When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality.
Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.
The Portuguese doctor Goulão who leads most of the drug panels does want to legalise all drugs. He makes the argument that all drugs should be legalised not just baby steps of cannabis, so he definitely agrees with you.
What Portugal has achieved is amazing because they also had very conservative governments and yet still got as far as decriminalisation.
Other options that, in my amateur opinion, would be better, would be to more heavily penalise adultered drugs, or to have pharmacies supply, with a prescription, addictive drugs, but only to addicts. The latter idea is basically an extension of safe injection clinics.
And while I know US has an opioid crisis this prescription thing seems to work here.
Far more dangerous for anyone who is near those that buy it.
Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.
The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.
"The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms," Nutt and colleagues calculate. "The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20101101/...
¹As defined in the law, but prosecutors and judges can and often do avoid charging people with crimes if they have a bit more and there's no evidence of trafficking.