Why would all drugs be legalised? [closed]

Question

In my world, there is a species from the Homo genus named Homo magicus. They are my wizards (or sorcerers, if you want).

Traditionally, magical humans/wizards/sorcerers are an EXTREMELY religious race: they originally lived in a polytheistic theocracy with a caste system à la Indian Empire with the caste of priests and priestesses on the top of everyone else.

In their religion, prophecies are said to come from intoxicating themselves.

In the most populated country mostly populated by magical humans, ALL drugs are legalised, both for therapeutic use, and for recreative use. Yes, that includes ethanol, nicotine, THC, CBD, LSD, magic mushrooms, etc.

However, there are still some strict rules. For example:

1. Nicotine is therapeutically legalised in forms of pills, legalised for recreative use in forms meant for being smoked, vaped, and chewed, and in both cases, in forms of gums.
2. CBD and THC are therapeutically legalised in any form (edibles, oils, etc.), but they are only legalised for recreative use in forms meant for being smoked, vaped, and chewed.
3. The legal age for buying, consuming, and possessing recreative drugs is 50 years old (magical humans age two times slower than anatomically modern humans, so the homologous age is 25 years old), but, there is no age restriction for buying, consuming, and possessing medically-prescribed drugs.

So, I wonder why would all drugs be legalised? What I mean is most countries today are not against the so-called "War on Drugs" that started in the United States of America because of a democratically elected tyrant, President Richard Nixon.

Answer 1

Just go to Portugal, who decriminalized all drugs

Even in tough-on-crime America weed is legal in several states, and Oregon legalized magic mushrooms.

How do the state politicians general sell these changes?

1. Health benefits for patients with AIDS, cancer, and seizures. Just find a doctor to say it'll help you.

2. Tax it and give money for schools and scholarships. You don't want to take money from children do you?

On the other end of the spectrum, legalization advocates argue drug laws are unfair.

1. Putting people in prison isn't free, and generally doesn't do anything to fix their drug problem. Drug courts were created in part to remedy this within the current legal framework.

2. The opioid crisis still regularly makes news in the U.S. EMTs are seen as heros. Users are seen as victims.

3. Many people believe drug laws are inherently racist, making them, and the cops that enforce them unpopular.

Answer 2

Legalizing all drugs isn't as much of a stretch as you might think. At this point in world history, drugs are illegalized under the presumption that the only way to stop people from doing drugs is to punish them for it.

If you compare the societal cost of enforcement to the societal cost of the actual use of the drugs, you find that enforcement usually costs us far more than the drugs. For instance, incarceration destroys more life than addiction does, even if you don't include the downstream effects of children who are raised without parents. Deaths due to overdoses can be compared to deaths that occur in turf wars and enforcement botches.

Once you shift to a management model, you can then derive benefits from harm-based taxation. For instance, you tax nicotine to pay for the cancer it causes. Since we currently tax as a punishment, the tax money does not go to address the harm, so it's mostly perceived as a sin tax that contributes to corruption and pork barrel politics.

In order to make the transition, you would probably need to induce a societal trauma around the punishment culture. We already have numerous societal traumas around racism, and that's what it takes to produce major shifts in mental model.

An example of this form of trauma is US prohibition on alcohol, 1920 - 1933. This raised crime to the point that we realized that the prohibition was causing more damage than the alcohol itself. We've had similar issues with marijuana and cocaine, and the first is showing results, whereas the cocaine trauma has been blamed on the drug users and dealers.

Answer 3

To eliminate organized crime

Criminal organizations prey on society, inflict violence on innocent people, and work to undermine and corrupt government and other organizations. The world would be a better place if organized crime were eliminated. But how?

When the legal economy has been entirely captured by a handful of sociopathic wealth-hoarders who are determined to ensure that all present and future revenue streams are theirs and theirs alone, legal opportunities are extremely hard to come by. For very many people, it is impossible to achieve a reasonable standard of living by legal effort.

But these people do not simply fold their cards, curl up in a ball, and wait to die (much as some super-wealthy folks fervently hope). Instead, many of them join criminal gangs. (Here, "gangs" can mean anything from the cosa nostra to yon Bloods, Crips, etc.)

People join gangs because gangs provide opportunities in life. Gangs of all stripes provide alternatives that come with decent pay, a believable track of advancement, even the possibility of some day becoming a "franchisee," all things which the legal economy increasingly fails to offer credibly.

All these benefits are made possible by having a revenue stream. Without significant amounts of revenue, criminal gangs would be unable to "attract and retain talent," amass quality weapons (or any other assets to speak of), or entice police and government officials into corrupt bargains.

Many criminal organizations are funded primarily by black-market drug sales.^{[citation needed]} It's their bread-and-butter. Thus, the single-best way to weaken almost all kinds of organized crime would be to eliminate the black market for drugs.

There are precisely two ways to eliminate the black market for drugs:

• Create a new type of human who does not desire anything which is forbidden by law. A market cannot exist where there is no demand. You too can win the "war on drugs" if you are willing to tamper in God's domain!
• Change the laws so that the drug economy is not a "black" economy. Given the choice, people will buy their drugs from a safe, friendly business instead of the sketchy fools they have to deal with in a black market situation.

A country that criminalizes drugs, but whose population still desires them, will necessarily always have some organized crime that provides the drugs -- criminals who have organized around the goal of supplying illegal drugs to the otherwise law-abiding residents who wish to pay for them.

Where there is a sea, there are pirates.

-- ancient Greek proverb

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^{Yes, organized crime has other profit centers, notably including human trafficking and arms dealing, and no good, healthy society can permit slavery or unchecked proliferation of murder tools. Those problems would be easier to tackle if society didn't waste an overwhelming amount of its resources trying in vain to combat drugs. Likely, many gangs that engage in those practices would be unable to survive without the reliable revenue of the black market drug trade.}