This is simply not true.
This notion that legalizing something will incur less addiction is simply not reasonable.
Opiates are available by prescription and that is huge source of addiction, even within that controlled environment. Doctors in Canada now give out the absolute minimum - I had major dental surgery and got two pills. Just two! Because it's that addictive. US doctors are changing as well.
Consider what full opiate legality would mean: it would be infused into tobacco, cola, alcohol, food etc. and available within an arms reach with billions in advertising behind it.
Even though a good number of people wouldn't use it, and another chunk can actually 'handle their drugs' - for a significantly high group of others it would be destructive. If only 5% of our population fell prey to this, and instead of having jobs they were stealing, in hospitals, rehab etc. - it would be a huge crisis.
I'm always surprised by how people put this issue mostly in the context of the here and now, and don't consider how so many things would transform.
Vaping (i.e. repackaging of nicotine) is blowing up massively in the US, Juul is hiring 2000 people just in SF and their business is exploding! This is not because vaping 'tastes good'. It's because it's deeply addictive, and as an ex-vaper (short period) I suggest there's a whole host of problems we haven't seen yet.
No good will come of a generation re-addicted to nicotine.
So yes, Portugual et. al. took a different path on hard drugs, but this is nothing remotely near legalization. It's still a health problem, they just deal with it differently.
Mushrooms are a different thing, they are not remotely addictive, so they're in a different class. That said, they are actually dangerous. Also the inherent demand is just not nearly there. Some degree of de-criminalization ought to be considered surely.
If opiates were legal, it seems unlikely to me that any significant number of people would need to steal to support their habit. I lived in Canada for a few years, and had a friend up there who worked in an ER there. All of the drugs they used had price tags on them as an incentive to remind the staff how much government money they were spending when they used them. He told me the giant syringes full of morphine that they used for severe burn injuries were a tagged as a few dollars.
Here in Washington state, legalizing marijuana has driven down the price so much that it's actually hard for growers to turn a profit.
FWIW, I don't use either of them.
FYI - people steal for dope not because it's insanely expensive, they steal because their lives are ruined and that's their recourse.
It's really nary impossible to make the case that we should be make super cheap opiates widely available. There is a reason (actually many) that it's essentially illegal everywhere on the planet wherein there is any form of governance.
The odd thing about the 'drugs debate' is how many very intelligent people have trouble with seeing the societal implications. To me the very debate itself is a fascinating social phenom, and I wonder what drives people to make odd arguments.
There's also the fact that a lot of black-market stuff only ever happens because it's illegal, which is why countries that decriminalize prostitution and take a treat-instead-of-prosecute approach tend to see benefits in addition to fewer people in jail for the associated crimes. I know there are people that won't break the law, but there are also people that make beaucoup bucks breaking the law because they're good at it. Which one wins out? No idea. Not sure if there's a way to get data on that beyond the enforcement vs. addiction studies.
There is plenty of room to discuss the effectiveness/costs of making drugs illegal and how (potential) enforcement should be handled. To whit, your response is answering an entirely different question than the one you originally posed!
EDIT Response to below. I can't understand your position. How is the data we do have even remotely relevant? Its a study about enforcement and so presupposes a population that is excluded by the very question posed...
And no data that I'm aware actually points towards prohibition having significant effect.
Its 'Are there people who would do drugs (and become addicted) if they were legal but will not currently because they are illegal'.
What the discussion here is missing is that it would be nearly impossible to abuse mushrooms, and that mushrooms seem more likely to get people out of other addictions than push them into one.
And the more you crack down, the more valuable this market becomes. Market forces don't care that something is illegal. Supply and demand.
So here's the question for you... even accepting your premise that some portion of the population is kept from using drugs simply because they are illegal, does that justify the social cost incurred by the creation of the black market?
You're asking if we can; I'm asking if we should.
To be really ugly about it, suicide is a 100% effective way to prevent cancer. Doesn't mean it's a solution, because cancer isn't the real problem - early death is the problem. Likewise, the problem of opioids isn't addiction... it's harm to society. And it's completely obvious that the very existence of prohibition causes harm - a black market that handles business by violence and corruption, a police state that keeps further encroaching our rights in the name of "war on drugs", and innocent victims caught in the crossfire. Worse, user-level prohibition keeps otherwise peaceable citizens from seeking treatment for addiction, pinning them in the arms of both the addiction and the criminal enterprise that provides their fix.
Being "narrow in scope" is not only ignoring the external costs, it's ignoring the actual problem at hand.
Yes, there are more people who are more negatively affected by the current state of affairs. The law should change. But we should also be cognizant of the consequences of that change.
It may or may not be illegal to jump off a cliff, but even if the government declared it explicitly legal tomorrow how many more people will start doing it?
And if you claim it does reduce overall rates, can you provide a source? Portugal's drug addiction rates have plummeted since they decriminalized: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/18/524380027/...
There was an article/interview that I can't find discussing the lack of available services for those with addiction in a Scandinavian country post decriminalisation. I don't remember it all that well but the jist was that now that drugs were legal, it was a personal problem rather than a societal one; the 'treat it as a medical condition' aspect of the broader argument never actually materialized with services for those in need
We can already look to a few countries --I think as success models (Portugal, Netherlands, Czech Republic) -- that have done this and see how the demand curve for more dangerous substances has trended.
All of those countries legalized Weed, LSD and Magic Mushrooms, Amphetamines, and natural opiates at the same time (I think).
I think the US states will legalize them in categories, and I'll be interested to know if by having LSD legal, if that significantly impacts the market for illegal MDMA. Or if by having MDMA legal, if that significantly impacts the market for opiates.
We should already have some data on that by weed being legal in a lot of the US for a year or more now.
DARE clearly didn't work. But whatever we did for smoking worked very well. Only 10.4% of 18-24 year olds smoke cigarettes.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in Europe created a trade imbalance between Qing Imperial China and Great Britain. European silver flowed into China through the Canton System, which confined incoming foreign trade to the southern port city of Canton. To counter this imbalance, the British East India Company began to grow opium in India and smuggle them into China illegally. The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.
In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalize and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to go to Canton to halt the opium trade completely[8]. Lin wrote to Queen Victoria an open letter in an appeal to her moral responsibility to stop the opium trade.[9] When he failed to get a response, he initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed too. Then Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. He confiscated all supplies and ordered a blockade of foreign ships to get them to surrender their opium supply. Lin confiscated 20,283 chests of opium (approximately 1210 tons or 2.66 million pounds)[10].
The British government responded by dispatching a military force to China and in the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its naval and gunnery power to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire,[7] a tactic later referred to as gunboat diplomacy.
And I'm not expecting China to invade the US if the US legalized opium.
To put it another way... if heroin were legalized tomorrow, would you start shooting up? Is illegality the best (or only) way to prevent addiction? Look at tobacco. It's legal. Most people don't use it, because it's addictive and dangerous, and usage rates have dropped considerably due to social pressures and awareness campaigns.
When proposing (or defending) a solution, make sure you ask yourself if it actually solves the problem.