What led to your realization that "drugs are bad", and does that include all external consciousness altering substances? (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, and so on).
It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.
Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.
The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.
> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage
Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.
Drugs that kill or otherwise destroy your life are very bad. Other drugs that don’t do that are probably much less bad, and we should allow things somewhere that fall under a line between not bad and very bad. Where that line exists is a matter of current debate.