[tremon]

To draw a parallel with filesharing:

"Of course, the more onerous the path the get legal movies, the more appealing illegal downloads become, so there's a profit-maximizing point somewhere along that integral."

We've all witnessed the war-on-piracy that the powers-that-be have been pursuing a few decades ago, and we've all seen it fail spectacularly. Similar to the drugs story, by going after the Napster-type filesharing systems, they created a much more lucrative black market where criminals made millions by being the first to crack protection schemes.

What reduced the problem to a manageable level? Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix. By making it legal to do entertainment in the confines of their own home, the harm to society at large was much reduced. And even better, because everything is legal now, production companies have much better insights into their market, and can better produce content that their users actually want.

[mc32]

If we look at entertainment we see that ease of access has increased viewership (consumption). In terms of drugs we want to wean people off of addiction. Of course making drug use less dangerous is better than not, but it does nothing to mitigate the issue of having a population addicted to harmful substances.

[tremon]

it does nothing to mitigate the issue of having a population addicted to harmful substances.

The experiences of Portugal and The Netherlands show otherwise:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-a...

https://drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-...