That may be true. I probably should have said that drugs intrinsically are not all that bad, and societies treatment of them in a lot of ways makes them worse than they really are. I will readily admit that hard drugs are pretty unequivocally a societal bad. But very rarely do you hear a discussion of whether the negative side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse than the negative side effects of the drugs themselves. And at least to me, it seems like the side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse.
It doesn't much matter when it comes about, the point is we need to try to get to that point. Whether we attempt to get there or not, the black market for drugs persists, and people commit crimes, murder and get murdered over the drug trade. This will happen whether we attempt to legalize and clean up the supply chain or not. The more harshly and violently we fight the cartels, the more violent and efficient we force them to be. Organized crime should always be criminalized, investigated, and punished. But unless we accept that the reason that organized crime exists in the first place is that there is a market for substances (and in a broader sense beyond the drug trade, products and services in general) without a legal way of obtaining them, we will continue to look at the problem incorrectly. In an ideal world, hard drugs would be illegal and nobody would use them. That's not how the world works, and we do not live in an ideal world. Time to deal with it.
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