I'd like to take this opportunity to enumerate some of the benefits of legalizing all drugs:

1. Instant 50% reduction in prison population. More than half of all prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. It costs 20-40k/year to house a prisoner [2]. There are approximately 2.2 million prisoners the US [3]. That equates to an instantaneous savings of $6.6 billion.

2. Elimination of the DEA. Instantaneous savings of $2 billion [3].

3. Massive reduction in crimes that are caused by drugs. E.g. theft, assault, etc. Personally, i'd estimate that as making up the bulk of the other 50% of all crime. Of course, I can't back that up with any data, but it makes logical sense to me that the majority of crime that happens is in one way or another connected to drugs.

4. Drug cartels disappear essentially overnight. Yes, they might switch to kidnapping or extortion or something. But those are not hyperscale businesses. They would evaporate to the point of irrelevance almost immediately.

5. Street gangs disappear or dramatically lose influence. Why fight a turf war if there's no money to be made on the turf? Sure, some will still happen. But they'll be dramatically reduced and the ones that remain will be severely underfunded.

6. Police and the communities they serve will no longer be enemies. Drug use is a victimless crime, and people resent being shaken down and arrested on suspicion of drug dealing and/or using. If drugs were legalized, police would only arrest people who are antagonizing others. This would go an enormous way towards healing the divide between police and citizens.

7. No more impure, uncertain drugs. Things would be labelled correctly and their doses standardized. This should dramatically reduce accidental overdose deaths, and improve the health and wellbeing of addicts by eliminating the nasty stuff their drugs are cut with.

8. Reliable, cheap supply for addicts. Being an addict involves an enormous amount of wasted time and money. It's extraordinarily difficult to hold a job, because just getting the drugs takes lots of time, waiting, and exposure to risk. Now, there are other reasons it's hard to hold a job as an addict, but these are big factors.

9. Massive reduction in social stigma around addiction and drug use. This is a double-edged sword, of course. But I think on balance it'd be a good thing. It would make it easier and less shameful for addicts to seek treatment. Taking it out of the underworld would make families more aware of their member's possibly spiraling problems, and give them an earlier opportunity to do something about it.

10. The way i'd like this to be structured would be that the government would sell these drugs in unmarked shops at essentially their marginal cost of production (which is extremely low). They wouldn't advertise, obviously, and you could implement reasonable age controls by checking ID in a similar way to alcohol. Now, that system is imperfect obviously. But that's ok I think. It's not like kids don't have access to drugs now. Monitoring and maintaining open lines of communication with these people will allow them to be studied and given access to treatment options and help. They can be guided into jobs and offered medical help with detox.

I say all of this as a former heroin addict. It's easy availability would make it somewhat harder for me not to use it. On balance though, it seems extremely clear to me that it's the right thing to do. The synergy of all the policing/crime benefits would be extraordinarily profound. The enormous reduction in crime and improved relationship between police and their communities would make police even more efficient at stopping what remaining crime there is. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see something like a 75-80% reduction in all crime within the first couple of years.

That isn't even to address the benefits to narco-states like Mexico. There it would be truly transformative. Terrorism would lose its largest funding source [5]. Border patrol agents would stop facing well-funded adversaries. The civil war in Colombia would stop. Corruption in government would be reduced to standard corporatism. The list is just endless, and it's not like drugs aren't available now.

What, really, is the marginal harm of making them slightly more available, when weighed against all of this? In my opinion, the drug war and its effects are the greatest ongoing crime against humanity in the world right now.

[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

[2] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administratio...

[5] http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrori...