https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...
When I tried to find the Borderland Beat article where I first heard of this I found that the site has been closed due to (as best I can find with the site's own explanation no longer up) a lawsuit by a drug lord whose California driver's license was published on the site. Huge loss and I hope they get the site back eventually.
I did find one article I was looking for on the Internet Archive if anyone is interested, although the above is a much better link on just the legalization aspect (this one is mostly about one of the illegal drug trafficers affected). I think BB had another article on the legalization but I can't find a link to that one. As one might expect, the comments on BB tend to be more extreme than many sites in various ways.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200811192412/http://www.border...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190801143825/http://www.border...
Briefly: drug addiction, which is the bad outcome of drug use, emerges from hopelessness and mental trauma. Limited data suggests linking safe drug use to mental health resources, is an effective treatment plan for reducing drug addiction.
I'm not being glib here. I'm not a crack addict because as an adult I can recognize even trying that drug is a really bad idea, and because I exist in a culture where doing crack is not encouraged, to say the least.
This is an incremental lowering of the barriers to people getting involved with hard drugs, and I cannot imagine that it will not produce some incremental outcome of people getting addicted compared to before.
Got any suggestions? We all know DARE didn't work, so we can't work from the "drugs are bad, mmkay?" angle.
Something that Bernie Sanders talked a lot about that I found very compelling was the idea that a lot of people get into life ruining drugs (I'm talking heroin/meth, not weed/mushrooms) because they feel like they have no hope. A lot of them have little in the way of prospects. Drugs are an escape from the hopelessness in a lot of cases.
If our society had a better social safety net combined with education about drugs that is based on facts/truth (there's plenty of truth about heroin/meth that would put off most people from ever trying it - but for a long time a lot of lies were told about other recreational substances.) it's likely that usage would go down organically.
And I fear that it also opens the doors to other countries / bad actors seeing that they have a new market to manufacture and sell drugs to (fentanyl, heroin, meth) without penalty.
I think there are major unintended consequences here that will materialize in years to come, and it could be possible that this hurts the people it claims to help (and more in fact). Those who voted for the symbol of decriminalizing the "harmless" drugs may get much more than they expected.