if they steal from corporations there are victims. the company, the shareholders, the customers, the company’s insurers.
if they do drugs there are victims, their kids, their families.
if they sell to people the people buying are the victims. sellers don’t give two sh1ts about people.
negative personal actions affect others. we are not in a vacuum where our bad choices only impact us.
you want them legal, get people in who will legalize them.
if they do drugs there are victims, their kids, their families.
So let’s throw their father/mother in jail. His family & kids are way better off then. Really?!
Our govt says this drug is good yet that drug is bad. Do this drug and we tax it, do that drug and you rot in jail and destroy your family.
Republicans public image is in the crapper. They could pivot and become “The Party of Family”. Let the Democrats own being “The Party of the State”.
Being the party of family values means you need to keep families together. Even if that means spending a billion dollars on drug treatment programs instead of another SuperMax prison.
The same with drunks, but we don't make sure their families are destroyed, or at least suffer, by throwing alcohol users in prison and denying them access to Federal student aid, nor do we seize the assets of liquor store owners or folks suspected of having alcohol profits for selling booze.
The only sharp line I can see between legal psychoactive drugs (alcohol, nicotine and caffeine) and illegal ones is that the former were popular in Europe at the time of the American Founding, while the latter weren't. Sure some drugs are so evil in their effects on the user that trade in them (or giving them as gifts) should be kept illegal (crystal meth, extacy, "bath salts" and the nasty Russian concotion "krokodile" come readily to mind), as folks who sell them, even to willing buyers, or give them to others, are victimizing the customers.
But the attitude of "using drugs will ruin your life, and just to make sure, we'll ruin it for good with a criminal conviction and all kinds of legal disabilities if we catch you", trampling civil liberties with non-knock raids and property rights with forfeitures even on suspicion of being involved in the drug trade has only had the effect of giving the trade the the most ruthless and evil drug gangs, depriving the state of tax revenues on the trade, and filling prisons with folks whose crime was possessing more than some arbitrarily set weight or volume of some psychoactive substance which legislators decided indicated intent to sell at great expense to the taxpayer.