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"...illegalization doesn't meet its purpose (making drugs difficult to get)..."

This is a common assumption about the purpose of drug prohibition, but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition and the war on drugs than genuine concerns about public health. The basic concept is that some non-white group is corrupting white youth/white women with drugs; therefore, to protect white people, the police are empowered to imprison/kill those scary drug peddlers. On some level it was about making drugs harder to get, but the assumption was that white people have no interest in drugs until some non-white person pushes it on them. The assumption was always that the impact of drug prohibition would be mostly concentrated on non-white populations.

This does not explain the situation in Europe, South America or Asia, all of which have (or had) laws similar to the US for drugs.

To my knowledge, these are all US-imposed policies.

You are right and it needs to stop.

You don't want to piss off the US.

   all US-imposed policies.

In what sense?

For examples China under Mao, 'cured' the opium problem using extreme repressions [1]. Have you got any evidence that Singapore or Duterte's repression was requested by the US?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Unde...

Aporophobia complements/substitutes racism when convenient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporophobia

What??

Drug laws vary wildly in the regions you mentioned. Just about the only thing that they have in common is that drugs are illegal.

And it's not just a question of laws, either. Laws are one thing, and policing is another. There are countries which don't really enforce the law for personal use amounts.

The US has draconian laws, and punitive policing. There's your problem. It turns out that the worse you treat your criminals, the worse your crime problem gets.

"...but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition...."

Here is the quote from John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

> At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

>the best argument (not only for cannabis, but for stronger drugs too) is that illegalization has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work.

This is a pragmatic perspective, but if you care I will share a principled one.

I think the bigger problem is with the principle of individual liberty. What right has a king or bureaucrat to order armed thugs to enter my home and tell me what plants I can or can't eat, smoke, or whatever?

I also think if you look at history, one of the most glaring lessons is that authoritarianism "has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work."

"I also think if you look at history, one of the most glaring lessons is that authoritarianism 'has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work.'"

This isn't really true from a historical viewpoint. By far the most common societal regime in history is empire, nearly all totalitarian empires, from the Babylonian totalitarian kings/emperors on forwards to the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Aztecs, Incas, etc. If you want more on this, refer to the writings of Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens, as well as podcast with Sam Harris, where he lays out how empire is indeed the most frequent/stable regime we've devised.

While I make no claim for the superiority of any particular governmental regime, totalitarianism has worked for itself for thousands of years, proving itself out far more than democracy has yet to do. If we look to the height of democracy in the USA, it had not even existed for 100 years before a savagely brutal civil war to end slavery, the scars of which are still open sores upon our American psyche. In a totalitarian regime, it may have been possible to dispatch slavery in a far less bloody and scarring manner. Therefore, I do not agree that history has shown totalitarianism to not work, perhaps you care to elaborate.

I ask you then, which other democracy or form of govt is truly the shining example that you would point to?

> In a totalitarian regime, it may have been possible to dispatch slavery in a far less bloody and scarring manner.

Under every other regime (except perhaps Haiti) slavery was "dispatched" without a bloody civil war.

And the US civil war wasn't fought over slavery as they want you to believe, freeing the slaves was merely a byproduct of the war between the industrialized north and agrarian south (mostly) over tariffs.

> And the US civil war wasn't fought over slavery as they want you to believe,

As who want you to believe? Because if you read the declarations of succession and the words of senators from confederate states at the time, they clearly cite slavery and "property" (read: slaves) rights.

That's true, the south's wealthy leadership was fighting to keep their slaves as their wealth depended on it.

But Lincoln, and before him, Jackson, specifically said the northern aggression towards the south was not because of slavery. Jackson even made a very explicit statement that exactly this was happening, and that slavery was only a "pretext" and not the real reason.

That is reality though it is very unfortunate that humans can often be like this.

> As who want you to believe?

The winners (who always write history).

They say it was "the war to free the slaves" but before the southern states seceded the federal government had no intention of starting a civil war and in fact had no legal basis to conduct military operations on US soil even if they wanted to forcefully end slavery.

> Because if you read the declarations of succession...

It's painfully obvious the southern states wanted the institution of slavery to continue but they knew that having been outlawed in the territories that its days were numbered, they would easily be outvoted as new states were formed and slavery would be (peacefully) ended.

And, no, I'm not some kind of pro-slavery crazy person it's just one of my many pet peeves that it's taken as dogma that was the justification for the US government to invade the southern states when slavery was ended everywhere else on earth without a massive civil war.

