Discount the rhetoric, count the bodies
There are indeed many drug panics. This one is the real thing.
To this view I would reply with the idea, attributed to Socrates, that there is no such thing as "moral weakness", or that doing good and bad amounts to knowledge of what is good or bad or a lack of it (keeping in mind knowledge could be more than merely mental abstractions).
Now unless this idea can be disproven, how can "moral weakness" be used as a justification to ignore the plight of these people?
“ ... as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.” -Pynchon