Drugs should absolutely be illegal. This concept that some Nordic countries made all drugs legal and everything was great, is so naive. It's so freshman year of college.
Making drugs illegal is a major deterrent to doing drugs. Simple as that.
Making drugs illegal is a major deterrent to doing drugs. Simple as that.
Half of the US is on some form of amphetamine from middle school onwards. We don't have an issue with people taking drugs. We want them to take the right drugs and pay the right companies for them.
You might have a problem with 'drugs' but that's politics.
Which drugs do you draw the line at? Coffee? Alcohol? Nicotine?
Yes I know about the David Nutt report. It's not remotely objective.
The people wanting to use drugs would view "punished" as anything that gets in the way of them and their drug of choice. Saying it harms no one is to say that the person using isn't being harmed.
I have (though probably used to have more) libertarian sympathies but it seems like that falls down in a large number of hard cases. I don't want to run other people's lives any more then I want someone else to run mine but there's an extreme version of the libertarian argument that equates any help with control.
There will be a demand and there will be people fulfilling the demand. It’s much better to have the fulfillers regulated instead of it being a source of money and power for criminal organisations.
Just look at how well prohibition worked in the US.
Nordic countries are actually rather (in)famously known in Europe as having strict drug laws.
> Making drugs illegal is a major deterrent to doing drugs.
Obviously, but people still do so many drugs, and the numbers are increasing. This is despite relatively very few countries actually even decriminalizing (_not_ legalizing) drugs.
From my own experience living in the Netherlands, weed being legal means tourists come to smoke it, but a lot of the Dutch are just completely uninterested, including teenagers. If you had given me easy to access cheap weed at 16 I would've been blazing all day, but I didn't come from a place where it's legal. Dutch teenagers did. Second order effects such as perception of drugs are a thing that must be considered as well.
As for it being a deterrent, it may be for some, but the measure should not be drug use but harm, and what is abundantly clear is that criminalisation drives up crime, and causes substantial harm up to and including large numbers of deaths.
Keeping drugs illegal given the evidence we have of the harm it causes is deeply immoral.