I think this misses the nuances of these arguments. I can speak for my self, where my view points could be summarized to be to increase restrictions on guns and legalize all drugs. You would be right this seems to be inconsistent.
But that's not really my view point at least. Guns are necessary to some degree, but I dont think they need to be given out at as freely as they are. Not everyone needs one, i think we can restrict through something like applications you has one and who doesn't. Also restrict the types of firearms(And im not here to debate gun control, im just explaining there's more then just a one liner to the opinion)
With drugs, I think we can legalize them all. But this also doesn't mean a free for all on availability. We should have limits on marketing, age restrictions, improved education. Like heroine should be available from a store, but maybe only in a plain white box, with a label on it. No one gets to market it as cool.
Very few people choose to get shot. A lot of people choose to take drugs. The person in front of me shooting heroin is unlikely to get me high. The person in front of me shooting guns is more likely to shoot me than themselves.
But when that field expert says otherwise, she is no longer being listened to. Were we listening, understanding and thinking the first time?
Btw, drugs don’t kill people — people selling fake, cut and laced drugs do. In other words, profit motives kill people.
But they would if they asked. Most hard drugs were readily available where I grew up -- middle class suburb. Being underage, alcohol and ciggarettes were more challenging to obtain, but if you wanted anything illegal you could have it delivered on demand. Despite that other than weed, few were interested. I don't know why that would change. Further you could make those drugs more restrictive, come with strings attached (like briefly meeting with a counselor), etc. The idea is something can still be widely consisdered bad and yet not be illegal, and that by making it more controlled and more visible we may have a better chance at improving people's outcomes. In the least, we could shift funding from a source that clearly doesn't work to one that perhaps does.
The thing is, we don't know what kind of people would get hooked on drugs if all of them were legal. We don't know if there's correlation between illegality and inaccessibility of the drugs and their abuse by people whose life if awful.
> They are not hard to find.
Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from. Making them legal would make vast majority of them absolutely aware of where to get them from.
> Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.
Oh yes it will. Not everyone who lacks opportunities in life is willing to resort to illegal drugs right now. But if they were legal, many more would.
I am sorry, but from logical standpoint, your experience is is an observational bias. Looking at a society at large, from statistical perspective, legalizing hard drugs would make many more compelled to try them, purely by enabling them to do so.
Decriminalizing them, however, would surely improve situation, especially if the money spent on enforcement was spent on mental health instead – see Portugal as a great example of such policy.
BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".