Oh Leighton, thank you for AGAIN being willing to speak the hard truth that few are willing or able to state publicly. The rhetoric around addiction has gotten so tangled and weird. We need an organized societal response other than letting people die, often in the streets, at the mercy of their physical dependency. I think a middle path has to be the answer, with treatment, forced when necessary, along with criminalizing the activities of those vile people who profit from the addiction of their customers.
I can hear the chorus now of how societal factors FORCE people to enter the trade cause they have NO CHOICE. Well, lots of us grew up poor as shit in abusive homes with addicted parents and found alternative methods to support ourselves that do not require destroying the lives of others.
Moreover, I think what is the unspoken factor here is the actual cost in dollars it will take to provide treatment, housing, medical care, food, etc., for those hopelessly addicted because it will all have to be built from the ground up. How can we provide addiction treatment when there are not enough professionals or lay people trained to do this? And nowhere to house people, particularly in psychiatric or treatment beds? These obstacles are insurmountable without massive public investment. Those downtown flophouses were better than nothing! And now we can long for the good old days when NORML was radical stuff.
You're definitely one of THE best substack writers I've discovered this year. Thank you for writing on issues that matter and for defending your argument so eloquently.
Agree with you completely. There are no quick fixes for anything. It’s just a bandaid on a severe wound that cannot heal without additional help. Unfortunately, just as with hackers with technology, illegal drug pushers, gun runners, etc. seem to always find a way to beat the system. I don’t know the answer. We used to think family, faith, education but those 3 things are in the midst of being lost. We as a country seem to be on the defense more than the offense. We need to start somewhere and if that fails try something different. We will never win this battle against drug addiction if we play defense. We have to get out front and lead with a great offense. If the offensive strategy doesn’t work, tweak it until we find one that does work.
Alcohol is the first drug for many of us. We have alcoholics. We have drug abusers. We have a society that causes much stress & anxiety. The pace of life gets faster and faster. There is a reason why people try to escape thru alcohol and/or drugs. I don’t believe life is suppose to be this difficult. How did it get this way without anyone paying attention???
Drugs like other inanimate objects or substances, are neither good nor evil. The freedom to choose is at the heart of the American experience. The resources freed up by decriminalization could be used to help those in need, and incarcerate those committing real crimes against others.
Perhaps the funniest aspect of this whole story is how the demonization of good old-fashioned drugs like aspirin fueled the extremely lucrative search for something "better."
A few years ago I had one of those slapstick comedy accidents in my own bathroom that left me with five fractured bones in my foot, a sprained ankle and a split-open forehead. After a night in a bed in the ER's bay for not-quite-admitted patients, I was discharged with a prescription for Tramadol, which is described as the "mildest" of the synthetic opioids and perhaps not even really classified as one.
I don't trust such things, and took it only a couple of times, at night, to deal with the worst of the pain, but it did nothing for the inflammation developing in the "good" leg because of the inbalance of my gait caused by one of those dinosaur boots.
So I tried using aspirin, 325 mgs., 3 tablets which is the maximum-at-one-time dose, and it was the far better remedy. Stuff is pretty cheap, though. Doesn't do all that much for a company's bottom line.
(And I can assure you that when the pain was bad, in that first week, it was awful. Brought me to tears and I'm fairly tough about physical pain.)
I ain't no physician but I suspect opioids are only necessary for advanced cancer or horrific wounds and burns. Please refute me if I'm wrong.
You correctly claim, legalizing weed drove many of the illicit suppliers out of business. That is exactly what legalization does, every time - alcohol prohibition is another example. To then make an argument legalizing other (presently illegal) drugs will have manufacturers increasing production to stay afloat, seems disingenuous. Increased Demand spurs increased production, not the other way around - the only exception to this is a market with a collapsing price - which is not possible in any tightly regulated government controlled market…..The fact the illegal drug industry is a network of small producers has nothing to do with market forces, but everything to do with the big cartels having law enforcement breathing down their neck. Make the drugs legal, and BOTH the cartels & small producers will disappear, just like with weed & alcohol….. To state the obvious, the War on Drugs has been an unparalleled disaster in terms of both cost AND lives. Yet, the legalization and regulation of alcohol & weed has been rather seamless. With facts like those, legalization seems like a no-brainer.
