Well now that you know more about it you can stop feeling like you’re beating your face against a brick wall.

Did you just make an argument to argue with yourself?

^^^^ If you're talking to me then the answer is no.

The prohibition Advocates say that drugs harm people so they should be illegal. My response to this is that they are already illegal and they're still harmful. The illegality also has spin-off effects on other aspects of society that I am adamantly opposed to.

The drug prohibition advocates say that drugs cause crime and while that is somewhat true the major driving factor of criminality that comes with drug use is the extremely high cost of the drugs and that cost is driven by prohibition. There is absolutely no correlation whatsoever to the production cost of illegal drugs and the end cost to the consumer. The high cost of illegal drugs pays for the risk associated with bringing those drugs to the market. If Dupont can make gunpowder that sells for $30 per pound retail then they could also manufacture methamphetamines for probably the same cost. What makes them expensive is that they are illegal.

The prohibition Advocates say that they don't want to have to be responsible financially for people that ruin themselves with drugs and my reply is that we already are spending that much money if not more in an effort to restrict drugs and to imprison people that ignore the drug laws.

My view is purely based on an economic one and a liberty one. I do not believe it is the place of government to tell adults what they cannot and can choose to consume even if it is extremely harmful to consume that product. I also know with an absolute certainty that as long as there is a very very very very significant profit motive to supply illicit drugs to Consumers then there will always be illicit drugs available to Consumers no matter what civil rights get destroyed in the process of law enforcement trying to stop that trade in illicit drugs. We have been fighting a war on drugs since the summer of 1971 and not a darn thing has changed. Drugs can be had by anyone who wants them anywhere in the United States with zero regulation or oversight.

So no laws, simply because people break them.

No, not that at all. There should be no laws that are ineffective, doubly so when the spin-offs from those laws cause egregious harm to people that aren't committing crimes.

When I was a little kid the thought of the police tearing apart someone's car on the side of the road to search for Contraband was absolutely inconceivable. Now I see it happening at least once per week and it has happened to me multiple times. The Fourth Amendment actually used to mean something and now it effectively means nothing. Because of the War on Drugs the police have taken an adversarial approach to the citizenry and with rare exceptions for people that I know personally I do not trust law enforcement one single bit. The War on Drugs has also been a war on the Civil Rights, immunities, and privileges of citizens that have nothing to do with drugs myself included.

One of my childhood friends and her husband bought a place just outside Durango quite awhile back, they said once pot was legal Durango became a place where a lot of pot heads started hanging out, crime went way up along with pan handlers and homeless people.

Yep, I can confirm this. I was through that area last summer, it's a "toilet" hole now.

I've never really considered that drugs are prohibitively expensive. Many folks who use them are poor, uneducated, and have little money. If they were so expensive how could they afford it? Homeless folks do drugs...how do we explain that?

As long as it is illegal criminal behavior will follow it. Contrary to popular belief so-called legalized marijuana is still highly illegal. Once you Legalize It the profit motive goes away and the criminal element outside of adverse reactions from long-term use goes away at the same time.

The people at the bottom who use drugs will usually either start selling drugs themselves so they can take a portion of what they sell or they resort to committing crimes to raise money to afford drugs.

Here are some of the wonderful benefits of legalization....according to Colorado....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6913861/

Section I: Traffic Fatalities & Impaired Driving
Since recreational marijuana was legalized, traffic deaths in which drivers tested positive for marijuana increased 109 percent while all Colorado traffic deaths increased 31 percent.
Since recreational marijuana was legalized, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana more than doubled from 55 in 2013 to 115 people killed in 2018.
This equates to one person killed every 3 days in 2018 compared to one person killed every 6½ days in 2013.
Since recreational marijuana was legalized, the percentage of all Colorado traffic deaths that were marijuana-related increased from 15 percent in 2013 to 23 percent in 2018.

