1. Keep as many innocent people as possible away from drugs.
2. Help as many junkies recover as possible.
3. Fuck the dealers.
Legalizing drugs seems to reduce the risk for dealers, now having their posh addiction-driven business at the mall, while increasing the availability of drugs for the untainted population and for the junkies. Are we really that concerned by dealer's quality of life that we willing to tradeoff the lives of our neighbors, friends or even family?
The tax money from legal drugs can be put into prevention and rehabilitation. We can measure the effectiveness of prevention strategies just like my current government measures their anti smoking and alcoholism prevention strategies.
Tax dollars made by my regional government from selling cigarettes went into a program here for a free long term supply of nicotine patches. This policy combined with other anti smoking initiatives have worked we now have the lowest rates of smoking in the country. Nicotine cessation therapy is proven to work. I don't understand why heroin or meth is not treated the same even when there is data that methadone does not work as well for treatment http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv...
The truly evil dealers, the violent street gangs who prey off the mentally ill and homeless addicts are impossible to bust because of how they have set up their operations to avoid prosecution by employing the desperate junkies to hold and sell small amounts of product 24hrs a day, while low level gangsters, who handle no evidence, run street security. The police if they arrest these addicts simply go to court for minor possession and are released the next morning. The low level gangsters are routinely arrested for violence while debt collecting or running off other gangsters and a replacement is there the next day. Sometimes they get them on conspiracy charges but it doesn't matter, they're hardened criminals who consider prison a cost of doing business and again somebody else replaces them and their operations change to adapt to a police crackdown status. Police have been fighting these gangs as long as I have been alive but the availability of narcotics remains steady. They have changed their policy to management of the drug war now, propping up one semi cooperative gang by turning a blind eye to their activities in exchange for intel on rival gangs, as to prevent a more violent and unstable gang they can't control from taking over and turning the streets into a warzone.
The margins on legal good are a whole lot less than illegal ones. You'd be putting most dealers out of business overnight by legalizing.
Question, though -- why does legal pot cost the same as illegal pot used to in places like WA? It seems there is still a large amount of profit to be made from growing and selling pot, although I guess (pretty much by definition) that money is no longer going towards criminal enterprise. Is it just high taxes?