I have always been a pro legalization of everything kind of person but I m having some doubts atm. Maybe you guys can help me out. Setting aside weed and hash that should be legalized everywhere (not because they are "harmless" but I mean wtf? Booze and cigarettes are legal !) let s talk about hard drugs like heroin and coke. I can think about two main pros of legalization :
1) people would have access to the real thing, know what they are using and how much they are using. Plagues like Fentanyl probably would not even exist
2) We will not give money to the likes of the Talibans- Ndrangheta-South American Cartels-etc
BUT :
legalization means availability and availability is a BITCH. I ve struggled with opioids and more recently with coke for the last 17 years, with a BS drug like..cigarettes I m not even struggling I feel really powerless AA style, don t even know where to start quitting because cigs are everywhere. I m sure alcoholics have a WAY harder time quitting their drinking than we coke or opioid users cos booze is available and socially accepted. I m doing lots of coke also because here in Brazil is...good, cheap and everywhere. If I was still in Europe I ld smoke my heroin and do coke only on special occasions. Can you see my point? What kind of legalization do we have in mind when it comes to heroin and especially coke? To give pharma grade heroin to addicts Switzerland style seems promising, but what to do with a super compulsive drug like coke? Not to mention stuff like meth ? Also, drug dealers will be out of business or invent some other shite- sell cheaper black market version of the legalized drugs ( i.e. what happened with cigarettes , back in the days in my South Italian hometown we ALL bought black market cigarettes?)
Definitely putting users in jail because they are users is the ultimate BS, definitely prohibitionism does not work, but I wonder what could really work, if anything....