Indeed. How about just making sure that the drugs people take are safe, of a high quality and available without feeding a criminal underbelly? Nah, that'd just be silly.
They're safe and of high quality, though they might still feed a criminal underbelly.
Of course, people who get addicted to synthetic opiates often have their lives ravaged to the same degree as people who get addicted to regular old street heroin, despite the safety and quality of the drugs.
Nobody is claiming that there will not be issues with dependence or abuse of these drugs. The point is that people should not have to deal with dangerous criminals, nor should they be afraid of jail time for admitting their drug use.
http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/tfrs/v11i4.pdf
We could make space in society for people to explore the parallel worlds. Maybe a week per year research period. Many users I know of all types of drugs take them just to tolerate their jobs. We could somehow make work more tolerable.
We could make everyday life more fulfilling and have less stigma attached to exploring alternate states of mind. We need to find a way to fit or shoehorn this stuff into our lives because we can't eradicate it. Perhaps this is the skill of the shamanic ritual and modern day music festivals... to put boundaries of time and space around the exploration of this alternate states of mind. We need to protect and shepherd people into safe places while they're experimenting and keep them away from responsible areas like driving and machinery while they're temporarily intoxicated. We need to keep them productive even if they're using.
Then you have the new "anti-abuse" formulations, which contain specific ingredients designed to be uncrushable, unpleasant if injected, or insoluble/gel-forming to prevent IV use. Given junkie creativity (and suppressed self-preservation instinct), there are various methods of bypassing these obstacles, but in doing so could affect the potency of the extracted remains by a factor of 2-10x. So now you have no idea how much you're dosing, as well as what's still along for the ride.
At least heroin dealers would typically only cut with toxic adulterants by negligence, rather than intent.
[not an opiate (ab)user, known a few]
All of a sudden they won't have hundreds of millions of people clamouring to give them money all the time.
Less profit means less money to spend on weapons, bribes and hiring goons. Sounds good to me!
In that corner, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, Dow.
Somehow, my money's on Big Pharma. Especially if they get to spend money on security contractors.
The basic reasoning here is that once you flood the markets with cheap, awesome, solid product the operating funds of the cartels go away. Destroy the market and you can't afford to be evil.
[1] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Monsanto_DrugWar....