[MichaelGG]

Taxing them really high will increase the likelihood of black market product, which goes against the public health aspect. You don't want a poor person buying junk and getting sick because they couldn't go to the store and buy proper medicine. Just like you wouldn't heavily tax aspirin or ibuprofen.

Basic medical education should be provided as part of national education. Except, properly done, not the factually incorrect, dramatic anti-drug programs they have these days.

There also seem to be a bias against drugs here, which I don't believe is founded in research. After all, we encourage people to get treatment for mental illnesses, the treatments which usually involve becoming addicted to very strong medications like SSRIs. Yet there's no education against being "trapped" onto such things.

[grault]

Makes sense. It could be difficult to raise money for prevention and rehabilitation purposes from the tax approach. Although maybe wealthy recreational users would happily "fund" the education / rehabilitation of the poor. Or maybe I'm just completely wrong here :D

I agree with the other points you've discussed.

[dragonwriter]

> It could be difficult to raise money for prevention and rehabilitation purposes from the tax approach.

Maybe, but it'd be easy diverting money being spent to arrest, prosecute, and imprison people into prevention and treatment (and we're already spending money on prevention and treatment from general state and federal tax money without legalization, so with legalization and no special taxes -- just general income, sales, etc., taxes -- there'd be more money from that, even before you consider repurposing the money currently being spent on the enforcement end of the drug war that would no longer be required.)

OTOH, while there are black markets for alcohol and tobacco -- largely as an effort to evade the special taxes on those products -- the special taxes on them still bring in considerable revenue, and the black market for, e.g., alcohol is far less significant and socially problematic than when alcohol was prohibited. So, its far from clear that special "sin taxes" on legalized drugs would not be useful as a significant additional revenue source for prevention and treatment activities.