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“It’s a flat 2% since 1900.”

BEFORE any DEA or “war on drugs”, when opium and morphine were easily available, the U.S. saw an end to its biggest ever heroine epidemic, in the late 1800s, using very large amounts of public education not criminalization.

The lets make drugs a crime regime started with people who also wanted to make alcohol illegal. They went at it in dribbs and drabs, first morphine and its derivatives, and cocaine, and after two decades achieved alcohol prohibition - the greatest factory for crime in U.S. history, like the drug wars today.

Although we made it legal to sell alcohol, the nation has continued to make constant efforts against excess alcohol consumption and criminal offenses for safety issues that occur when someone is operating under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The nation has also continued, and is expected to continue formal and P.R. public education concerning drugs, addiction, the relationships between them and the impoverishment from it. I don’t see that changing.

I also don’t see decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana as increasing long term drug use and addiction.

Addiction requires, as it has even in its epidemics, a variety of personal social factors in addition to availability of mood altering substances and even then, majorities who meet the social circumstances criteria do not succumb to the lure of the drugs, additionally indicating drug availability alone does not a drug user make.

We can “fight” drug addiction better with education. It takes very little to reliably evidence, in education, that it is not a relief but a downhill road, socially and financially.

As a moral person, you have to ask yourself do most people not commit a murder, assault or rob someone because it’s illegal, though they might have an opportunity for it and feel they might have some advantage in it? Or is it because they know they shouldn’t.

Yet, you don’t think MOST people will continue to not become marijuana addicts, just because availability changes, in spite of them knowing they shouldn’t.

The nation did not become a nation of boozers and alcoholics since prohibition was lifted. It will not become a nation of drug addicts if possession of small amounts of marijuana are decriminalized.