Drug War Questions

I made a reference the other day to Prohibition and the Drug War as being similarly inadvisable. One difference that has puzzled me, though. If the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was required to proscribe alcohol, why were drugs outlawed by a simple act of Congress? Was the Constitution harder to circumvent in the 20's than in the 30's?

Has anyone done a study to the effect that the drug trade is a net gain/loss to the economy? Could the Drug War actually be a jobs program?

My biggest question, the only one that gives me a scintilla of doubt concerning my desire to end the Drug War, is this: People who now earn their easy money by selling drugs would possibly be attracted to other criminal activities when the money dried up. Would they, like the rumrunners, go legit and make an honest profit, or would they go back to the coal mines like moonshiners presumably did. Or would they take up something profitable but socially monstrous, such as kidnapping and slave trading.

I hesitated to bring up this suggestion at all, because it is difficult to believe that the amount of corruption and violence generated world-wide by the drug business could get any worse. I mention it only because it is a puzzle to me. What would these people do if all the easy money disappeared? Have they been irredeemably addicted to crime by years of involvement in it? Are these the kind of people who would have turned to crime without the inducements?

What would the economic impact be? It's hard to use Prohibition as a test case since it was ended at the height of the Depression. Maybe it will be like an industry specific depression. Will all the new cheap labor be absorbed by other businesses? These are people with a certain set of skills that might not be incorporable into other fields. Suspicious resumes might make them unemployable. Maybe they could go into a new business of generating fake employment histories.