In the last bolded part, you seem to be saying the cost to our liberties is too high to continue the drug war, therefore restore our liberties even if it means more addicts.
Would you clarify?
We will have more addicts of “big drugs” and liberals and conservatives will set out to “save” them and save us from them by stripping us of our liberty and our property along the way. There are all kinds of twisted freak things the nanny staters will do to the innocent of society if people have the choice of doing drugs in the name of controlling the people who partake in and retail legalized drugs. The schemes will never end. For example, they will work diligently to make drugs too difficult to get through punative taxation, leaving open a black market for addicts who will do whatever they have to do to get the drugs. See big tabacco.
On the other hand, addicts are soulless creatures who act to harm themselves and the people around them. They do a lot of crime and violence from their state of being - not just the act of buying illegal drugs. There is brain and character or soul damage that comes with drug use and that results in a lowering of performance or of competence in society and abuse of the innocent. We will have more of these folks to deal with. They will be interacting with us openly, driving, interacting with our children and doing jobs under the influence. They will be loud and proud instead of hiding like they do now. They will be voting and you can imagine how that will go as politicans contort reality and goodness to get big drug money and the drugie vote. See homosexuality.
If we look at the use of booze as a start to project what a society would be like that permits the use of drugs, we see the young in America tend to abuse the only drug we permit until they get out of college. If the drug of choice was cocaine instead of booze, we would have a lot of addicts and brain damaged young people (with criminal records) who would not be able to recover their mental potential from the brain damage they incurred in their youth. One drug are more damaging to the human than another. Crack is worse than cocaine and nanny staters will look to curtail and ban the use of some drugs opening black markets for the cartels. Should our international socialists, like George Soros, the guy who funds the drug legalization movement, permit drug users to own guns? Since they can now track everything you buy, this would be a great way to deny people individual freedom. There is always an angle to their dangle.
Libertarians have a Utopian social ideal that is unreal when they look at legalizing drugs. They have the idea that if you want to do drugs and kill yourself, fine, just leave me alone. They do not realize that people will never live in a bubble of their lofty choices surrounded by people who do not make lofty choices and who do not and will not leave them alone. Legalizing drugs will halt one set of terrible problems but will be followed by another set of problems which libertarians have not thought through and deny with magical thinking.
As a conservative, when I look at the future of a society where drugs are legal, I don’t have the luxury of entering into anything without forseeing the consequences of change we make as a people. Things are not so black and white for me. People are twisted freaks all around and we no longer have a society built on moral rights and wrongs. We no longer have an elite dedicated to freedom rather they are dedicated to overcoming freedom to the lofty goal of achieving global rule (like Hitler and Stalin). What is good is said to be evil and what is evil is said to be good by the internationalists who run our business, government and private institutions. They will use drug legalization to advance their cause of oppression just as they use illegal drugs to advance oppression.
Oregon just busted an open-air, in plain sight, 91,000 plant grow operation run by 5 Mexican citizens on public land. The pot farm ran through a ravine for over 3 miles, had irrigation piping and had been there for at least 5 years. Some drug war we're fighting.
Name a successful black market for anything commonly used in the United States. They don't exist because they can't compete with Safeway, Walgreens, Costco, etc.
Bottom line, of all the recreational drugs, we must legalize marijuana now and put American farmers to work instead of Mexican farmers.
Remember, the addicts and young people you talk about, as excessive users, are our own families and friends whom suffer far more from getting caught than from getting high on marijuana.
The hard drugs such as cocaine, meth, and opiates I am not ready for full legalization because the producers are largely foreign and often military enemies and our government is unwilling to take the drug war fully to them.
I don’t think you mentioned the division between state and federal government. Should decisions about legalization within a state’s borders be left up to the states under the Tenth Amendment, or should fedgov continue its involvement via the New Deal Commerce Clause?