Wait, wait, wait.
Hold up here.
It seems to me that practically every discussion about the prohibition of drugs seems to center on one of three "solutions": either ban them all, don't ban any of them, or ban some but not all of them.
The white elephant in the room that's not being discussed is whether the Federal government should be the arbiter of whether or not any, or all, now-illicit drugs should be legally prohibited.
What about merely returning control over the matter to the States and their constituent jurisdictions, thereby allowing them to regulate controlled substances in much the same way as alcohol and tobacco are regulated today?
The last Federal prohibition clearly didn't work, and it produced some rather unpleasant and unintended side effects; but the present means of regulating alcohol and tobacco for the most part does work.
I believe the legalization argument centers around the idea that it would eliminate the black market. I don’t believe it would. As I said, the black market cannot be eliminated unless every drug is made available, and every person from birth on can have access.
Otherwise the specific drugs still denied would be black marketed, and kids under age would also be targeted.
As for the Tenth Amendment argument, you have heard of the BATF. There’s still federal involvement in those products.
Look, the interstate and transnational aspects of drug trafficking make it quite difficult to simply turn it over to the states.
I’m generally a 10th Amendment supporting person, but this one has far reaching implications. If Arizona has open laws, what prevents people from other states from swooping in to partake from states that don’t.
What would stop the smuggling? Once state lines were involved, you’d still have fed involvement.
Like I said, every drug, every breathing human, in every corner of the nation, or you still have a black market.