But let's cut to the chase, this is not about drugs and health issues. This is about money and jobs for DEA. Essentially, we're pissing away our tax money to pay for DEA agents and their expensive toys, who, in turn, don't provide any real service.This drug war is expensive, it costs dollars and lives. It's trivial to end it, but it's not happening. Too many dollars at stake.
I was with you until this, not because I disagree but because I think it's an irrelevant issue. There are many examples of enforcement/regulation wings of the government being rolled back when the political tide turned against them. The issue is that law enforcement expenditures, like military expenditures, are pitched as a response to public fears.
If you talk to older generation, suburban family folks who support criminalization instinctively, their number one stated concern is, in my experience, that they are afraid of drug-related crimes -- robbery, burglary, theft i.e., crimes being committed to support a habit (so the hypothesis goes). Now the obvious response to that is to point out that those things happen now, but then you are engaging an issue of the heart by attacking a point made in their head. This will probably segue into an argument about stiffer criminal penalties -- the exact opposite of what we want -- because the person is still afraid.
DEA toys don't figure into this argument, even if that is the end result, so if you want this to happen before that generation is old and gone you have to have an argument that addresses the core concerns people actually have. If you have to talk about the DEA, even if you are technically correct, I doubt anybody can be swayed by such an argument -- it's all cerebral and doesn't address the central issue, which is fear.
That's MHO anyway.