[gary_0]

The Drug War is massively, massively expensive. You have to pay for all that policing, plus the massive resources needed to convict and incarcerate people. All that pointless, wasteful cat-and-mouse with addicts and dealers. Not to mention people in prison for drug offenses don't pay taxes, and a criminal record makes it even harder to find productive work.

However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.

[jrumbut]

It's also massively complicated and tied into all kinds of things you might never imagine (the education system, the healthcare system, foreign policy, etc, etc).

Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.

One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.

I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.