If people are ANYTHING to go by thy will ALWAYS keep taking drugs and while there's a market people will be prepared to supply them-all keeping ANY drug illegal does is make the purity go down and the price go up. This can lead to a spiral of drug related crime from burglaries through pyramid dealing to users being made criminal-all of which costs tax pa7ers money and ties up the police in a futile "war on drugs" they have no belief in and zero chance of ever winning.
People might not like it but they need to hear that prohibition never works. It just doesn't and shouldn't people before to put whatever they want in their own bodies anyway? We're all grown ups and know the risks and if it's legal and standardised you take all that money out of the black market and criminals hands, lose fewer people to crime and OD(obviously not a risk with weed), free up the police and take the prices down to a level where burgs and muggings shouldn't be such a crippling issue. with the money saved you can put in place education and drug treatment programs and, imho, going to the pharmacy and not to your mates to get your drugs and making them legal takes the romance out of it anyway. I don't think MORE people would use ANYTHING as if you want to you can now anyway. The main benefits, though, are in saving police hours wasted in the merry go round of drug related crime and making fewer users OD as the supply would be of set purity and so on.
I'm not some liberal drug proponent I'm just sick of the hypocrisy surrounding this issue and don't think you can split the harder and softer drugs while we have tobacco and alcohol legal which cause bigger social issues than any of the illegal drugs ever could. We keep trying to keep these things banned and it's just a money drain and every day I see a couple more methadone ODs because people use on top and don't know the purity of their Heroin etc. In the UK , for example, when Heroin was legal(as recently as the 1960s)when had a handful of registered addicts getting it from their doctors. We criminalise it and now that number has shot through the sodding roof and supports gang related crime the country over. We NEED a new approach not just for Pot but for every drug there is. Not time to be squeamish about it either-maybe there's a halfway house but, to me, while some serious(and Alcohol has SERIOUS health and social problems FFS)drugs are lega and other's aren't governments don't even have any moral or logical high ground and criminalising things has only led to ore widespread use.