Section II: Marijuana Use
Since recreational marijuana was legalized:

Past month marijuana use for ages 12 and older increased 58 percent and is 78 percent higher than the national average, currently ranked 4th in the nation.
Adult marijuana use increased 94 percent and is 96 percent higher than the national average, currently ranked 4th in the nation.
College age marijuana use increased 18 percent and is 48 percent higher than the national average, currently ranked 6th in the nation.
Youth marijuana use decreased 14 percent and is 40 percent higher than the national average, currently ranked 6th in the nation.

Section III: Public Health
The yearly number of emergency department visits related to marijuana increased 54 percent after the legalization of recreational marijuana (2013 compared to 2017).
The yearly number of marijuana-related hospitalizations increased 101 percent after the legalization of recreational marijuana (2013 compared to 2017).
Marijuana-only exposures more than quadrupled in the six-year average (2013–2018) since recreational marijuana was legalized compared to the six-year average (2007–2012) prior to legalization.
The percent of suicide incidents in which toxicology results were positive for marijuana has increased from 14 percent in 2013 to 23 percent in 2017.

Section IV: Black Market
RMHIDTA Colorado Drug Task Forces (10) conducted 257 investigations of black market marijuana in Colorado resulting in:
○ 192 felony arrests
○ 6.08 tons of marijuana seized
○ 60,091 marijuana plants seized
○ 25 different states the marijuana was destined
Seizures of Colorado marijuana in the U.S. mail system has increased 1,042 percent from an average of 52 parcels (2009–2012) to an average of 594 parcels (2013–2017) during the time recreational marijuana has been legal.

Section V: Societal Impact
Marijuana tax revenue represent approximately nine-tenths of one percent of Colorado’s FY 2018 budget.

^^^^ And I will take all of that and more gladly vs having an ever growing set of government policies and more restrictions on civil rigjts that are brought about trying to fight the endless problem of drugs.

What's not being discussed above is Colorado's population growth versus the number of traffic fatalities. Take that into account and the rate vs the pure numbers drop. Since pot is fat soluble it sticks around in someone's blood for I think about a month. Simply testing positive for marijuana use within the past month doesn't mean a traffic fatality was caused by marijuana use in the past month. I could believe it if it was within 24 hours but not 4 days much left the full length of time that a test can detect marijuana use.

I also have to point out that marijuana is still illegal in all 50 states and US Territories despite what any individual state says about it.

Tell me about all the other laws which should be done away with.

If keeping drugs illegal and more expensive stops one future user, it is far better than making them less expensive and legal with the outcome being only one additional user.

Rational people will sometimes fall prey to what they believe are rational arguments when attempting to sway peoples' minds. Then again, somes jus believe they are smarter than others. Continue on o' erudite one.

Pretty much every federal law outside of the ones dealing directly with the enumerated powers granted to the federal government in the Constitution. At a state level any one of them that attempts to put limitations on anything laid out in the Bill of Rights. Also at a state level the criminal code needs to be simplified. There's no reason to have 20 or 30 different charges that can be applied to the same crime.

you are taking care of the federal side which really has little to do with enforcement of drug laws. What about - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." That little to the states wording can get you.

We have a bit of a chicken or the egg problem here. It could be successfully argued and it's probably true that drugs are more prevalent and available in the consumer Market because of their high price. There are people that have a vested interest in supplying a good that people can get hooked on because it is extremely profitable. Amphetamines didn't become a plague on society until after they were outlawed. Now meth is basically white boy crack that has destroyed rural communities the way crack ran through the black urban areas in the '80s. The laws against methamphetamines had absolutely zero impact on their popularity or spread.

When we see blue cities doing stupid stuff that causes problems and then they double down on those policies and still don't get the results that they thought that they would get all of us roll our eyes at their stupidity. The political right is doing the exact same thing in regards to the War on Drugs. It is a war that it has had disastrous side effects on people that have nothing to do with drugs while at the same time not doing a single thing to stop the availability of drugs on the illicit consumer Market. Right now there is nothing to stop at 12-year-old from buying cocaine or methamphetamines or heroin or ecstasy or marijuana. Underaged people can buy illicit street drugs easier than they can buy alcohol.

