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Ok accepting this logic ad argumentum, why would we stop prohibition short of alcohol? Why does the line run precisely between Marijuana and Whiskey?
I think there’s room for arguments around where exactly to draw the line on drugs. But I think the harder drugs should certainly be illegal simply, as I said as a way to keep the junkies from stealing and harassing people and from openly doing drugs on the streets. The problem is that as the do gooders continue to move various social norms toward the bottom, it creates a rot and quite often that rot ends up harming those who, unlike the do gooders who just want to be compassionate without a thought that such compassion might be making the problems worse.
I think the worst idea is decriminalized drug use for a lot of reasons. First of all, since most hard-drug users tend to either be thieves or fencing for other thieves, you can keep a lot of street crime down by giving jail time to drug users. You can’t always catch a thief in the act, but finding a dime bag is a decent enough proxy. Having drug use be illegal (and again, I’m thinking more of the hard stuff) also means that drug users will be much less likely to use openly, and if they do, you can arrest them for that. As it stands now, you can’t walk down some streets in major cities because homeless drug users harass people, rob people, shit on the streets, and build huge eyesores of cobbled together houses in the sidewalks. This obviously kills business near those areas because believe it or not, nobody with money to spend wants to go to drug alley for anything. This reduces the value of property within walking distance substantially and creates more poverty and more despair and ultimately more drug use and more crime. The monied flee fairly quickly as crime slowly climbs.
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