In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.
Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
I buy melatonin and buproprion from dodgy websites. In the US I could just go the pharmacy or my doctor respectively.
Here we see that there is some level of harm from any drug restriction which must be balanced against the benefit.
In the US you can buy lidocaine cream over the counter. My wife is experiencing some post pregnancy problems involving really extreme pain that could be mitigated effectively with lidocaine. Because we need an authorisation issued to a specific pharmacy and we can't get another doctors appointment after the first pharmacy was out of stock, I watch her curled up crying again, I wonder how huge this benefit has to be to be worth it.
Those numbers might not be exact as it's been a couple years since I dealt with this, but it was definitely a tiny difference.
More pragmatically there are websites where you fill out a form saying you are quiting smoking a doctor at the website signs it off based on the form.
However, these are hacks for a bad system right?
The harm is, there are a lot of brits suffering poor sleep when they could just pop a melatonin for 20 cents in the US. Gating it behind a £200 medical appointment creates the harm.
So you could do something like that - it's available but consumption is monitored.
The main benefit would be taking all the money away from gangs.
If they could easily obtain legal heroin of known purity and concentration then it would presumably lead to less deaths as they would be less likely to overdose and less likely to use more dangerous chemicals such as Fentanyl as a substitute.
From what I have read, addicts don't want the hard stuff like heroin and fentanyl, they are pushed into it.
They initially had debilitating pain and were put on prescription opioids, but either for legal or medical reasons the script ran out, and since the pain management was not addressed, the addicts turned to hard drugs to manage their pain.
I think if there easier to obtain, legal opioids, then we would not see heroin or fentanyl abuse.
Will there be addicts and abusers? Sure, but that situation has to be less worse than the current opioid crisis.
Getting it pure from a legal point of sale would ruin the drug market and would remove any interest in growing the market. This would effectively end the drug system.
I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
Think through the question before you ask it.
If pharmaceutical companies were making drugs instead of criminals, there would be consistency of product and tax revenue instead of addicts ingesting crazy chemicals made by criminals. But I doubt it will ever happen because the US prison system, including police, are too invested in the drug war. It makes way too much money for them to let go of it.
With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system.
If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend.
The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
A truly free society should allow people to throw their lives away, practice harmful habits, etc.
Otherwise, is your life yours or the state's?
Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount.
Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.