Doing drugs is not a "civil right". If that were true, your argument says that you should be able to buy fentanyl, propofol, or whatever else OTC. That's dumb. And where do you draw the line? Would it also be ok for men to have sex with 9 year olds if they consented?
Or for people to fight dogs for enjoyment? What about doing away with speed limits because they slow me down driving to work? I'm sure there are a whole host of "problems" we could solve by legalizing anything and everything, but no one should be so short-sighted to think that doesn't open up a whole new set of problems to deal with.

it's a libertarian mismatch of logic & reason.

Trust me, I know what's there and I support applying the 10th Amendment to every aspect of law. I've pointed out before a constitutional amendment was required to outlaw alcohol. If individual states want to outlaw drugs then more power to them and I say that because I fully support the 10th Amendment. At that point the drug trade simply becomes one of arbitage and the unreal profits will be whittled down to just fat profits. It would resemble the trafficking in cigarettes that is very common in the Northeast.

get over it - prohibition was repealed almost a hundred years ago. They haven't fixed the women voting thing though.

I never said that doing drugs was a civil right and I am adamantly opposed to drug use. What I said is I don't believe it is the government's position to be telling people what to do in regards to consuming and elicit habit forming and dangerous substance.

Regulating drugs whether they be prescription or over the counter needs to be left to the individual states. I suspect if the feds get out of it that a majority of the states would form an interstate compact and have Mirror Image laws from state to state. They may be similar to the existing federal drug laws or they may be considerably more liberal and mirror the laws we have restricting alcohol consumption. I don't know because I don't have a crystal.

I do not believe that grown men or women having sex with children is appropriate. Seeing as how the age of consent varies from 13 years all the way to 18 years in various States ( I just googled it) I would say that we need to come up with a more uniform definition of what a child is versus what a minor is.

I believe speed limits are best set by the engineers that design the roads, that should not be a political decision.

Last I recall most dogs really don't need all that much encouragement to fight amongst each other and some need no encouragement at all. Let dogs be dogs but I do find the thought of organized dog fighting to be quite distasteful and once it crosses over into the territory of animal cruelty it needs to be stopped.

My real problem with the War on Drugs is the spillover onto people that do not have anything to do with drugs such as myself. My civil rights and your civil rights have been eroded massively within our lifetimes and it's almost like no one even notices. The security state apparatuses of the government have virtually unlimited authority to implement any level of force against you including killing you all in the name of fighting drugs. They even do it to people that have nothing to do with drugs; sometimes deliberately, and sometimes by accident. I seem to recall some detectives down in Houston who falsified information about drug purchases just so they could inflate their arrest records. They served a warrant on a couple's house, killed both of the people, and one of them got shot in the process by one of their own guns. Last I recall both of those officers are up on charges for that incident but it took months for them to be called out for those killings and in the process it uncovered literally decades worth of abuse by one of the detectives. If you can guarantee that no mistakes will ever be made again by the police and no one's egos, corruption, or greed gets in the way of treating people fairly then I would accept the restrictions that are placed upon us in the name of the War on Drugs but you can never make that guarantee because it's not possible. That Mantra of "if it just saves one life" is also what the gun grabbers say repeatedly.

How about medical marijuana?

I could care less what other people do. I do recognize that the medical marijuana laws are simply intended to crack the door open for full legalization. You want to smoke, go ahead and smoke. I wouldn't dream of telling you not to do so unless you were sitting on my couch.

Edit: I also find it to be incredibly improbable that marijuana has any real medicinal values. The oils might but any high-grade plant oil would fulfill the same purpose and there's nothing magical about plant oils derived from cannabis.

Who cares if marijuana is laced with fentanyl?