Not having them become drug users in the first place would be even better. Let's not forget that a lot of drugs really are seriously harmful
Criminalizing drug use is fucking stupid, sure, but I also really don't want to have big companies spend big advertising budgets on making people addicts.
I don't want that either, but what I would really like is if we could find a way to encourage our massive pharmacological sector, in the private and public spheres, to research and produce less harmful recreational drugs.
The problem we'd have if we just de-regulated to encourage this is that there would be a market incentive to produce things that are more addictive.
[0] http://www.healio.com/hematology-oncology/news/print/hemonc-...
The government is facing a huge lawsuit though.
But I agree, drug use should be legalized but of course advertising for them (ANY kind of advertising) should be forbidden: note that this is problematic as many movie could be considered as a kind of advertising for alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
That being said, drugs, including more dangerous drugs, are already very much part of our culture and glorified everywhere from music to movies. De-criminalizing them is the obvious course of path for harm-reduction and diminishing the influence of organized crime.
Add prohibiting taxes. With the added taxes, direct a large portion to projects which is intended to prevent new users and educate the population.
Ban the use in public areas. Make it social unacceptable behavior and shunned during day light.
Create regulations and complex bureaucracy for those who want to sell the product. Create state controlled monopolies if possible, which then can advertise against purchases.
For tobacco, you can have warning labels that covers most or the whole package.
(Examples are taken from Sweden).
And a lot of the ones that hurt lots of people now, predominantly harm people due to effects of the criminalisation. Even heroin is a quite safe drug (comparable to other opioids, which does not in any way make it harmless, but also not nearly as nasty as it's often portrayed) - to the extent that it's prescribed for post-op pain in .e.g the UK (under the name diamorphine).
It becomes the horrible nasty mess that people overdose on when you incentivise criminals to cut it with anything from other drugs to brick dust and sell it at all kinds of unpredictable doses because their customers have no recourse.
Give people predictable doses of clean heroin, and it's not much different than having people stay on prescription drugs like Vicodin. In fact, one of the most common gateways to heroin abuse is a dependency on prescription drugs like Vicodin - once the prescriptions are terminated people often turns to the black market due to dependencies, and gradually get nudged over to heroin because it is far cheaper.
I'm not saying we should have ads for heroin or let grocery stores sell it, but the criminalisation even of these drugs do massive amount of harm and we owe it to the people harmed to actually seriously consider whether the criminalisation is even moral.
Your concern of advertising budgets is easily prevented by outlawing advertising. Whenever I visit the US, I'm shocked at the amount of drug advertising on TV for example, as in Europe both drugs (prescription or otherwise) and alcohol advertising is strictly regulated or outright banned in a range of countries.
Likewise many European countries regulate sale of e.g. liquor heavily, including with government sales monopolies with stricter sales policies in a few countries.
The last figure that I read was that 85% of the DEA's budget was spent fighting marijuana.
If it were legalized, overnight, that would mean that the amount of money available to go after cocaine, heroin, crystal meth and prescription opiate trafficking would be increased by about 566%.
Some of the most dangerous drugs (alcohol, benzos, opiates) are already heavily abused by people addicted to heavily, heavily marketed drugs.
For the drug user and possibly society, not better for the Law Enforcement, Prison Guard and private corporations who run them though.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/06/23/251363/cca-geogr...
http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/22/4-industries-getting-r...
A more viable solution would be to license hard drugs to pharmacists, and notify health department and non-profits so that they can help users.
I agree that it's an error to criminalize them, but you should also discourage people to use hard drugs like heroin and meth. Putting a frame around the use of drugs is a good idea, but it's also important for public health to not send a mixed message.
Obsoleting the dealer is one thing, but don't forget the users.
"[In 2012] the annual average taxpayer cost in these states was $31,286 per inmate."
If you start treating people you need less law enforcement and you get less inmates. And then you haven't even considered the less obvious damage that drug related convictions cause, like not being able to find a job and relying on welfare. Children of convicted drug abusers growing up in a bad environment and being more vulnerable to addiction and crime.
Most arguments against decriminalization are extremely short sighted, just look at the positive effect it's having in Portugal. Drug use might not be severely affected, but the surrounding factors are slowly improving: http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation-portugal-...
Daily maintenance doses of heroin for a typical addict costs less than $20 (we know, because medical grade heroin is in use in a number of countries for post-op pain). Compare that to the cost of policing, or incarcerating these users, and health care costs that are massively exacerbated by impurities and unknown dose strengths, and offering free prescriptions for pure versions of many drugs would likely save us massive amounts of money.
Especially when indirect crimes (e.g. robberies to finance drug habits) are taken into account, as well as reduced tax revenues (from drug addicts that are unable to function in work places due to the current system).
Getting people to stop using would be preferable, but it is not realistic to get most people to even start to deal with until they're not hounded by police and spending most of their time struggling to scrounge up the money for their next hit. I'd be willing to bet that even in purely economic terms, handing free drugs to most drug addicts in clean forms and predictable doses would likely have a massive ROI for society even in purely economic terms because of the reduced damage - both to users health and due to crime - and increased tax revenue from actually getting many of these addicts back to relatively normal lives (even most heroin addicts can function relatively normally when they don't have to worry about where their next hit is going to come from).
In human terms, the suffering that is directly caused by criminalisation of many of these drugs today is downright disgusting - we'd be hard pressed to come up with anything worse (unless we allow unregulated marketing and sales to children or something).
The problem isn't that these substances aren't available. It's more of a problem of who they're available to. If you're wealthy and informed, you can probably shop doctors or get prescribed a strong pain killer and even have insurance to pay for it. The less fortunate have to risk their lives to get the same kick with an inferior and less controlled product.
Not to mention one of the main points of approaching this whole situation differently is that treating users and decimalization may actually save money overall.
Many ethical issues have to be solved first. Several hard drugs, for example heroin, methamphetamines and crack, are almost impossible to use without "abuse". So you have companies selling this stuff to people so they can harm themselves. It will be tough to make these sales a better ethical choice than banning these drugs.