I will take the contrarian position here. This is bad policy and shouldn’t happen.
First, making recreational drugs illegal is a good policy. Drugs are addictive. They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function. Some people are more affected than others and commit crimes while taking drugs. They disrupt the normal functioning of society. The more people that take drugs, the worse it is for society. Look at the opioid epidemic for a recent US example.
Second, the government should not send mixed signals about drugs. It should not at once ban them, and also facilitate their “safe” consumption. People cannot understand this mixed message. If drugs are bad and shouldn’t be consumed, why is there an official channel for “safely” consuming them?
The result of this double think will likely be further moves toward legalization of drugs, their subsequent proliferation through society, and the further decay of society as a result.
Allowing drug users to legally and safely test their drugs results in more safety for individuals and less costs for society. In the Netherlands, private organizations have been testing drugs for users and helping the government track dangerous trends in the distribution of illegal drugs.
There’s a lot of recreational drugs like alchohol and (more recently in the US) weed that are legal to consume. The current system where drugs are only available through illegal means results in violence and huge amounts of organized crime, and a mixture of upper and underworld endangering citizens and politicians. We have huge issues with this in the Netherlands.
Personally, I find drug use abhorrent and I condemn everyone buying drugs illegally and propping up and enriching monstrous people, but I fully support legal drug testing.
> People cannot understand this mixed message. If drugs are bad and shouldn’t be consumed, why is there an official channel for “safely” consuming them?
Most people do seem to manage understanding such a mixed message with alcohol. They know it's bad for them, they consume it anyway in moderation, and they don't get addicted. That's the most common pattern.
I don't disagree with your core message: the more people drinking more alcohol, the worse off for society in general. We should very much wish to discourage it. But is prohibition the proper way to do that?
> Look at the opioid epidemic for a recent US example.
For anyone with even passing familiarity with the US opioid crisis, it sounds absurd to suggest it was a cause of societal problems rather than a symptom of them.
>Drugs are addictive. They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function. Some people are more affected than others and commit crimes while taking drugs.
This also applies to alcohol. How do you feel towards it?
So many people use the phrase "drugs and alcohol", which makes as much sense as saying "meat and beef".
The thing those people never want to admit is, they LOVE drugs (coffee, sex, TV, alcohol, tobacco, antidepressants, benzos, ...) but they don't want to acknowledge that they are first class drugs too, because they view "drug users" as losers, because they don't like those drugs in particular.
Alcohol is also bad. Unlike other recreational drugs, we have thousands of years of tradition in society in how to regulate its consumption and handle the negative effects. This includes social traditions, social pressures, and government rules. The rules go down to the specifics of the hours you can buy it, where, how you can carry it around, etc. Things like “alcoholic” are social tropes that are frowned upon and have been for centuries.
Maintaining the status quo is very different from changing it. This applies to drug consumption.
Every study under the sun shows drug criminalization causes more public health issues than it solves. It should be treated as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue. Portugal is a fantastic case study of how this succeeded.
"They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function"
So do lots of things: Art, advertising, roller coasters, sex. Pretty much anything worth doing "disrupts your normal brain function". And then there's the biggest, manipulation of brain function in history: religion.
Frankly, a life lived in stubborn abstinence is a life wasted, sacrificed on the altar of bullshit self-righteousness. Judging others is an easy way to get your kicks off, but it's not exactly the most healthy. Or in other words "Take a chill pill, dude".
Clearly not all drugs are bad, we use most of them in medicine.
What if eliminating addictive personality from society was beneficial to humanity as a species? No easier way than legalizing all drugs and letting people filter.
First, making recreational drugs illegal is a good policy. Drugs are addictive. They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function. Some people are more affected than others and commit crimes while taking drugs. They disrupt the normal functioning of society. The more people that take drugs, the worse it is for society. Look at the opioid epidemic for a recent US example.
Second, the government should not send mixed signals about drugs. It should not at once ban them, and also facilitate their “safe” consumption. People cannot understand this mixed message. If drugs are bad and shouldn’t be consumed, why is there an official channel for “safely” consuming them?
The result of this double think will likely be further moves toward legalization of drugs, their subsequent proliferation through society, and the further decay of society as a result.