I'd argue that our inability to deal with the fact that drugs are a natural aspect of humanity is at least as damaging as any harm that comes from said use.
The "Just Say No" campaign (and others of its ilk) has helped condition the general population to reject any thoughtful discourse on how to properly integrate this behavior in a way that minimizes the damage and maximizes the reward from such use.
To undo the cultural damage will take generations.
In Norway there's increasing political support for decriminalisation of drugs after the Portuguese model, but culturally I see much less progress. Because now the debate is couched purely in medical terms. "Imprisoning addicts is wrong", "replace fines with medical treatment", etc. While not wrong, these perspectives are missing the bigger picture. We're merely changing drug use from being something we want to eliminate by law enforcement to something we want to eliminate by medical treatment.
The "want to eliminate" part is the real problem. We shouldn't want to, because we fundamentally can't. We need to instead have a culture of responsible drug use, like we already do for alcohol. Most people who drink don't drink very often, because that's the cultural norm. For illegal drugs, the dominant cultural norm is total abstinence. The problem occurs e.g when you try to give advice to a young person who just discovered they like weed. When you come at it from a total abstinence point of view, you will seem out of touch to them, and they will subsequently ignore everything you say, even if a lot of it is true.
140,000 deaths per year in, just in the USA, from alcohol use and abuse - not sure I would call that a responsible culture of use and certainly not a worthy goal to mimic for drugs.
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
Humans have murdered each other for as long as we've existed. Would you advocate for "thoughtful discourse" on how to better integrate this fully natural aspect of humanity into our society? Has all of our generations of telling people "just say no" to murdering each other just conditioned our society to reject thoughtful discourse on murder?
What it means specifically is that we will always have to deal with it, and can't ignore it or hope it goes away someday.
We kind of did do it, though. Between state monopoly on violence, exercised by leaders and courts through armies and law enforcement, and all exceptions and extenuating circumstances around e.g. self-defense, we managed to integrate even murder into our society.
Regardless, it's not very useful to bucket murder and drug use in the same bucket. It would perhaps be better to consider alcohol, tobacco and coffee as the mind-altering drugs they are, as this should shine light on alternative approaches applicable to the same category of consumables.
“Murder” is a word that means intentional wrongful killing — and “murder” is only defined within the context of integrating violence into society.
A better example is “zero tolerance” for violence in schools — which has led to many documented cases of punishing victims defending themselves.
We regularly debate the “zero violence!” crowd about how their beliefs are unethical and damaging.
The same as with drugs.