Scary thought. Legalization is presented as the utopian solve-it-all-policy and everyone points to weeds harmlessness. But hard drugs who lead to physical addiction?
But that's the point. The arguments for the current regulatory environment failed because the gatekeepers still perpetuated a drug epidemic. That is, not only did drug scheduling fail to keep people from obtaining illegal substances, it failed to keep people from getting legal but inappropriate ones too.
Not everyone said weed wasn't dangerous either. Leading up to cannabis deregulation there were any number of experts warning of disaster due to its claimed severe effects.
The point of the deregulatory argument is that you can't really entrust a homogeneous monopoly to act optimally, because there's lack of competing perspectives and alternatives.
The current drug regulation regime has failed in all sorts of ways that go far beyond drugs of abuse, into siphoning off funds surrounding less recreational substances, through rent seeking. Anyone who has tried to get a prescription for something harmless or nearly so that they've taken for years can attest to this. Acyclovir, for example, is an essential medicine per WHO, and articles have been written in which it is acknowledged to be safe for the general public (with empirical data) but still argued should be kept as a prescription to avoid viral resistance (even though there's no evidence of this, and other sources of microbial resistance are routinely ignored).
The current system has failed in part because discussions are presented in this black and white fashion where it's things stay as they are or nothing. Pharmacists could be used much more than they are, for example, as could other provider types, not just for drugs but for lots of things.
The pandemic is full of other examples. The CDC demonstrated early on how regulation can fail, and people managed to poison themselves without involving prescribers or their illegal drug dealing counterparts at all.
That possibly desensibilize the user for violence, and give them a reason to need an unbreaking stream of income? That's another reason the black and white them versus us image is misleading. Many of the criminals are victims, and vice versa, moral hard liners tend to criminalize use for the same reason. This also means that it would be a runaway process, and that the elites have to practice abstinence or at least self control.
That's what I'm really unsure about, the physical and psychological addiction potential and an extreme stance which would take it as justification, that the victims are weak of will. The eugenics argument would even encourage this as a way to selection for fitness. IMHO, the physical addiction is countered by the adverse effects of the come-down. I hold some arguments against it, but consider the psychological component much more important. 30% of first time heroin users became addicted in the last German federal report on domestic drug use. I'd say only 30%, in contrast to the myth of the immediate addiction--which is real in a sense, for if addiction-affinity is considered, it's effectively correct. Arguably, understanding the history, these people must be extremely racist, fascist, socialist, liberal, you name it, basicly selfish egoists in any sense you might find offensive.
Simple adversary population dynamics settle at an optimum in the infinite limit (I've watched a video by numberphile or so on the Logistic Function, haha). If the government is a regulator, it should seek to estimate the optimum. The pretense that the optimum is the extinction of drug use and users is ...
