User:Truemathematics/sandbox

Legalizing drug use means kids will have less access to them, not more.
When polled, high school students say they have more access to weed, hard drugs, and black market prescriptions like Adderall, than they do to alcohol and cigarettes. Drug dealers don't care if they sell to kids or not, and so kids have more easy access to drugs when they're illegal than if they were legal and controlled by government. With legalization, there will be more control over the process and the process will be more open.

Legalizing drug use means addicts will have more options in terms of safe access and recovery.
Addicts live isolated in fear right now due to the current perceptions of the law and interactions with police and the like. No addict is willing to ever even start to approach being open about their use and so their addiction gets worse than if they had simply been allowed to exist in the light of day as a regular person. The addition is hidden away with a much greater effort than it would be if drugs were legalized. This is a bad thing and prevents them from getting help. There's also the matter of the money spent on jailing, enforcing drug laws, and fighting everything with drug laws can instead be used more properly to fight addiction and treat addicts in a safe environment.

Legalizing drug use means that there will be less unpleasant social element (junkies shooting up in the street and the like), not more.
These people will always exist, but the size and seriousness of a drug under-culture can be controlled. European countries are experimenting with safe areas where drug users shoot up in a controlled environment and offer needle exchange and rehab options also within the same area. A junkie is much more likely to seek help if they are not threatened with prison.

Legalizing drug use means that crime will go down, not up.
We re-introduce rule of law. All the territory battles, the drug murders, the thefts, etc all fall apart under the light of legalization. Right now, if one drug gang enters into a trade war with another, neither side has any option other than violence. There's no police to help, there's no courts, you live in true social anarchy. There's no zoning for sales, no protections or regulations for anyone from distributors to dealers to users. Without these basic social constructs to enact rule of law, you get what we see today: the most violent and ruthless and vile are the biggest dogs and they spread social decay. If drugs were legalized, then all of these people were re-introduced into society and the rule of law. Without rule of law, we all fall apart to anarchy and violence. With rule of law in place, we would see a very fast drop in the violence.

Legalizing means gangs have less power, not more.
Legalizing it means that those who play with the law stand to benefit much more than those who don't. It gives motive to not be violent and settle matters in a court of law. It would take money away from the cartels and gangs unless they legitimized and became businesses and corporations. The most important part is stopping the violence and introducing standards and protocol and regulations that would benefit everyone and not simply leave so many out in the cold. Would gangs have less power with legalized drugs? Absolutely. They wouldn't be able to compete with the people who do legitimate business. You don't see gangs selling beer and trying to harass local breweries and if you legalized drugs you also wouldn't see it for those either. Not to mention you'd starve their money supply because legalization would deflate the profits so rapidly that only those who actually had an interest and passion would enter those realms of business.

Legalizing drugs would make many things better.
Would it solve all of our problems? I seriously doubt that. There's still the mental illness issue that is beneath the drug use and that's something that requires long term treatment and care. There's still poverty which may or may not get worse. There's still that people will continue to use drugs and overdose and die. But all of these problems can at least be made much less severe if drugs were legalized.