[AndyJackson]

And the way that you deal with things that have a long term deleterious effect on society and culture is to create cultural taboos around them - take drugs and you cannot hold a responsible position, you will be shunned by everyone except the political class of California, Colorado and Washington State.

We have tried criminalization and that created the war on drugs bonanza which created enormous financial incentives not to solve the problem.

[exDemMom]

We have tried criminalization and that created the war on drugs bonanza which created enormous financial incentives not to solve the problem.

I don’t buy the argument that criminalization doesn’t work, therefore drugs should be legal. No activity has ever been stopped by making it illegal, but making certain activities illegal certainly does help to decrease the incidence of those activities.

For example, most murder is illegal. And the numbers of murders committed illegally is fairly low—fewer than 16,000 in 2016. But murder of the preborn is legal, and almost one million children are murdered legally per year. Thus, in this example, making the activity legal increased its incidence by about 62 fold. The increase is actually far greater, if I compare murder rates of the preborn before and after murdering babies was made legal.