Re: The name is fitting
I never proposed that legalising something reduced its harm, but the point that the anti-legalisation lobby choose to ignore is that making drugs illegal has patently had no material impact on the availability or use of drugs.
Anybody who chooses to use drugs has ready routes to access them, whether that's the rich and powerful, middle class partiers, working class joes, teenagers, or the down and outs. Drug control has failed. Completely. And pretending otherwise makes the problem worse, because government has no accurate information on prevalence, no control of shipments, of quality, and by making it illegal they create the circumstances for organised crime to flourish. US (and UK) jails are expensively full of criminals serving sentences for drug related crime, possession, use, supply, violence over drug debt, violence over distribution routes, theft and fraud to pay for drugs. US estimates put the cost of the war on drugs at a trillion dollars - and what is there to show for that? Nothing.
If society wants to have greater control over drugs, the only way of doing that is legalise and regulate. Anybody who thinks that the way forward involves more enforcement and harsher penalties as the obvious answer to the failure of drug prohibition need only look at the Philippines, where the police were given free rein to shoot drug dealers - nine years and thousands of deaths later and drugs are still a problem.
If somebody wants to consume drugs - however unwisely and even in excess - why does society try to stop them? We don't stop people eating or drinking themselves to death, and excess deaths from those last two are significantly larger than the toll from drugs.