Please provide a citation for your claim that criminals make more money from illegal liquor sales now than they did during Prohibition. This defies common sense. When was the last time you bought an illegally sold beer?
When booze was made legal there in the late 60s they simply quit and made adjustments to their spending habits and their boss a distant cousin plowed his profits into cotton farms and once had (his son) arguably the best vintage WWII aircraft collection in that part of the south...Corsairs, Mustangs, P-47 etc
Likewise...without too much detail I have kinfolks in the medical and not sanctioned pot growing business as we speak and I can assure you they are not moving on to heroin or prostitution...but they sure don't want pot legal because the price will collapse from 3-4K/pound for top shelf to less than a 1k/pound...like in Colorado and Washington...Kali already has a glut anyhow
if made legal, they will go back to their day jobs..farming mostly...they are just trying not to go bankrupt and lose multi generational assets and personally I could give a damn...I hope they succeed
so..to be honest..platitudes and cliches from both sides of the argument are not blanket accurate
I will make two further declarations:
I think alcohol is far more damaging than marijuana overall though pot is hardly benign...and I smoked for 12 years in the 70s and early 80s
I am not in favor of drug legalization and I do think hard drugs are a menace. I do favor giving junkies access to controlled prescriptions rather than stealing and whatnot..but then that opens up issues like what about how they neglect their kids and stuff...none of this is an easy fix short of executions and I doubt that would garner much support ...I mean many of the drugs were indeed legal not that long ago....laudanum abuse and so forth
it's a hard difficult issue and technology has made more goodies available