It's true that at the margin, increasing supply and making it easier to obtain drugs will lower the price, and cause some number of users to try drugs that didn't before.

Another feasible description of the world is that this marginal effect is very small, and almost everyone who wants to do drugs does already.

We don't need to speculate on how significant these factors are; we can look at places like Portugal that fully decriminalized drugs, and extrapolate from there.

> It's just one of those things - some people can handle their drugs - most people can't and fall down the slippery slide.

I sympathize with your point about losing friends to drugs; however I'd suggest that "most" isn't the right quantifier to describe the proportion of individuals that "fall down the slippery side". Some people are susceptible to mental health issues, and drugs can trigger episodes that might not otherwise happen. But the harms those individuals would experience from a general increase in prevalence of drug use are dwarfed by the harms that are currently inflicted on the drug users who do not abuse or otherwise have problems with drugs.

(And note that if we didn't spend as much money incarcerating drug users, we'd have a lot more money available for helping individuals with mental health/addiction problems.)

While would be nice to wave a wand and do away with all of the harms discussed here, the current drug policy proves that attempting to reduce drug usage through prohibition adds more harm elsewhere in the system than the harms that it attempts to prevent.