> Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices

Too late to edit, but I forgot another massive benefit of this: Cutting out the cartels, and funding of global terrorism in general. But I'm not convinced the powers that be aren't doing dirty dealings, and thus want to maintain existing power structures

Drugs are really cheap right now, basically fentanyl is cheap and they just lace it into everything else to reduce costs. It is hard to imagine (a) fentanyl being even cheaper than it is and (b) that any taxation on it wouldn’t make it a magnitude more expensive than it currently is. Heck, just having real businesses distribute it rather than other addicts would increase prices significantly.

I mean, if heroin was the same price for an equivalent dose, wouldn't people use that? I know (many? most?) addicts prefer fentanyl, but that's because it's cheaper for a better high. It's much more effective at a much smaller dose, so a kg of fentanyl smuggled in goes much further than a kg of heroin.

But I don't think people actually prefer the sensation of the high, right? Like, you can do enough heroin for an equivalent sensation, you just have to do a lot more of it.

So it sets up this situation where fentanyl is the easiest to smuggle in 1 billion doses, so it's the cheapest, so people prefer it, but it's actually way more dangerous because the difference between a dose that feels nice and a dose that kills you is too small to measure for most people.

Yeah, maybe don't make fentanyl legal, but make heroin legal and make it price competitive with fentanyl

edit: and really, isn't fentanyl like $10 / dose on the street? I'm pretty sure heroin could be produced for a fraction of that if it was done legally. Sell it for $5 for an equivalent dose, people will make the switch