Truly criminal behavior can be effectively fought because people actively seek to avoid being its victim, and victims (and/or their next of kin) actively cooperate in investigating it after the fact. In sharp contrast, everyone participating in a drug 'crime' wants it to succeed and acts to keep it from even being detected.
There is also the violence that drug abusers commit to obtain drug money; we cannot expect this kind of crime to disappear just because buying and using drugs is made legal.
We can expect it to decrease with the decrease in the drug prices that motivate it.
no one is willing to tell addicts that since they got themselves into that situation, they can darn well face the consequences
Speak for yourself - I'm entirely willing to tell them so.
What about crimes like mugging people for money, breaking into houses or businesses in order to steal cash or items that can be easily fenced for cash? Those crimes have nothing to do with the legality or lack thereof of psychoactive drugs, and everything to do with addictions so compelling that they drive the addict to do just about anything to get their next fix. And those crimes can hardly be described as victimless.
We can expect it to decrease with the decrease in the drug prices that motivate it.
Actually, I would expect the rate of crime associated with obtaining money to buy drugs to increase if drugs are legalized, because there will be more addicts, more people who, through addiction, become incapable of working and leading productive lives. That leads to more people who will be desperate enough to do anything to guarantee their next fix.
no one is willing to tell addicts that since they got themselves into that situation, they can darn well face the consequences
Speak for yourself - I'm entirely willing to tell them so.
Actually, I'm speaking as to what we do as a society, which is not necessarily reflective of what individuals do. Personally, I'm okay with addicts dying of exposure lying in ditches in their drug-induced stupors. But society doesn't like that. You see that at the government level with endless welfare handouts; you see that at the personal level every time someone hands money to a homeless person.
Your assumption is incorrect - marijuana was criminalized at the behest of recently unemployed Prohibition enforcers drumming up new business by ranting about white-woman-seducing Negro jazz musicians and "crazy Mexicans."
Actually, I do not know that. I do know that whenever I try to research what led to the anti-drug laws (anti-all drugs, not just marijuana), there are so many pro-legalization propaganda pieces out there that sifting through the distortions and outright fabrications to get to the truth about the matter is nearly impossible. Many of the stories told to obfuscate the rationale behind the efforts to criminalize drugs starting in the late 1800s don't even make sense. For example, the story that Dow lobbied for marijuana criminalization because it wanted to protect its nylon rope profits, or however that silly story goes, just does not make any sense when you ask , "Why did Dow *only* lobby for marijuana criminalization, and not for criminalization of every other material that can be used to make rope, if criminalizing marijuana was *only* about protecting Dow's profits?"
Because of the lack of reliable or even credible information, I have to form hypotheses as to why the push to criminalize drug use began in what was actually a fairly permissive environment. The hypothesis that best fits the facts is that people observed that drug users became addicted and utterly useless. Then, since they perceived those addicts as expensive burdens on society, and that those addicts became burdens out of personal choice (unlike, for example, a veteran who becomes disabled as a result of war injuries), they made the rational assumption that removing the source of self-inflicted disability would decrease the overall burden to society. I can say that because 1) we have the current experience of seeing people become useless through drug addiction, and 2) one can find accounts about the heroin/opium dens of the time, describing people who literally spent every waking moment in those dens in a drug induced stupor.