The statistics from places with lax drug laws, decriminalization, partial legalization, etc suggests that everyone who actually wants to do drugs long term already does, and that most (if not all) of the rise in drug use you see at a law change is just people experimenting and then deciding against routine use.

Similarly, higher drug use isn't necessarily a problem, since legalization would allow for treating drug addiction as a health problem, which would likely lead to decreased health problems as people are now free to seek treatment for their issues without worrying about arrest or other legal consequence.

Also, drug violence is a HUGE source of crime. The Mexican cartels, for instance, receive about 10x the funding of NASA by selling to the US drug market.

There's no way to overstate just how bad it is that we're funding paramilitary groups around the world to the tune of hundreds of billion of dollars a year, and the small increases in misery caused by any rise in drugs (which we haven't seen in nations that have taken laxer stands on drugs) would be offset by removing hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to some of the most violent organizations on Earth.

I don't think anyone wants our society to be a constant civil war so we can lock people in boxes for liking altered states of consciousness. It's clear that people who want drugs aren't going to stop, even if the other people threaten to throw them in cages and murder them for their habit. The only path drug prohibition can lead us down is to continue this civil war.

I think people who are against drug legalization literally don't know what's happening or how things work, because when they try to explain their stance to me, it always critically depends on things that are simply untrue.

There is no debate over prohibition: it's a failed policy and gives us an objectively worse outcome, no matter what your goal was, unless your goal was to see constant violence between large organizations, such as the US government and paramilitary groups.

> The statistics from places with lax drug laws, decriminalization, partial legalization, etc suggests that everyone who actually wants to do drugs long term already does, and that most (if not all) of the rise in drug use you see at a law change is just people experimenting and then deciding against routine use.

All the people I've met who took drugs and then became violent or addicted had problems well before the drugs were there.

All the people I've met who could handle drugs were well adjusted, or were on their way to becoming well adjusted.

It's a complicated issue which, as far as I can tell, mostly comes down to whether illegal drugs tend to displace alcohol use or not. If someone who regularly uses alcohol to become intoxicated switches to weed that's a big public health win. If they use weed in addition that's a public health loss. If they switch to heroin they're clearly worse off, but they're less likely to harm others due to drunk driving or induced belligerence.

A couple of independent harm analyses: http://welshcouncil.org.uk/english/dangerlist.html http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...

It's not "what do we want our societies to be" -- everyone wants the same ideal society. It's "what do we want our societies to be, within the constraints of what is actually possible," and the key disagreement is over what is actually possible -- indeed, people's assessment of what is possible is so different that their world views are irreconcilable.