How did the Prohibition against Alcohol work out? How about marijuana?
Prohibition has been proven wrong and wrong again and is proving wrong in this case as well. If addicts could buy cheap, pharmaceutical quality drugs, overdoses would decline to almost zero, as they did in Amsterdam when legal heroin was given to addicts.
The vast public resources spent on arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning drug users should be instead focused on building rehab, supportive housing, mental health treatment and other services dedicated to treating those who are addicted.
You provide evidence for the statement that since fentanyl distribution is decentralized, it is less likely to be broken up by legal distribution networks. I will accept your claim but I still believe that if relatively cheap, high quality drugs were available at Walgreens, almost all users would prefer that. Would there be an increase in drug use? No doubt, but the slight to moderate increase in use would be less bad for society than the current conditions, with 100,000 overdose deaths a year, hundreds of thousands incarcerated and with permanent criminal records, and all the property crime associated with the funding of addicts habits, most of whom are not employed and steal to support their habits.
I quote extensively here from The Economist article "Joe Biden is too timid. It is time to legalize cocaine"
" The real answer is full legalisation, allowing non-criminals to supply a strictly regulated, highly taxed product, just as whisky- and cigarette-makers do. (Advertising it should be banned.)"
"Legal cocaine would be less dangerous, since legitimate producers would not adulterate it with other white powders and dosage would be clearly labelled, as it is on whisky bottles. Cocaine-related deaths have risen fivefold in America since 2010, mostly because gangs are cutting it with fentanyl, a cheaper and more lethal drug."
"In private, many officials understand that prohibition is not working any better than it did in Al Capone’s day. Just now full legalisation seems politically impossible: few politicians want to be called “soft on drugs”. But proponents must keep pressing their case. The benefits—safer cocaine, safer streets and greater political stability in the Americas—far outweigh the costs."
Most of these arguments apply to fentanyl as well. But we already legalized marijuana, let's do cocaine next and see how that goes. Some cities are already legalizing psychedelics, which have very little addiction potential. Maybe someday we will have learned enough to make the next obvious step and legalize opiods. It is impossible politically today, but as people have seen the foolishness of marijuana prohibition, which ruined millions of lives due to their incarceration, they are willing to consider more sane criminal justice policies around drug use in general.
I don't see anything about the 2 main issues of the war on drugs:
1- a lot of deaths and ruined lives are in the distribution side of drugs, not the user side. Legalization kills or significantly hampers drug cartels, diminishes intra-dealers violence and collateral damage, and gives a chance to rehab low-level employees.
2- not criminalizing use gives us a chance to help users instead of sending them to jail and its death spiral.
I agree the issue is fraught with ethical issues. How did it go in countries that tried it ?
Also, why drugs but not tobacco, alcohol, and firearms ?
Maybe my judgment here is affected by me being a user of legal weed since it became legal here, but: I've never wanted to try meth, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, if ever.
So I'm not sure how the same people who used to grow weed in Mexico switching to meth because weed is becoming legal in more and more places actually creates more meth addicts; people are either interested in your product, or they aren't, and it doesn't matter how plentiful it is, right?
Lots of people look at meth and, like me, they say "Nope, not interested, I'd like all my teeth to stay in my mouth, thank you very much." And they go with weed or something else less risky. If there were some kind of big marketing campaign designed to make meth look like a good thing, then maybe some of us would have our minds changed since advertisers are good at making people want things they don't need and/or aren't good for them. But with meth still being illegal, there is of course no such campaign.
Now, would legalizing literally everything, including meth, and making the drug acceptable enough to be advertised that way create more addicts? My guess is that it would, meaning that the main point you're making--that we should *not* legalize literally everything--could very well be true. But I'm not disagreeing with you on that. I'm disagreeing that there's any case to be made re. legal cannabis worsening the addiction crisis.
