Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country's illegal drug business , more/less?
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Legalize all drugs. Move 100% of the enforcement funds into drug treatment programs. And then tax them and put that towards treatment programs.
I tend to agree with this. The main thing this does is takes away the profit from criminal gangs. Of course, when people make drugs illegal they don’t realize they are making criminal gangs rich. But, that is the result. Instead, people are thinking of the tweakers and homeless all over the streets, or their loved one who OD’d. And, truthfully, there likely are certain drugs that can never be used responsibly (opioids, meth). For those, society needs to find a way to manage it. Maybe give away the drugs for free in certain supervised spaces. And, forcibly treat people who are high in public. 8 years in prison for anyone that gives drugs to a minor. But, legalize the drugs so murderers aren’t the ones manufacturing and selling them.
You're talking about decriminalization, which is not the same as legalization.
Heroin should absolutely not be legalized, but it shouldn't be criminalized either.
No, I'm talking about legalization. I said legalized, I meant legalized. Drug treatment programs should be ubiquitous, available, and free.
Where I live they are. As we have universal healthcare.
We still got hit very hard by both a cocaine and heroine crisis.
Not all people who need help will seek it, even if it's free help. A hard lesson to learn, but one you learn while living in a country why vast social programs and universal healthcare but there are still people with severe issues who just refuse to get helped.
And those people unfortunately aren't going to be helped by prohibition either. In fact, prohibition will only make things much worse for them and everyone else. The knock on affects of prohibition are far worse than most people understand.
I do want to also ask, are you aware if there are any waiting periods whatsoever to get into treatment programs anywhere in your country? I find that in most countries at least somewhere there are prohibitive waiting lists.
Prohibition would reduce the number of potential people in that situation. For the people that inevitably would fall into drug abuse and addiction is where social programs come into place.
All the dangers you listed for prohibition are handled by social programs, decriminalisation of users and harm reduction. Here there are many places you can go to test your drugs for free to know if they are adulterated with dangerous substances or not. No question asked.
I don't know the waiting periods for these treatments. But they are irrelevant to prohibition/legalization, they are not going to get extra help or quicker help because hard drugs are legal.
All these being said I don't see any single thing that's worse here because hard drugs are illegal.
Also we have the example of tobacco. While legal here there was a time when ilegal tobacco dealing was very big, because it was cheaper. With hard drugs would happen exactly the same. Ilegal would be cheaper than legal so most points about reducing gangs and drug-dealing related crimes would be defeated.
Users are not criminalised, so they can get help. Help is free for them, and there are plenty of social programs to get them out of that world. There are free points for drug testing, so they don't use adulterated substances. Drug related violence is not a big issue here. There's the typical marginalised violence in some neighbourhood, but I don't see how making drugs legal would solve anything there. The only people being prosecuted here are drug dealers, which to be fair are making money by destroying people's life so they kinda deserve being declared criminals imho.
There would always be drug addicts, but I don't see how situation would be made better here by legalising those drugs. By keeping them illegal at least you reduce the potential drug users who would fall into that horror.
All this for hard drugs of course. Soft drugs should be legal, for moral reasons. Here they are partially legal. There use to be some places where you could legally get weed but they are in a gray area. Anyway marijuana is so common and personal use in your own home is perfectly legal. Thought I think in this case it should get the same status as alcohol.
I mean technically all kinds of opiates, some considerably stronger than heroin, are already legal. Access to them is strictly controlled but if you have the right piece of paper you can go to the local pharmacy and pick up all manner of extremely hardcore drugs.
Just nitpicking the semantics of legal/controlled/etc though. Ultimately we're all in agreement that drugs should be a healthcare issue and not a criminal one.
The stricter it's "controlled", the more out of control the black market is.