People had legal access to opium in the US until the Progressives got their way. Somehow we got by before they took over.
I can appreciate the view, however that was almost two hundred years ago. It is a different dynamic now and the drug war is the longest running war in US history.
We do not have the stomach to execute drug dealers, or invade nations that harbor narco-cartels, and we fail to realize that the drug war has been responsible for more Constitutional challenges and case law than any other source.
It has led to the proliferation of drug gangs, in which there are well over a million documented members of all ethnicities and races. They export violence on each in unprecedented scale outside of wartime, and it causes liberals to push for more gun control. Conservatives in turn push back, and now we are nation armed and seething, almost to the point of civil war level violence.
I worked the drug war full time for five years, surveillance, raids, asset forfeiture, Title 3 wiretaps, the whole bit.
When I was done I realized I had not make one bit of difference and the taxpayer costs associated with what I was involved in was astronomical.
The dirty little secret that law enforcement and the courts don’t want you to know is that we were never winning and we are no longer holding the line. We are retrograding slowly but surely, and it does not help that few want to enter the field anymore, thanks to Brown and Baltimore as the two main offenders.
My main objective is to see the violence be seriously curtailed, I care not if adults put chemicals in their body. How many people would take it to the streets if liquor or fast food were outlawed?
I also don’t want to use China as a metric for anything.