Now the question is how do we police it? Throwing drug users in prison doesn't seem like a good idea anymore. We really want to go after the dealers, the people who get users hooked and strung out.
First order crimes. For example drinking, then getting in a crash would be a first order crime of alcohol use.
A second order crime could be something like stealing money to buy your next beer, or running an illegal bootlegging operation.
In deciding how to police the issue, the last thing you want to consider is punishment, and the first you want to consider is harm reduction.
Going after dealers just doesn't fucking work. We've been spending billions on it, and in doing so we have a non-stop line of dealers and manufactures making more deadly and addictive concoctions every day. The more you bust the dealers, the more the price goes up, the more stealing occurs by the users, the and more corruption of law enforcement by the dealers paying people off because of the huge sums of money involved happen. As they say "There was a war on drugs, drugs won".
1. (Large parts of) Funding of organized crime would dry up and the state would get extra income via tax
2. Addicts know they can get their fix and hence can take up regular work
3. Substances would be cleaner and thus safer for consumption (easing the burden of the health care system)
Not saying that there are no downsides to this, but the downsides have to be weighed against the upsides and in my book the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I may get downvoted for this, but...
I for one believe that drug dealers are still the scum of society using people's own biology for profit. This isn't any different than the Sackler's. Why do you want to normalize drug dealing?
You can hate them as much as you want but you don't solve problems as long as the incentive structure exists for it.
We take a thousand square miles of BLM land in the middle of the desert, and turn it into freedrugcity, and ship anyone who wants free drugs there.
Probably cheaper in the long run.
So is this a place are interned to and can't leave easily? Well, great, you've created a drug terrorism ghetto.
Is this a place people can freely come and go to? Well, it will likely be "too successful" for a number of the hard anti drug politicians, remember this is supposed to be a failure to show how bad the moral failings of people that even thing about drugs end up in. That and when said politicians kids get caught there they'll have the entire place destroyed.
Also doing drugs probably doesn't mean "crime free for all here", so, um, who's policing the place?