Burying your head in the sand won't change the fact that there are significant emotional components which are relevant here.
I wanted to talk about the merits and reasons for/against drug decriminalization, as well as alternative solutions.. You keep telling me that I'm missing the point, but maybe you're missing my point. I'm not interested in the discussion about the broader point of the process itself. Talking about parties and sides and gun control is not the discussion I engaged in. The fact that it's a controversial issue that elicits strong emotional responses from people is not germane to the discussion at hand.
The original poster said: "Maybe our political discourse wouldn't get quite to the level of talking about secession if we tried to understand one another's values a little better."
That's exactly what was happening! I wanted to take part in that. The last thing I would want to do in that discussion is bring in heated tangential topics that would serve to derail the conversation. That's not burying your head, that's staying on topic. There are significant emotional components about this and also as well about guns. Agreed. The original point stands.
You're missing the point entirely. Drugs aren't an isolated example. There are a number of highly divisive issues in the US for which the majority of Americans appear to hold largely emotionally based views. (Note that the degree to which a view is emotional is entirely orthogonal to whether or not it can be arrived at rationally.)
> There was no mention of "parties" or "sides".
And yet in practice, the vast majority of opposition to drug decriminalization (let alone outright legalization) comes from more conservative people. Such divides exist in a statistical sense whether you like it or not.
Your points about the relative inefficiencies and overall failures of the current approach to drugs based on available data is well taken. However, when it comes to highly divisive issues such as this one, it seems that simply appealing to rationality in this manner is not a viable tactic on its own for the majority of people. The analogy to gun laws helps to illustrate this fact - imagine how the majority of liberals would react to a "rational" explanation of why a particular gun law was unlikely to improve things.