[jqm]

No, not at all. I agree... this kind of problem exists even with criminalization and I agree on the pretty obvious (to me anyway) need to do away with criminalization.

But problems of this kind could become worse if taking meth were legal. That's my only point.

[schoen]

It sounds pretty analogous to the problem about the incentive to take performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. In this case the players might mostly prefer a world in which doping was banned, with effective enforcement, to one in which it was permitted, just because of the competitive pressure to take risks.

[conceit]

The personal barrier to entry would become worse with legalization, that the peer pressure would thrive on. But that logic would be true for other accounts, too. I've been thinking before that legalization, from the perspective of prior moralized prohibition, would seem like allowance or even encouragement, instead of deregulation because of a lack of or even of the futility of enforcement.