[ledge]

Whatever girvo did, he did while heroin was illegal. So how does what you said make any sense?

Prohibiting substances will never stop users from seeking them out. It will however make their use less safe (contamination, mislabeling, inconsistent purity, dirty needles, hesitance to seek medical attention for fear of prosecution, lack of available research on currently illegal substances hindering treatment of overdoses, etc.) and create a black market around the distribution of those substances (leading to violent crime, overflowing prisons, traumatized neighborhoods and broken families, etc.).

If fact, all of our available evidence from countries that have decriminalized hard drugs points to a reduction in abuse. That's just intuitive to me... wouldn't you be more likely to relapse if you were a felon unable to find gainful employment? Or a mother whose son just got shot for pushing crack on the corner? The repercussions of breaking up families, criminalizing and incarcerating our most vulnerable members of society, and exacerbating violence in our poorest communities cannot be understated. The drug war has caused a whole plague of societal ills, one of which ironically appears to be higher rates of drug abuse.