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Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country's illegal drug business , more/less?
There's a big difference between the weed shop I can walk to down the corner and the nearest safe use site/casino. I think people should be free to engage in whatever recreational activity they choose to, and the existence of addiction doesn't give the government the right to infringe on those freedoms. Safe use sites and social programs can exist without a semi-dystopian puritan system. I don't understand why addiction is so huge a problem that it requires such insane overreach. Without capitalist exploitation, addiction wouldn't be monetized. A different form of government and legalization do a far better job at managing addiction than creating a black market with draconian laws.
I don't think it's that crazy or draconian at all. You're still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it's a safe location and your drug of choice isn't cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don't like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.
There's a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won't go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that's just how a human reacts to the substance.
It's kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies' expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?
Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn't cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You're undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince