves ineffective, unreasonably costly, and substantially more harmful than the supposed evil it was intended to cure, that prohibition merits repeal -- just as alcohol prohibition did 70 years ago.

Check out this page for links to the full back and forth -- including a special, exhaustively footnoted version of Nadelmann's original July National Review article. Also check this out.