[klodolph]

From a public policy standpoint—the point of a ban on hard drugs is to improve public health. If hardly anyone uses hard drugs as a result of the ban, then it’s effective. However, if people are using hard drugs anyway and getting punished for it, the ban is not serving its purpose—it’s failing to prevent these people from using hard drugs, and it’s also then punishing these people (which is wrong).

So you have to weigh the negative impact of the punishments and the cost of enforcement against the positive impact of reducing (not eliminating) drug use.

[greggman3]

Just pulling random stats of the internet but, number of alcohol related deaths per year = 3 million

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol

So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level? AFAIK drug enforcement casualties don't come close to that number.

We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted. Of course it's a different time period. Maybe today stuff like that wouldn't happen.

[klodolph]

> So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level

Look at countries where they are legal—the answer is almost certainly NO, for most drugs and most countries.

Alcohol consumption would almost certainly be banned if (1) bans were effective at reducing consumption and (2) bans were made on the basis of public health. People in the US want to consume alcohol so badly that it will happen in great numbers despite a ban, as we see during US prohibition. That’s not to say that prohibition failed, just that it was at best a partial success.

The question is then, why is alcohol not banned if it is widely known that alcohol is more harmful and more addictive than various illegal drugs?

> We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted.

Right, for example the very dark period in Britain's history when it supported the opium trade in China, even though it was illegal in both Britain and China at the time. If you want to understand this part of history, I’d say that the horrors of British colonialism are more explicatory than the addictive nature of opium itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

If you thought of opium as a public health problem in China you would not be wrong, but if you thought of it as weapon used by imperialist Britain against the Chinese people then you would not be wrong either.