No one can know in advance what mental state alcohol will put a specific person in when they get drunk, and many drunks hurt or kill others all the time.. much more so than the users of any other drug.

Yet we've learned from the Prohibition of the 1920's and no one's seriously suggesting making alcohol illegal again.

Legalization would allow people to try it in a safe controlled environment and find out what something will do to them. And that would also be an ideal time to educate them about the actual risks and experiences they may experience before taking anything.

No question about that.

But that doesn't translate into knowing what the results of a given person taking a given drug will be, in terms of harm to others.

you can. it's called research. it can be done (if it hasn't already been done) on virtually any drug.

education + choice are key when it comes to deciding if you want to try drug X. this should be a personal choice not something big brother decides.

You think you can predict someone's response to major hallucinogens? Even with cannabis, among my friends and family who use it, there's a wide variation in response, particularly in levels of reported paranoia.

Research will clarify the statistical level, but isn't necessarily of much help with predicting individual results.

Psychedelics ("hallucinogens" is a pejorative, inaccurate, and outdated term) are some of the most unpredictable of drugs, but there's been a lot of research that has shown the chances of a constructive experience can be maximized with the right dose, set and setting, especially if trained support and integration is available.

Many of the people who suffer from paranoia and other adverse effects from psychedelics probably take them in the wrong setting, with the wrong setting, and in too high a dose for their experience level.. and often unsupervised too.

Education will help here, but ultimately less than ideal use can't be completely eliminated as some people won't care, won't listen, won't believe, etc... But even that kind of use will be way, way, way safer if the substances they take are legal, since they can at least be certain they'll be taking what they thought they bought and they can be sure of the substance's purity and dosage. On the black market it's all a crapshoot, and lots of people have died that way (even if they don't get shot by a cop in a raid or get murdered in jail if they get arrested and imprisoned).

Also, according to wikipedia (not definitive, but likely indicative of current thinking), psychedelics are just one subset of the larger family of hallucinogens:

> A hallucinogen is a psychoactive agent that often or ordinarily causes hallucinations, perceptual anomalies, and other substantial subjective changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness that are not typically experienced to such degrees with other drug classifications. The common classifications for hallucinogens are psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants.

If you come to forgive yourself or your parents as a result of taking psilocybin, is that a hallucination? If you overcome your depression or PTSD as a result of taking ketamine (a "dissociative"), is that a hallucination?

Calling these substances hallucinogens is inaccurate, and it's pejorative because it presumes that what's experienced on them is unreal.

Many of the things experienced on them not only seem to be but are to many of their users more real than ordinary waking reality. To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

Perceptual anomalies and changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness all happen on psychedelics, dissociatives, and deleriants. These are not useful distinctions.

It's handy to differentiate between the "resting state" of perception and other states. That doesn't make the "resting state" (i.e. no recent ingestion/injection of any psycho-active compounds) more real, but it does provide a baseline that makes it easier to discuss the differences, similarities and unknowns when in other states.

I'm sorry that you think that the term "hallucinogen" is so loaded with perjorativeness. I don't find it hard to notice how many terms we use in English may have in the past had been used with perjorative intent and have lost that sense. From my perspective, "hallucinogen" (and "hallucinating") is one of them. I don't read "hallucinating" as "having an unreal experience of the world", but rather "having an experience of the world that differs substantively from the resting state".

> To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

AFAIK, anyone who has had such an experience has also experienced the world in the "resting state". Because of this, the "priviledging" is not my view of reality versus theirs, but "one of their experiences" versus "another one of their experiences". It doesn't need to be inter-personal comparisons in any way.

I don't disagree with any of the "ideal scenarios" that you've outlined here.

But you're apparently completely discounting the idea that if all (most?) drugs are legal, more people will try more drugs and that statistically speaking, not all of those new experiences will happen under the ideal scenarios that you've outlined.

Again, this isn't an argument for prohibition. It is an argument against simplistic rationales like "adults should get to do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others".

Whether more drugs will be used by more people depends in large part on how legalization is implemented.

If, say, heroin ads and a wide variety of colorful heroin preparations with outrageous claims are allowed when heroin is legalized, as they are with cannabis then yeah, it's likely that use could rise significantly.

But it's unlikely that the legal heroin market will be allowed to be the kind of free-for-all that cannabis has had. Ads will probably be forbidden, and there'll probably be just one or a handful of heroin preparations in white-labeled containers, as there are for generic prescription drugs... and you'll probably need a prescription to get it too... and you'll probably need to register as a heroin user and maybe even be required to undergo treatment.

So that's a totally different approach to legalization compared to cannabis. Heroin and cocaine, if they're ever legalized will be heavily regulated, and then not nearly as many people will be drawn to using them, compared to cannabis which most people think is harmless and which is advertised heavily wherever it's legal, with a million enticing preparations of all kinds and no prescription needed to get it.

Something else to consider is the example of the Netherlands, where it was shown that Dutch teens were much less likely to use cannabis (despite it being effectively legal in the Netherlands) than their American teen counterparts when cannabis was illegal in the US. The Dutch teens just didn't think cannabis was cool, unlike American kids who were drawn to the forbidden fruit.

So, paradoxically, drugs can be made to be less enticing when legalized than they are when they're illegal.

Yet another thing worth mentioning is that pretty much everyone who actually wants to use a given drug can freely do so now, while it's illegal. It's not unavailability but disinterest or fear of addiction that's keeping most non-users away right now. That won't change with legalization.