I'm for legalizing all drugs, prostitution and anything else that a person only hurts themselves. When you prohibit anything by law you don't prevent it and you make a lot of really bad people tons of money. You also cause violence because a person in an illegal venture can't call the police to protect his interest, he therefore has to use violence to do so.
About 5000 people a year die from drug overdoses, if it were legal that might even go down due to more reputable people being involved in the manufacturing of it, but it certainly wouldn't cause overdoses to go up. I don't reframe from smoking crack because it's the law, I do reframe from doing so because it's a dumb idea and I don't smoke weed because of my job, not because of the law. However, 15,000 Americans are murdered a year producing, importing and distributing illegal drugs, that number would almost certainly take a drastic cut.
Also, a credible argument can be made that cocaine would not even have caught on had the government not cracked down on weed, and crack and meth may have never even been invented had the government not cracked down on cocaine.