You seem to assume here that the only reason to argue for the legalization of drugs is in order to somehow "solve" the addiction crisis. In fact, however, there are a number of reasons to advocate legalization (and the loosening of regulations on the recreational use of prescription drugs) even if it has no effect on addiction numbers or even increase them:
1. Eliminating the illicit drug trade with its concomitant violence. That violence is not limited to the US. In Mexico alone, it has been estimated that 350,000–400,000 have been killed due to organized crime-related violence between 2006–2021.
2. Improving the safety and purity of drugs and reducing contaminants and overdoses. Street drugs are often highly contaminated with dangerous substances; people cooking meth in their houses aren't too worried about the health of their clients. Think about alcohol prohibition--people used to go blind from drinking unregulated, dangerous moonshine. You don't see too many blind drinkers anymore, and the reason is because the drug is now legalized and regulated. The lack of regulation also contributes to overdoses, because a street user can never be sure of whether the dose they're taking is as strong as what they're used to taking. If the dose they have is stronger than their usual, this can lead to inadvertant overdose. Drugs' illegality also contributes to overdoses by preventing dissemination of instructions as to how to use the drug properly for recreational purposes. Even legal but highly regulated drugs that are used illicitly don't have instructions as to proper and safe recreational doses, leaving people to go it alone and, all too often, to overdose.
3. Incarceration. While you down play this aspect of the drug war, huge numbers of people are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. I don't see how this would change in a world where you kept drugs illegal. Even if street users were given lenient sentences, sellers rarely are, and as you mention, drug selling has become more of a "small business," meaning more people could be incarcerated for distribution.
4. Cost. The drug war is extremely expensive, and on top of that, we miss out on the revenue from taxing illegal drugs. Keeping drugs illegal also raises their price on the black market, forcing addicts to spend more to get their fix, which leads to property crime and destroyed lives. If drugs were cheaper as a result of legalization, more people could have a normal life while being addicted to drugs.
5. Prohibition hasn't worked to reduce use. As you yourself indicate, addiction is a huge problem right now *despite* drugs being illegal or highly regulated. Why do you think things will change by doing more of the same? If drug legalization has zero effect on addiction, or even increases it slightly, the other benefits which I've laid out here more than make up for it.
6. Personal freedom and bodily autonomy. Finally, why should the government be able to tell someone what they can cannot put into their own body (assuming informed consent about the risks of consumption)? Fundamentally, this is a choice it should be up to an individual to make. Yes, some people do become addicts, and that is a shame. Your position is fundamentally patronizing and doesn't respect people's personal autonomy to make choices about their lives. People also become alcoholics, but we nonetheless give people the right to choose whether to put alcohol into their bodies. Alcohol is an addictive substance which claims thousands every year to addiction. Do you want to bring back alcohol prohibition? If not, how can you justify keeping alcohol legal but other recreational drugs illegal? Or what about cigarettes, which kill tens of thousands of people a year? Yes, addiction is a problem, and we should make every effort to help those addicts who want help. But there is a fundamental element of personal choice here which needs to be respected.
The clear, immediate action required is to decriminalize drug possession.
I agree that legalization is a very complicated solution that comes with it's own evils versus full legalization. So I don't understand why we do not simply decriminalize possession. This stops the war on drugs negative effects in terms of American incarceration rates, unfair drug sentences, and puts a plug on the homelessness/prison recidivism pipeline for drug offences. This immediately frees up law enforcement funding to focus on illegal drug manufacturing and distribution which is what we should be focusing on anyways. Sure, there will still be cartel and drug crime, but at least we will immediately stop perpetuating a clearly broken system without taking too early of a jump on legalization.
I see no reason why decriminalization would be a bad alternative. It would allow us time to lift the ban on studying the affects of drugs in academia (one of the worst outcomes of the war on drugs) and would not upset the status quo to the point that legalization would. It is a concrete action that would generate a lot of positive gain and would allow us time to develop a thoughtful drug policy approach based off scientific studies and rehabilitation best practices to develop.
