I don't quite get the hypocrisy angle. He's not making rules that apply to everybody but him.
I would guess legislation around what you can and can't put into your body is around the amount of harm and suffering caused ty you(& by you) after ingesting these substances.
Different people have varying vulnerability(changing throughout their lives) and more likely to seek escapism at certain points in their lives. Legislating against subtances stop them from being widely sold & readily available.
Seems pretty common sense to me.
(with allowances for existing(read normalised) special cases, namely: alcohol & tobacco) I can see tobacco being phased out completely in the next century.
It shouldn't even be a question about the morality of taking drugs or the hypocrisy of trying to stop it while carving out extensions any more - it's way more important than that.
[0] Or severe alcoholics, for that matter.
Feel free to substitute "middle-class" for "bourgeois" if it sounds less political or inflammatory to your ears.
Indeed, Portugal has invested massively in the kind of healthcare and drug-treatment infrastructure that's required to effectively handle the inevitable results of decriminalisation.
Whatever you want to say about drugs or drug policy, the people who do them aren't just minding their own business. One way or the other, the rest of us have to respond to it. Complaints about the "hypocrisy" of attempts to reduce use simply are not serious.
And, as I said above, it's a position that rarely survives prolonged interaction with actual addicts.
No,, Portugal has invested massively in the healthcare and drug treatment programmes that you need whether drugs are legal or not.
The US could implement all of those tomorrow and still keep drugs illegal.
Sure, but play this against "The legislative environment created by the War On Drugs creates such overwhelming negative externalities, in our own country and beyond, that it costs much more in terms of both tax and lives."
(Actually I fundamentally disagree - health care is a common good, and society does not really get to have this oversight. If it did we'd see bans on extreme sports, for instance)