Legalize it, tax it, and use the proceeds of the taxation for needle exchanges and rehab clinics.
If I held a gun to a drug addict's head, you think that will not pressure them to stop, even if just for that moment when the pressure is applied?
If your assertion is true, with any degree of correctness, then we've found a perfect way to destroy information! Simply convert data into a signal fed to a drug addict. Because you're asserting that drug addicts can destroy such information since regardless of what signal they're fed, they will destroy the information.
Pressure, as I took it, meant legal methods of affecting change. And even so, widespread violence against addict's and their families certainly didn't eradicate the problem for China. Today there are around 4-5 million drug users in China and yet that country has laws allowing for the death penalty for trafficking and very stringent use laws.
And certainly putting a gun to someone's head is definitely not a long term solution to addiction but rather a very cruel way of incentivizing treatment.
People say that China can't stop everyone from going through the Great Firewall. That's the same point you guys are missing. China puts pressure against people from accessing uncensored information on the internet. They may not stop absolutely everyone, but they can reduce a large % of people from doing so, and prevent large % amount of information from being accessed that's corresponds linearly with the amount of pressure applied.
There is in fact no policy which is absolute. You can't eradicate all criminal activity, that doesn't mean you shouldn't put any pressure into doing so.
It's pretty much impossible to completely eradicate child pornography, especially now with the internet prevalent in third world countries. Are you also arguing we should legalize that because if someone really wanted to they still can get child pornography???
> Are you also arguing we should legalize that because if someone really wanted to they still can get child pornography???
Absolutely. We should be going after the people making and selling CP, not possession. It's in the creation and distribution of CP that people are being hurt, not in the consumption.
If some guy is mentally ill and enjoys CP but otherwise doesn't hurt anyone, how are we better off for putting him in jail?
Marijuana prohibition is not, for the most part, visiting anywhere near the misery on the human species that heroin prohibition is. Tens of thousands of people are kidnapped, tortured, or murdered every year in wars over heroin distribution. Addiction to heroin is made much, much worse under prohibition.
In fact, in the presence of prohibition, you're much more likely to find these concentrated forms of plant medicines precisely because people are unwilling to take the risk to smuggle whole plant matter.
This phenomenon is also observable with coca and cocaine. Cocaine obviously has the capacity to seriously destroy communities and lives. However, it doesn't have this effect on everyone. And, among people who use the entire plant for tea or as a chew - which is typical in places where the plant is legal and indigenous - it is utterly benign.