People generally don't like to be coddled by their government. They changed the laws in their states to allow them to make their own choices (and deal with the consequences).
Nobody chose to be homeless, nobody chose to have an eating disorder as a teenager, nobody chose to have a society that it incredibly obese, etc these are all conditions largely created as a consequence of the externalities of others actions chasing their freedoms: others decided to buy lots of investment properties and drive up prices beyond middle class affordability, others decided to photoshop and post their selfies to create toxic body standards, others decided to openly consume incredibly sugary food and increasingly normalized obesity.
We live in a community, we’re not atomized individuals, and how others behave DOES affect us. The freedom to create a shittier society for everyone is no freedom at all.
I live in Michigan and IMO legal cannabis products are too cheap. Stores will run deals where you can get vape carts for less than 10 dollars. 200mg THC bags of gummies go for $5 somewhere in town almost all the time. Actual flower and pre-rolls aren't quite as cheap, presumably because they can't be made from shake and other waste. At these prices, $20 could keep me high for a week straight (admittedly I'm a bit of a lightweight), which is absolutely not the case with booze, even the cheapest bottom-shelf fortified wine. I think there is a lot of room to raise taxes on these products without fueling the black market.
I don’t care if people use some drugs. I have some edibles of my own in my fridge right now. What I care about is normalizing vices and pretending like it’s just a matter of individual preference when it obviously affects the rest of society at large (and makes life worse).
Not like we have done with cannabis though, that obviously would be a disaster.
But I do think some wise well regulated control and dosage with some form of monitoring or limitation would be very much less costly in terms of dollars, lives saved, health and social disruption.
So reduce freedoms to make us safer? Maybe stop people having that extra pizza slice or smoking that cigar?
You're implying that the government is competent enough and not corruptible enough (via lobbying) to take this on.
Evaluate the quality of the public US education system, the health system for it's citizens (especially the non privileged wage earner), the national debt (of ~ $31T), the judicial system that has caused overpopulated prisons and even simple stuff like the responsibility of taking care of combat vets.
The handling of the pandemic (the lies, collusion with the media companies to suppress opposing views/questions of assumption) have made a lot of population think twice before trusting the government (irrespective of political party).
Not a good track record and does not inspire confidence.
Now I do agree that the points you brought up are blights on society. A lot (of the population) seem to be swayed by commercials, have massive financial debt and lack basic critical thinking skills.
However I can't see regulation by the incompetent as the solution.
We ended up in a logically dissonant state because that's just how politics and culture work. What's most galling, IMO, is when people today defend this obvious dissonance, such as in San Francisco where leftist politicians will defend both narratives in the same sentence with a straight face. Worse is when they do stuff like ban mentholated cigarettes with the express intention of saving the black community from itself, while opposing any proposed restraints on the sale or consumption of marijuana as oppression of the black community. There's so much dissonance there it boggles the mind.
There are ways to harmonize the disparate treatment of cigarettes and marijuana in our new, normative culture so that marijuana use is afforded more laxity relative to cigarettes, but too many seem to be bought specifically into the fallacious logic of the original campaigns.