I’m not trying to argue that legalisation would lead to less expense: locking people up and the judicial process is expensive. What I’m saying is that some drugs are able to take hold of people in such a way that their own lives become nothing but a pursuit for ways to procure more of those drugs and then do them. I feel that is someone’s right to do if they choose to but I also feel it’s sad to let people do that when life can be so freaking amazing.
How would you feel if your brother or daughter chose to become an addict, and keep in mind that when I say “chose” I’m actually saying: at one point they chose to do the drugs but at the point of addiction are they actually still choosing that? I’d argue no.
I entirely agree that prohibition does nothing to mitigate the problems. In that regard you’re preaching to the high choir, but I think you need to consider a case in point which is already legal and highly taxed: cigarettes. Here in Oz a pack of 25 is going to set you back a whopping $20+. Even at that ridiculous price the costs imposed on the health system by smoking are far more than the tax revenue from sales of cigs. It’s also an example which doesn’t greatly impact things like policing or increased crime rates. You may well be right that the revenue earned could cover the costs to society imposed but short of having a real-world trial you’d never have the hard figures to make a call on it and since we can see that in the case of tobacco there is a massive shortfall between the revenue and the cost I’m not convinced that legalisation would definitely lead to less overall expense in the case of all drugs.
so a heroin user knows how to do it w/o killing herself.
People OD using reliable drugs all the time. The problem is that certain drugs affect your memory and risk assessment and most drugs create some level of tolerance meaning that regular users typically scale up their dosages over time.
Man I’m all for universal legalisation just to see what the hell happens, but I really believe that we’d discover that some drugs would have cost impacts that are unpredictable.