There are big differences between marijuana (although that term is now considered "racist) and "hard drugs."
Don't over-buy the blame laid at the Sacklers' feet for simply having marketed the same drug that had been prescribed for 40 years in America (Oxycodone). The doses were MUCH higher with Oxycontin (as high as 160 mg. vs. the usual 5 mg dose), but the reality is that the vast majority of legitimate pain patients, who follow doctors instructions, DO NOT become addicted. If you look at drug overdose numbers over the 25 years since Oxycontin's introduction, they peaked in 2011 for pharmaceuticals, and have been dropping steadily ever since.
At the same time illegally produced fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine are skyrocketing.
But many reporters conflate overall opioid deaths and prescription opioid deaths.
Writing from Oregon, where I was one of very few public opponents of Ballot Measure 110, which in 2020 virtually legalized all drugs. Technically it created a new "self category" of infraction, like a parking ticket, but even less with the courts' (I was a judge for about a year after 35 years as a prosecutor) instruction to max the fines at $25 (even on repeat offenses).
So now there is absolutely NO disincentive to use the most destructive drugs. Overdose rates, OD deaths, and unmet treatment is getting much worse, mostly in the dark,
So, YES, Leighton is right, "Legalizing Drugs is a Terrible Idea."
I'm ambivalent on this subject of drug legalization. I just know the situation feels like it's gone beyond what we can rectify, though we need to try, rather than letting politicians use it as a talking point and fundraising gimmick. But I always find you to be very thoughtful and you make some good points, such as legalizing marijuana actually making the addiction crisis surrounding other drugs worse. I haven't actually heard anyone else suggest that, but it makes a certain amount of tragic sense.
Oh Leighton, thank you for AGAIN being willing to speak the hard truth that few are willing or able to state publicly. The rhetoric around addiction has gotten so tangled and weird. We need an organized societal response other than letting people die, often in the streets, at the mercy of their physical dependency. I think a middle path has to be the answer, with treatment, forced when necessary, along with criminalizing the activities of those vile people who profit from the addiction of their customers.
I can hear the chorus now of how societal factors FORCE people to enter the trade cause they have NO CHOICE. Well, lots of us grew up poor as shit in abusive homes with addicted parents and found alternative methods to support ourselves that do not require destroying the lives of others.
Moreover, I think what is the unspoken factor here is the actual cost in dollars it will take to provide treatment, housing, medical care, food, etc., for those hopelessly addicted because it will all have to be built from the ground up. How can we provide addiction treatment when there are not enough professionals or lay people trained to do this? And nowhere to house people, particularly in psychiatric or treatment beds? These obstacles are insurmountable without massive public investment. Those downtown flophouses were better than nothing! And now we can long for the good old days when NORML was radical stuff.
You're definitely one of THE best substack writers I've discovered this year. Thank you for writing on issues that matter and for defending your argument so eloquently.
Agree with you completely. There are no quick fixes for anything. It’s just a bandaid on a severe wound that cannot heal without additional help. Unfortunately, just as with hackers with technology, illegal drug pushers, gun runners, etc. seem to always find a way to beat the system. I don’t know the answer. We used to think family, faith, education but those 3 things are in the midst of being lost. We as a country seem to be on the defense more than the offense. We need to start somewhere and if that fails try something different. We will never win this battle against drug addiction if we play defense. We have to get out front and lead with a great offense. If the offensive strategy doesn’t work, tweak it until we find one that does work.
Alcohol is the first drug for many of us. We have alcoholics. We have drug abusers. We have a society that causes much stress & anxiety. The pace of life gets faster and faster. There is a reason why people try to escape thru alcohol and/or drugs. I don’t believe life is suppose to be this difficult. How did it get this way without anyone paying attention???
Drugs like other inanimate objects or substances, are neither good nor evil. The freedom to choose is at the heart of the American experience. The resources freed up by decriminalization could be used to help those in need, and incarcerate those committing real crimes against others.
Perhaps the funniest aspect of this whole story is how the demonization of good old-fashioned drugs like aspirin fueled the extremely lucrative search for something "better."
A few years ago I had one of those slapstick comedy accidents in my own bathroom that left me with five fractured bones in my foot, a sprained ankle and a split-open forehead. After a night in a bed in the ER's bay for not-quite-admitted patients, I was discharged with a prescription for Tramadol, which is described as the "mildest" of the synthetic opioids and perhaps not even really classified as one.
I don't trust such things, and took it only a couple of times, at night, to deal with the worst of the pain, but it did nothing for the inflammation developing in the "good" leg because of the inbalance of my gait caused by one of those dinosaur boots.
So I tried using aspirin, 325 mgs., 3 tablets which is the maximum-at-one-time dose, and it was the far better remedy. Stuff is pretty cheap, though. Doesn't do all that much for a company's bottom line.
(And I can assure you that when the pain was bad, in that first week, it was awful. Brought me to tears and I'm fairly tough about physical pain.)
I ain't no physician but I suspect opioids are only necessary for advanced cancer or horrific wounds and burns. Please refute me if I'm wrong.
You correctly claim, legalizing weed drove many of the illicit suppliers out of business. That is exactly what legalization does, every time - alcohol prohibition is another example. To then make an argument legalizing other (presently illegal) drugs will have manufacturers increasing production to stay afloat, seems disingenuous. Increased Demand spurs increased production, not the other way around - the only exception to this is a market with a collapsing price - which is not possible in any tightly regulated government controlled market…..The fact the illegal drug industry is a network of small producers has nothing to do with market forces, but everything to do with the big cartels having law enforcement breathing down their neck. Make the drugs legal, and BOTH the cartels & small producers will disappear, just like with weed & alcohol….. To state the obvious, the War on Drugs has been an unparalleled disaster in terms of both cost AND lives. Yet, the legalization and regulation of alcohol & weed has been rather seamless. With facts like those, legalization seems like a no-brainer.
How did the Prohibition against Alcohol work out? How about marijuana?
Prohibition has been proven wrong and wrong again and is proving wrong in this case as well. If addicts could buy cheap, pharmaceutical quality drugs, overdoses would decline to almost zero, as they did in Amsterdam when legal heroin was given to addicts.
The vast public resources spent on arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning drug users should be instead focused on building rehab, supportive housing, mental health treatment and other services dedicated to treating those who are addicted.
You provide evidence for the statement that since fentanyl distribution is decentralized, it is less likely to be broken up by legal distribution networks. I will accept your claim but I still believe that if relatively cheap, high quality drugs were available at Walgreens, almost all users would prefer that. Would there be an increase in drug use? No doubt, but the slight to moderate increase in use would be less bad for society than the current conditions, with 100,000 overdose deaths a year, hundreds of thousands incarcerated and with permanent criminal records, and all the property crime associated with the funding of addicts habits, most of whom are not employed and steal to support their habits.
I quote extensively here from The Economist article "Joe Biden is too timid. It is time to legalize cocaine"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/12/joe-biden-is-too-timid-it-is-time-to-legalise-cocaine
" The real answer is full legalisation, allowing non-criminals to supply a strictly regulated, highly taxed product, just as whisky- and cigarette-makers do. (Advertising it should be banned.)"
"Legal cocaine would be less dangerous, since legitimate producers would not adulterate it with other white powders and dosage would be clearly labelled, as it is on whisky bottles. Cocaine-related deaths have risen fivefold in America since 2010, mostly because gangs are cutting it with fentanyl, a cheaper and more lethal drug."
"In private, many officials understand that prohibition is not working any better than it did in Al Capone’s day. Just now full legalisation seems politically impossible: few politicians want to be called “soft on drugs”. But proponents must keep pressing their case. The benefits—safer cocaine, safer streets and greater political stability in the Americas—far outweigh the costs."
