Also, if those drugs were legalized, their use might go up, thereby multiplying their negative impact on society.
It's possible that the number of people trying a drug might go up, but there are a number of desirable benefits to drugs being legal:
- the quality is controlled, so you know you're not snorting bleach. This reduces user harm immensely right off the bat.
- the cost of the drug can be taxed, which would give the government money to invest in treatment programs for problem users. Even if you're generally anti-taxation it's difficult to argue that the profits of the drug trade are better off with the people who currently receive them, who are generally some of the more unpleasant people on the planet.
- societies are free to treat problematic drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. US jails have an extremely high number of inmates who are there for relatively minor drug infractions due to e.g. three-strike policies. This is expensive for the state and they probably come out more likely to commit serious crime than when they went in. There's a lot of evidence (apart from just plain common sense) that being able to treat drug abuse with theraputic techniques is much more effective than punishment (see Portugal, for example).
It's possible that the number of people trying a drug might go up, but there are a number of desirable benefits to drugs being legal:
- the quality is controlled, so you know you're not snorting bleach. This reduces user harm immensely right off the bat.
- the cost of the drug can be taxed, which would give the government money to invest in treatment programs for problem users. Even if you're generally anti-taxation it's difficult to argue that the profits of the drug trade are better off with the people who currently receive them, who are generally some of the more unpleasant people on the planet.
- societies are free to treat problematic drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. US jails have an extremely high number of inmates who are there for relatively minor drug infractions due to e.g. three-strike policies. This is expensive for the state and they probably come out more likely to commit serious crime than when they went in. There's a lot of evidence (apart from just plain common sense) that being able to treat drug abuse with theraputic techniques is much more effective than punishment (see Portugal, for example).