I decided to start with a couple of polemic questions to get a sense of how people would react to somebody a bit more inclined to the other side of the scale.

I believe addiction is a disease and the sick must be treated with high priority. My younger brother started taking drugs even before high-school, like most boys here where I live. He had no choice. He wanted to play bass with that band and hang out with them. Pot and cocaine, basically. Tobacco and booze came later when he was in college. He made it to the end and got a major in Advertising with a minor in Psychology. Two years after graduation he was struggling to find a decent job and that led him to a whole decade of drug abuse. He has developed some sort of schizophrenia and has a problem in his lungs. Today he lives with my mother, as he cannot live alone, and he makes a living selling SIM chips in a kiosk inside a supermarket. On top of all that, he has depression, so needs to control it taking medications.

My brother is just another drop in the ocean of addicts. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for my mother. Our family started treating him as a sick person only 10 years ago, and it was too late for him. So I strongly believe all addicts should be treated at the earliest possible while there is still a chance of recovery.

I have spent the last 40 years of my life watching how drug cartels operate down here in the third world. I hate them, of course. Their entire structure, from the 8 year-old who takes drugs to school and share them with his buddies to the drug lords who dine with politicians every night.

I'm part of the group of people who believe addiction starts at early age, adolescence, when people really enjoy taking drugs, loads of them. Distribution starts really at school, and for free. They normally choose two brothers, one must be older and outside school, the other, in school. They take the older and kindly offer him a gun/ammo or good money. In exchange, his little brother is now part of the cartel and will have to distribute drugs at school. This little man will be arrested countless times, but released in the same day once his mother pops up into the police station. He will be back to his "job" next morning. In case his mother decides to take him out for treatment, the consequence is that the elder brother now has a serious problem with the local drug distributors and will have to choose between working for them, saying goodbye to normal life he used to have, or death. In the long run, both brothers will be neck deep into crime.

The reason "war on drugs" doesn't work anywhere is because it is not a real war. Governments are mostly investigating, arresting, taking to jury etc. There is no extreme, war like violence, between government and drug cartels. No mass killing. Elimination, as I wrote in another thread. So the government thinks it has "destroyed" a cartel, when in fact it has just "dismantled" it until people at lower layers see vacant positions they can be filling in. Yes, government let WoD as it is, is a multi decade, multi trillion dollar worldwide worthless effort. Take that money and help the sick.

On the other hand, WoD in the slums is a completely different ball game. It is extremely effective because it is violent to infinity. Cartels operate in total monopoly within their territories. No sharing. If you look at the news coming from Rio de Janeiro this week, there is a war going on between a handful of groups interested in a specific region. Those "Fallujah battle" like scenes we see on TV is the tip of the iceberg. It is what can be shown to society. Down there in the ground, when a slum is finally taken over, that when the barbaric mode turns on. The unlucky bastards and their relatives who didn't die in shootings will be subject to beheadings, all limbs amputated, burned/buried alive etc. War. Everyone from the losing cartel is killed and a new monopoly starts.

"Ok, so what if you decriminalize production/distribution to weaken the cartels, giving the population the choice to stay away from all that horror and still buy better quality drugs at a fraction of their cost on the streets and use them without the possibility of being arrested?"

Now, you, third-world government and law enforcement broke the monopoly. And now you are going to face the real war on drugs (no quotes). It's going to be everywhere. The immediate reaction will be something like what happened back in 2006 in Sao Paulo[1].

"Since early Friday May 12, 2006 there have been 299 attacks against public establishments such as police stations, justice forums, buses, etc.; which are allegedly organized by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) criminal organization."

Yep, 299 attacks in 5 days. Just because some cops killed some key assets from the criminal organization. That is insignificant next to the possible impact of ending the monopoly of their main revenue stream: drugs production and distribution.

They would kill/barbarize people all along government's drug "supply chain". At the factory, at the warehouse... retail shop? I can't even imagine the violence. And, finally, consumers. Bad consumers who made the bad decision to support the monopoly break. Those would be killed at the shop's door so the media could do its job and promote it nationwide.

I also believe cartels would have no trouble in massively robbing premium grade drugs from the government and sell them afterwards. For that, they can use the same .50 cal and TNT used elsewhere to rob banks and armored cars[2]. "They" in this case is not a handful of dudes, but 50.

"The robbers numbered about 50 and came armed with high-caliber weapons, grenades, dynamite..."

So, IMHO, drugs decriminalization may weaken some cartel ops in developed countries, improving quality of life in many ways. No doubt. But that's not necessarily the case in third-world nations where organized crime is big, rich and unthinkably violent.

I wish my government could be as violent as the cartels are and kill everyone. Elimination. Yes. That's the monopoly gameplay. It would trigger something like the 2006 event[1], but then the Army and all law enforcement would fight back nationwide, at all levels. The vacant slots in the cartel structure wouldn't see any backfill.

Of course, no government can do that to its own people these days in modern society. Well, maybe there are some examples here and there, but that doesn't matter, my wish is pure utopia, a crazy fantasy. It won't happen. So let's treat the sick the best way we can. Portugal, parabéns!

Thank you for reading this to the end. It was a long day for me and English, as you obviously know, is not my first language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_violence_o...
[2] http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-paraguay-...