Most of these arguments apply to fentanyl as well. But we already legalized marijuana, let's do cocaine next and see how that goes. Some cities are already legalizing psychedelics, which have very little addiction potential. Maybe someday we will have learned enough to make the next obvious step and legalize opiods. It is impossible politically today, but as people have seen the foolishness of marijuana prohibition, which ruined millions of lives due to their incarceration, they are willing to consider more sane criminal justice policies around drug use in general.
I don't see anything about the 2 main issues of the war on drugs:
1- a lot of deaths and ruined lives are in the distribution side of drugs, not the user side. Legalization kills or significantly hampers drug cartels, diminishes intra-dealers violence and collateral damage, and gives a chance to rehab low-level employees.
2- not criminalizing use gives us a chance to help users instead of sending them to jail and its death spiral.
I agree the issue is fraught with ethical issues. How did it go in countries that tried it ?
Also, why drugs but not tobacco, alcohol, and firearms ?
"The most important part of any solution, in my opinion, is treatment and recovery"
But where do you find the money to really do so ? By legalizing.
Maybe my judgment here is affected by me being a user of legal weed since it became legal here, but: I've never wanted to try meth, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, if ever.
So I'm not sure how the same people who used to grow weed in Mexico switching to meth because weed is becoming legal in more and more places actually creates more meth addicts; people are either interested in your product, or they aren't, and it doesn't matter how plentiful it is, right?
Lots of people look at meth and, like me, they say "Nope, not interested, I'd like all my teeth to stay in my mouth, thank you very much." And they go with weed or something else less risky. If there were some kind of big marketing campaign designed to make meth look like a good thing, then maybe some of us would have our minds changed since advertisers are good at making people want things they don't need and/or aren't good for them. But with meth still being illegal, there is of course no such campaign.
Now, would legalizing literally everything, including meth, and making the drug acceptable enough to be advertised that way create more addicts? My guess is that it would, meaning that the main point you're making--that we should *not* legalize literally everything--could very well be true. But I'm not disagreeing with you on that. I'm disagreeing that there's any case to be made re. legal cannabis worsening the addiction crisis.
You seem to assume here that the only reason to argue for the legalization of drugs is in order to somehow "solve" the addiction crisis. In fact, however, there are a number of reasons to advocate legalization (and the loosening of regulations on the recreational use of prescription drugs) even if it has no effect on addiction numbers or even increase them:
1. Eliminating the illicit drug trade with its concomitant violence. That violence is not limited to the US. In Mexico alone, it has been estimated that 350,000–400,000 have been killed due to organized crime-related violence between 2006–2021.
2. Improving the safety and purity of drugs and reducing contaminants and overdoses. Street drugs are often highly contaminated with dangerous substances; people cooking meth in their houses aren't too worried about the health of their clients. Think about alcohol prohibition--people used to go blind from drinking unregulated, dangerous moonshine. You don't see too many blind drinkers anymore, and the reason is because the drug is now legalized and regulated. The lack of regulation also contributes to overdoses, because a street user can never be sure of whether the dose they're taking is as strong as what they're used to taking. If the dose they have is stronger than their usual, this can lead to inadvertant overdose. Drugs' illegality also contributes to overdoses by preventing dissemination of instructions as to how to use the drug properly for recreational purposes. Even legal but highly regulated drugs that are used illicitly don't have instructions as to proper and safe recreational doses, leaving people to go it alone and, all too often, to overdose.
3. Incarceration. While you down play this aspect of the drug war, huge numbers of people are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. I don't see how this would change in a world where you kept drugs illegal. Even if street users were given lenient sentences, sellers rarely are, and as you mention, drug selling has become more of a "small business," meaning more people could be incarcerated for distribution.
4. Cost. The drug war is extremely expensive, and on top of that, we miss out on the revenue from taxing illegal drugs. Keeping drugs illegal also raises their price on the black market, forcing addicts to spend more to get their fix, which leads to property crime and destroyed lives. If drugs were cheaper as a result of legalization, more people could have a normal life while being addicted to drugs.
