While I get the arguments that prohibition doesn't work, you need some function to disincentivize people from being drawn to try drugs. Removing practically all barriers, especially to the hardest, most dangerous drugs, is a bad path for Oregon to have opened up.
And I fear that it also opens the doors to other countries / bad actors seeing that they have a new market to manufacture and sell drugs to (fentanyl, heroin, meth) without penalty.
I think there are major unintended consequences here that will materialize in years to come, and it could be possible that this hurts the people it claims to help (and more in fact). Those who voted for the symbol of decriminalizing the "harmless" drugs may get much more than they expected.
Your concerns may sound reasonable, but they are not evidence-based. So far the evidence beginning to accumulated from states/countries that have decriminalized and/or legalized previously prohibited drugs has been mostly contrary to your concerns.
Don't forget Mexico back in 1940, although only for 6 months due to the US shutting off supplies of the drugs and the war preventing them from finding alternative suppliers:
When I tried to find the Borderland Beat article where I first heard of this I found that the site has been closed due to (as best I can find with the site's own explanation no longer up) a lawsuit by a drug lord whose California driver's license was published on the site. Huge loss and I hope they get the site back eventually.
I did find one article I was looking for on the Internet Archive if anyone is interested, although the above is a much better link on just the legalization aspect (this one is mostly about one of the illegal drug trafficers affected). I think BB had another article on the legalization but I can't find a link to that one. As one might expect, the comments on BB tend to be more extreme than many sites in various ways.
Check out the Rat Park experiment or read Chasing the Scream for one idea of how incentives work when drugs are decriminalized.
Briefly: drug addiction, which is the bad outcome of drug use, emerges from hopelessness and mental trauma. Limited data suggests linking safe drug use to mental health resources, is an effective treatment plan for reducing drug addiction.
Those functions exist. They are culture and adulthood.
I'm not being glib here. I'm not a crack addict because as an adult I can recognize even trying that drug is a really bad idea, and because I exist in a culture where doing crack is not encouraged, to say the least.
I appreciate the comment. But if those were enough deterrent for everyone, why do we have any drug addicts at all?
This is an incremental lowering of the barriers to people getting involved with hard drugs, and I cannot imagine that it will not produce some incremental outcome of people getting addicted compared to before.
>you need some function to disincentivize people from being drawn to try drugs.
Something that Bernie Sanders talked a lot about that I found very compelling was the idea that a lot of people get into life ruining drugs (I'm talking heroin/meth, not weed/mushrooms) because they feel like they have no hope. A lot of them have little in the way of prospects. Drugs are an escape from the hopelessness in a lot of cases.
If our society had a better social safety net combined with education about drugs that is based on facts/truth (there's plenty of truth about heroin/meth that would put off most people from ever trying it - but for a long time a lot of lies were told about other recreational substances.) it's likely that usage would go down organically.
And I fear that it also opens the doors to other countries / bad actors seeing that they have a new market to manufacture and sell drugs to (fentanyl, heroin, meth) without penalty.
I think there are major unintended consequences here that will materialize in years to come, and it could be possible that this hurts the people it claims to help (and more in fact). Those who voted for the symbol of decriminalizing the "harmless" drugs may get much more than they expected.