"They" being every credible historian of the era, I guess? C'mon.

In a totalitarian regime, every citizen is a slave.

>While I make no claim for the superiority of any particular governmental regime, totalitarianism has worked for itself for thousands of years, proving itself out far more than democracy has yet to do.

I was speaking with an assumption of prosperity and liberty as inherent virtues in humanity. You seem to be suggesting that other forma of governance, totalitarianism, is better because it has existed for longer periods of time.

"Everyone knows where to go." - No, most people don't actually.

Most people definitely do not know how to get something beyond weed.

Most people live really normal lives, the might 'know someone or know someone who knows someone' who smokes weed, but not coke, lsd, mushrooms or crack.

Illegalization 100% makes things 'hard to get' - it's a game of supply and demand: if opiates were legal, they would be infused into coca cola, cigarettes, candy and orange juice and be available in every corner store tommorow.

I'm a fairly 'experienced' individual and as of today I'd have zero idea how to get a hold of opiates. If they were legal, they'd be within arms reach.

Legalization of hard drugs, particularly opiates would cause a public health crisis like we've never seen. Only a small percent of people can handle that stuff, the rest go downhill very quickly and our health services would be overflowing, people would not be showing up for work.

And fentanyl basically closes the argument. That drug is like Russian Roulette and has caused a marked upswing in overdoses around the world - and it's something the junkies are asking for (because they like the potency). Legalize that and it would be like the plague.

I would legalize weed but not allow for commercialization, and then make hard drugs a health issue not a criminal issue.

And of course, open things up for research. It's really silly universities can't experiment safely with weed.

Well, for opiates specifically all one really needs to do is visit a doctor. It's gotten better, but in the past 5 years I've been offered a prescription for painkillers after nearly every doctors visit where I could have conceivably used them. I needed 5 stitches on my leg, and was offered 4 weeks worth of drugs. Ridiculous, considering the stitches weren't even in a month, and after 3 days I wasn't even taking acetaminophen.

In Canada doctors prescribe them in the singles.

For a tooth removal I got 2 pills total. Literally a prescription for 2!

For most things you get nada. And it's tracked.

So this problem can be fixed basically by doctors treating them like the very addictive substances they are.

But you're right - this is where a lot of people are addicted!

> To me, the best argument (not only for cannabis, but for stronger drugs too) is that illegalization has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work in practice.

Maybe only in the US. Drugs are illegal in places like the UAE or Singapore, and the prohibition seems quite effective there. There seems to be more things involved here.

There will always be tragedies with drugs but criminalization only compounds the tragedy. It is not a problem you can fix with the kneejerk violence of placing people in cages. At the root I think the problem is addictive drugs remove people from society. Incarceration all but guarantees that removal is maximized.

Portugal legalized everything a while back and it was a major success. It is worth reading up on their experience. A great quote I heard a couple years back: "It is an atrocity what we do to people when we don't like what they do to themselves." - Anon

you seem to be right, prohibition does not have the effect it was meant to have.

but too many people have a job through this regulation as is (police can easily improve quotas, prosecutors/legal advice etc., in my country there are medical staff in state institutions doing nothing else but testing people if they used cannabis/again ...), so the resistance is great to change anything.

I'm pretty sure prohibition had the exact effect it was actually intended to have. There's a reason US prisons are a big business now and US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

This is not true.

Most people do not know how to get hard drugs.

If hard drugs were legal, they'd be in soda, candy, food, cigarettes - it would be sold literally on every street corner and grocery store.

So the contrast between 'arms reach' and 'most people do not know how to get opium' is quite high.

For weed, it's a different story, but for pretty much all other drugs, prohibition has a pretty dramatic effect on supply and demand.

Weed accounts for a huge portion of incercerations in the states. Also, many of these "hard drugs" like LSD or MDMA have legitimate medical uses. The motivation here was never to protect the public, and if you want to see what that actually looks like check out countries like Netherlands or Germany.

Having lived in Germany and visited the Netherlands on a number of occasions, I can assure you that opioids, LSD, MDMA are not remotely legal in those areas. They have slightly different take on those drugs, but they are definitely out of bounds.

Opioids have legit medical use obviously, and they are legal for those, and even then we have to be very careful.

I didn't say they were legal there, I said those countries take a different approach to dealing with them.