Also, some studies suggest that the current arbitrary blanket ban has hindered possibly useful medical research related to some of the currently prohibited substances.
If there was a drug that gave the user unimaginable euphoria or was guaranteed to kill them with a 50/50 chance should we do everything in our power to stop that? Especially for the young and impressionable? Even as someone who thinks heroin should be legal that gives me pause.
Should knifes for personal use be legal to purchase? How about guns? How about artillery? Tanks? Nuclear weapons?
I don't know, but thinking about these issues in absolutes like "personal liberties" tends to bring you some bad places, just like any other absolute. I think it's more useful to think about the practical implications of our actions given existing data, which shows the current drug war clearly isn't working, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever have any sort of ban on substances purely intended for personal use for public health reasons.
> If there was a drug that gave the user unimaginable euphoria or was guaranteed to kill them with a 50/50 chance should we do everything in our power to stop that? Especially for the young and impressionable?
We do have a system in place for controlling access to substances like Alcohol and Tobacco to minors.
You don't get to choose between having drugs and not having drugs. Everywhere in the world has drugs, you just get to choose whether you have an underground criminal black market that the state creates through its policies or not.
The whole decriminalization of consumption argument just moves the goalpost. You create the same problem The Netherlands has had with weeds for the past few decades, which is admittedly better than most of the rest of the world, but production remains and unregulated black market.