Harsh punishments for personal use are nonsense, USA are just insane on that, but I don't think making everything legal is reasonable.
who is arguing making them legal for a food additive, and even more still who is advocating them to be legal for kids?
Making a chemical legal doesn’t preclude disallowing it becoming a food additive. And food regulation is a very serious matter, that can, and is, being strongly enforced.
If that’s the only reason you’re against legalisation, I have good news for you! You needed worry about it, at all.
A good explanation is driving above the speed limit on roads. An unreasonable system would put people behind bars for years for any kind of speeding. That is roughly what you have today in USA with respect to drugs and I understand why you'd want to remove it. However removing speed limits is not reasonable either, even if you personally can handle it we can clearly see that deaths increase significantly with higher limits so in this case we care about their lives above your freedom.
If making a particular drugs more legal to use causes a lot of deaths then I don't think it should be legal to use, no matter how much you think that your liberty gets violated if you aren't free to use it. I value their lives above your freedom. Cannabis doesn't kill people so I don't care much about it, but harder drugs often do.
Edit: As an example we can see how making opium more available to people (prescribed via doctor) killed a hundred thousand people in USA the past 10 years. Making it easily accessible even without prescription would likely be worse. I don't think that properly regulating the substance and saving that many people is unreasonable.
I’m sorry, but if your counter argument just ignores what I said, I’m not going to bother addressing your points either.
Children are vulnerable when there are no adults actually looking out for their welfare in earnest. When there are adults looking out for them, children aren't anywhere near as vulnerable as we routinely paint them.
You seem to assume "X substances are bad" plus "kids shouldn't have certain choices available to them, ever."
Life isn't as simple as "x substances are bad." Kids are best served by an approach other than simply seeking to control them per se, which generally doesn't work and is typically counterproductive.
I do realize that creating good policies during a transition phase is especially challenging. But you tend to not get there from here if you don't bother to try to go in that direction at all.
Decrimilaziation is a good step in the right direction. Yes, there will be some pitfalls of taking it. We can and should work those and bringing up such concerns is a valuable part of that process, so thank you for doing that.
But it's not a good reason to take a good step. It just means "We also need to be concerned about unintended consequences for vulnerable populations." That's always a good thing to have your eye on, whether those vulnerable populations are children, women, people of color, the LGBTQ crowd or cis het white males with money.
You are not a US citizen nor living in the US. But you would like me -- an American citizen who is living in the US and spent many years living in California -- to defer to your personal opinions about how best to manage the problems in my country.
I'll pass, thanks.
We have a several hundred year history in this country of crapping all over Natives and people of color and they tend to be the ones ending up in our prisons for years and years on end on BS excuses and to my mind this is a vastly more serious problem than some kid no longer living in fear if he tries mushrooms or something that it will leave him with a criminal record, which may not stop him from trying them and may, instead, begin his descent into a life of crime as he gradually figures out how to get away with more crap in a system that he knows for a fact is out to get him.
Those problems would mostly go away by just reducing the sentence from years in prison to a small fine. Viewing this as choosing between punishing them with years in prison or making it legal is ignorant.
> You are not a US citizen nor living in the US. But you would like me -- an American citizen who is living in the US and spent many years living in California -- to defer to your personal opinions about how best to manage the problems in my country.
This is a discussion, not me trying to force your country to enact some specific law. If you only discuss with Americans then you are ignorant and ignore the diversity of views and experiences from the rest of the world.
The tar and other additives in cigarettes cause chemical dependencies. Vaping removes the additives and replaces them with a controllable amount of nicotine. Over time you reduce your exposure to nicotine and at some point you just quit entirely when the dosage is very low.
The US desperately needs more family-friendly policies. If we don't successfully address that, a lot of our efforts simply won't be very effective.
You need fertile ground to grow something good. We lack that because we lack some basic essentials in terms of nurturing our people.