While I agree with much of what you are saying...
especially about all that "feel good hippy shit" (Pete Townsend, Psychoderelict), you may be missing the point. It is not that anyone truly disagrees that most things that you smoke, ingest, shoot up, etc. have a cost with your metabolism (I have lost two brothers in their forties due to drugs/alcohol) - it's the idea that criminalizing/decriminalizing any substance is necessarily a "wise idea". To wit:
You cannot legislate morality. When the Volstead Act was passed and Prohibition of alcohol was enacted, organized crime (gangsters) stepped in to fill the still present demand. Just like now, if you criminalize something like ecstasy/methamphetamine/pot/heroin/monkeydope/uppers/downers/poppers/cactus/mushrooms/pickanythingyouwant then organized crime is happy to step in to fill the demand. And that brings added violence - organized violence. It also fills up prisons with people who predominately are a threat only to themselves... It also greatly increases the prices of said drugs and lures poor folk in by economics alone. It's said, but if you check history, every culture that I've read about had it's drugs/alcohol to alter its reality.
I don't drink anymore. I don't use drugs anymore. I haven't done either for many years. As I've said, I've watched two brothers die early deaths from overdose and schlerosis (just a month ago). Guess what? I still think these things should be not be illegal. To me, the cost of the war on drugs is far to high when compared to the benefits gained. YMMV.
