Actually yes it's happening right now, there's a very high correlation right now with people who do certain kinds of drugs (cocaine, meth, heroin, that sort of thing) and crazy, violent, self-destructive and community-destructive behavior. I for one don't want more of that going on than already is going on. I don't want to live in a world where that's more widespread.

1. The police in my area don't seem militarized. Where in the US are the police militarized? Are you seriously referring to things like tanks, jets, battleships, mortars, or what? In my town, and it appears in most of the rest of Colorado, we have police and they mostly do old fashioned police sorts of things.

2. Attack is a strong word. That also sounds like you're suggesting it's something pervasive. I bet if we did a poll of people, at least here in Colorado, for example, I bet we'd find that at most a very small fraction of 1% of the population will say they feel they have experienced an "attack on [their] civil liberties". Another point I'd add to this is one could make a very strong argument for the position that there is no such thing as some inherent "right" to anything. People do what they can get away with, and it's been happening like that for millions of years, I suspect. Heck, I'd love to have the "right" to do anything I wanted. But in practice, that's not going to happen. And there's that notion of one person's rights end where another's begin. Your right to walk down the street firing a gun ends where my right to walk down the street and not be shot by some idiot, begins.

3. the folks who buy a thing are the ones funding it, I would argue. If you buy illegal drugs, YOU are funding the organization which provided it to you. The government did not. That's a physical fact. Yes, if it was legal, then you might be buying it from a different source, and then YOU still would be the one funding it.

4. "gigantic waste of money" -- I cannot refute this point, merely say it's a question of whether one thinks that the benefits of the situation outweigh the disadvantages. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Are their better ways of achieving the same goal, for less cost? Perhaps, I don't now. But if your position is that nothing positive has come from it, I think that's a harder case to make.

5. again I think this is a case of individuals making poor choices and ruining their OWN lives -- through their OWN actions. The government did not come along and ruin their life, against their will. It's also not clear to me that in every case where an individual buys or sells an illegal drug, and gets busted for it, that when they are processed by the legal system their lives are all automatically ruined -- that's a pretty extreme statement. However, in the other direction, I'd argue that when people CHOOSE to use/consume/inhale/inject those hard, illegal drugs they very often do ruin their own lives, or set them on the road to ruin. They also make the world worse for their families, friends, and communities. There's a lot of evidence to support that position.

Hey, if I could live in a world where all the hard, "bad" drugs were legal and easily available AND also live in a world that has not turned into a violent, anarchic, ghetto-like hellhole (due to bad drug behavior & culture) I would like that.

On your Mexico point... counter-point: there are other countries where the same drugs are also prohibited, and they don't have the serious violent drug gang/war problem as Mexico. And as you pointed out, there are also countries that have looser drug laws, and they have less problems (apparently, in some dimensions) than Mexico or the US. So perhaps the stronger correlation is with the type of culture, and the type of people, and the types of lifestyles, choices, intellect, etc. that exist in those different areas. All I know for sure is that there's a high correlation between hard drug use and with behavior that is destructive to self and community, and so I don't want to live in a world where there's a larger percentage of people doing that. This is not an academic argument, it's a practical one, based on seeing and experiencing and knowing real people in my life and community that have went down the path of hard drugs -- even if those drugs were legal, it wouldn't change their effects on mind and body.

Freedom is just one dimension. There are other dimensions I think most folks care about as well. Health, safety, happiness, wealth, efficiency, quality, fairness, etc. On one extreme end of the freedom spectrum you basically have pure anarchy -- and I bet it's a state with much more violence and fear and rape, etc. and a lot less health, safety, justice, etc. Almost all modern societies have intentionally dialed down on the freedom dimension in order to raise one or more of those other dimensions we also desire. I like freedom, it's those other dimensions I won't want to lose. This is not a radical position, it's pretty mainstream actually.