5. Prohibition hasn't worked to reduce use. As you yourself indicate, addiction is a huge problem right now *despite* drugs being illegal or highly regulated. Why do you think things will change by doing more of the same? If drug legalization has zero effect on addiction, or even increases it slightly, the other benefits which I've laid out here more than make up for it.
6. Personal freedom and bodily autonomy. Finally, why should the government be able to tell someone what they can cannot put into their own body (assuming informed consent about the risks of consumption)? Fundamentally, this is a choice it should be up to an individual to make. Yes, some people do become addicts, and that is a shame. Your position is fundamentally patronizing and doesn't respect people's personal autonomy to make choices about their lives. People also become alcoholics, but we nonetheless give people the right to choose whether to put alcohol into their bodies. Alcohol is an addictive substance which claims thousands every year to addiction. Do you want to bring back alcohol prohibition? If not, how can you justify keeping alcohol legal but other recreational drugs illegal? Or what about cigarettes, which kill tens of thousands of people a year? Yes, addiction is a problem, and we should make every effort to help those addicts who want help. But there is a fundamental element of personal choice here which needs to be respected.
The clear, immediate action required is to decriminalize drug possession.
I agree that legalization is a very complicated solution that comes with it's own evils versus full legalization. So I don't understand why we do not simply decriminalize possession. This stops the war on drugs negative effects in terms of American incarceration rates, unfair drug sentences, and puts a plug on the homelessness/prison recidivism pipeline for drug offences. This immediately frees up law enforcement funding to focus on illegal drug manufacturing and distribution which is what we should be focusing on anyways. Sure, there will still be cartel and drug crime, but at least we will immediately stop perpetuating a clearly broken system without taking too early of a jump on legalization.
I see no reason why decriminalization would be a bad alternative. It would allow us time to lift the ban on studying the affects of drugs in academia (one of the worst outcomes of the war on drugs) and would not upset the status quo to the point that legalization would. It is a concrete action that would generate a lot of positive gain and would allow us time to develop a thoughtful drug policy approach based off scientific studies and rehabilitation best practices to develop.
"The most important part of any solution, in my opinion, is treatment and recovery"
But where do you find the money to really do so ? By legalizing.
There are big differences between marijuana (although that term is now considered "racist) and "hard drugs."
Don't over-buy the blame laid at the Sacklers' feet for simply having marketed the same drug that had been prescribed for 40 years in America (Oxycodone). The doses were MUCH higher with Oxycontin (as high as 160 mg. vs. the usual 5 mg dose), but the reality is that the vast majority of legitimate pain patients, who follow doctors instructions, DO NOT become addicted. If you look at drug overdose numbers over the 25 years since Oxycontin's introduction, they peaked in 2011 for pharmaceuticals, and have been dropping steadily ever since.
At the same time illegally produced fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine are skyrocketing.
But many reporters conflate overall opioid deaths and prescription opioid deaths.
Writing from Oregon, where I was one of very few public opponents of Ballot Measure 110, which in 2020 virtually legalized all drugs. Technically it created a new "self category" of infraction, like a parking ticket, but even less with the courts' (I was a judge for about a year after 35 years as a prosecutor) instruction to max the fines at $25 (even on repeat offenses).
So now there is absolutely NO disincentive to use the most destructive drugs. Overdose rates, OD deaths, and unmet treatment is getting much worse, mostly in the dark,
So, YES, Leighton is right, "Legalizing Drugs is a Terrible Idea."
I'm ambivalent on this subject of drug legalization. I just know the situation feels like it's gone beyond what we can rectify, though we need to try, rather than letting politicians use it as a talking point and fundraising gimmick. But I always find you to be very thoughtful and you make some good points, such as legalizing marijuana actually making the addiction crisis surrounding other drugs worse. I haven't actually heard anyone else suggest that, but it makes a certain amount of tragic sense.
I would suggest reading this https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2020/march/20200303_drugs . Decriminalisation seems to be working in practice compared to what you say.