The problem I have with legalization is what would be legalized.
Most people don't have a problem with weed, probably hash too. But what about coke, meth, LSD, heroine?
Everyone wants to talk about tax it but thats just silly. How many people have started brewing their own beer/wine in the last 10 years. They jumped on the internet found out how to do and started. Thats exactly what will happen with drugs.
There just isn't a good answer.
As usual there are many sides to the issue. But we started out in the 60's and 70's locking people up for +20 years with a felony record just for possession of any amount of weed. Some of them are still in jail today for nothing more than possession of the remains of a joint some one else left behind.
I read recently that something like 70% of the Texas prison population is there for non-violent offenses, many are in just for drug possession. IIRC we (Texas, USA) have the largest per capita prison population in the world, by several hundred percent.
Some of the FDA approved food additives, drugs and drug additives are far more dangerous than some of the outlawed, Illegal drugs. Check out the connection between mercury in teeth fillings..... mercury in vaccines and Autism for one example:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/22/eveningnews/main625458.shtml
I think I heard recently that autism has been declared an epidemic in the USA.
1 in 150 children have autism in the USA now.
http://www.tacanow.com/autism/latest_autism_statistics.htm
Many FDA approved food colors are crude oil derivatives, that are documented to cause ADD. Several of them were banned a decade ago as human carcinogens in Europe, but we still allow there use in food and drinks like Gatorade in the good ol' USA.
Britain does not have the drug war problems that we have, because they decriminalized these drugs decades ago. They hand out free needles and free Methadone to those that need it to help them kick heroin addictions, and to help slow the spread of AIDs via needle swapping by drug abusers. Also this removes the need for drug addicts to rob and steal to get money to support their expensive drug habits.
Britain has much less of drug problem because they removed the profit motive from drug pushing, and gave users a free drug alternative.
We have illegal drug, drug pushers in part because there is such a huge profit margin in it, and too little legal opportunity for the young, and poor people to advance to the middle class by a means other than selling and pushing highly profitable illegal drugs. By decriminalizing it you kill the large massive profits, and people stop becoming pushers because the profit motive is gone. Then all you need to do is create real job opportunities, and education opportunities.
The drugs and drug users are not the real, major problem right now. Personal profit, greed, government corruption and greed (many state and local governments have been railroading people into the jails with false evidence, just for their own profit, as the DEA pays handsome rewards for drug convictions. But they don't pay for murder or rape convictions. Also note that it is far easier to find, arrest and convict someone for drug possession, than it is to find and convict a murderer. So police in low drug crime areas, plant evidence and force convictions on any easy undesirable local targets they just don't happen to like, just for profit, to get the DEA money, and the fruits of selling seized property (they profit from that too, and it bypasses the courts in violation of the US Constitution, no due process of law).
FDA sets a limit of 1 ppm for the max mercury content in a can of Tuna fish. They randomly sample 20 cans of tuna fish a year. They do not do any enforcement of any kind if they find more than 1 ppm of mercury in canned Tuna, and the Tuna industry is not required to do anything if they find excess mercury in a batch of Tuna fish. It just gets filled away and ignored.
But the EPA limit for total mercury in drinking water is .002 ppm.
20 ppm of total mercury (must all be leachable) in a waste makes it a Hazardous waste! Today, silver colored tooth fillings are still about 50% elemental mercury. Until recently ethyl mercury, Thimerosal, one of the most neurotoxic forms of mercury, was used at concentrations as high as 50,000 ppm in vaccines!
Pure LSD is being tested for prescription medicinal uses! While we throw LSD users in jail. DEA still considers California medicinal marihuana dealers as felons from what I have heard recently, even though California law legalized medicinal uses for relieving chemotherapy symptoms years ago.
Our society and our laws are full of huge contradictions, bias, and inequities that bear much closer examination by the electorate!
If you want to cure the illegal drug problem, make it unprofitable by legalizing it. All criminalizing it ever did was make it more profitable for the good guys and bad guys, and the attorneys, and jail builders.
