They would argue about the damages drugs do.
I think they know what they are doing. Digital privacy has no lobby outside of EEF. We donate more than $10k to them annually.
If one of them finds a way to patent drugs that are currently illegal or otherwise profit from it, legalization will happen.
Honestly, in many places, legalization has already happened, look at the coffee shops in the Netherlands and the dispensaries in North America.
The police industrial complex might be attached to their cash cow, but everyone else in the capitalist system wants to get rich too, and I suspect in the long run that'll win out.
Also, much as how after a few thousand years of civilization people eventually wised up to human sacrifice wasn't actually a good idea and was not in any way required to make the sun come up, maybe at some point in the future we'll realize that harsh criminal penalties don't actually solve the drug problem.
France has some of the strictest laws against cannabis use in Europe, and also some of the highest rates of consumption, or at least it did last time I checked.
Some of it, certainly, but I doubt it's all. Violence committed by druggies trying to scrape up enough for their next hit would still happen.
Also, addicts stealing from their moms would still happen, which is regrettable even if it is not violence.
If drugs were not prohibited, they would not cost so much as to cause "scraping up enough".
How come I can buy 50 liters of isopropanol (99.(9) whatever, dehydrated, better than medical eth) for like 20 euro, but no luck for ethanol. Even while ethanol is that much cheaper to produce?
> Violence committed by druggies trying to scrape up enough for their next hit would still happen.
It's almost none, because those things don't cost enough to ruin a person's life. Even for most of the serious addicts.
The "war on drugs" probably brings violence associated with drugs, but drugs in general bring harm (when someone becomes an addict or dies because of an overdose, it does harm to the relatives). Nobody would care about drugs if it didn't.