Not all drugs are equal in my mind in that sense.
Granted I've no issue for being measured with how to handle folks who are caught with it.
Criminalizing addicts is not helping anyone. Throwing addicts into jail doesn't solve their addiction problem, and distributors are still out there.
The former means you won’t get a criminal record for it but it’s still illegal.
Decriminalization is a half-assed step from horrible situation, but its still a bad and unfair situation. We can do better once we recognize that some substance is not the end of the world (like weed recently).
Personal example - a friend brought from US a vaporizer with weed oil inside. Its much less health-damaging compared to usual smoking - even compared to plant vaporizers, the potency and effect is predictable, you know what to expect. This is how things improve when market is legal, in just couple of years. And this product is illegal everywhere else, including Amsterdam...
Legalization is not the solution to everything either. Since weed has been legalized around here (Canada) a couple of big cities moved to literally ban smoking it everywhere. Current Quebec government is also pushing to ban smoking it outside province wide. They also let landlords ban marijuana use property wide. So basically, in these cities (and if the current Quebec government gets its way, which it definitely might considering its a majority government), marijuana is now legal to own, but renters now can't legally smoke anywhere.
We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.
We saw what happened in the Prohibition. When alcohol was criminalized, gang violence spiked, production was accidentally mixed with ethyl -and- methyl, tax revenues went down, and we as a populace was generally unsafer after than before. There were even cases where the US govt poisoned rumrunners' stocks to kill drinkers - they were doing something illegal, so US officials deemed it OK to kill people. It was bad enough that Congress and the president did another constitutional change to remove the ban.
With cannabis, it is mostly harmless and makes you feel weird. But as noted by Nixon and other republicans, banning and punishing cannabis users was being equated with targeting hippies and blacks.
And of course, cannabis usage completely ignores many health positive effects like prevention of nausea, glaucoma, and many others. It's not a cure-all, but the downsides are very very limited. Just compare this to say, the Sacklers' pushing of Oxycontin. I don't think "near harmless" can be used to discuss that.
When we look at harm minimization, making drugs illegal only pushes them underground, deprives tax dollars, increases violent groups to maintain illicit trade, and further reduces public safety. So yeah, you do have to look at the whole issue rather than "My uncle Jimbob sits around gettin' high". Whereas alcoholism and alcohol overdose is a significant issue which can kill people.. Yet we had that discussion a century ago, and we learned our lesson then.
> a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
Have you ever wondered why they're drunk/stoned all the time? They're not a drunk because they're a drunk. They're a drunk for different reasons. They're depressed. They're not satisfied with their life or themselves. They're hurting. They're scared. They're angry. There's a reason for it and it's not because they can buy alcohol or drugs.
Yes, he's terrible.
Putting him in jail, and destroying any possibility of him getting a decent job, forever, hardly seems a constructive way forwards there though does it?
stoned fathers still exist, during the current prohibition.