I think that there are two kinds of drug users, basically. People use drugs because of hardship and people who use drugs because of boredom. When it comes to the hardship camp, I think the best solution is to alleviate the hardship. This means making sure that everyone has a well paying, respectable job and making sure public infrastructure is healthy and so on. When it comes to boredom users though, it's hard to come up with a solution besides punishment. Look at the current heroin epidemic. Yes, it is illegal to use drugs, but affluent white kids don't have to worry about police, so they just don't care. I grew up in an affluent, white neighborhood so I have seen this first hand. In these places, there might as well be no laws regarding drugs. And I think the results are not very surprising. Dumb teenage kids try heroin and then get hooked and then suffer some horrible consequence which can oftentimes be death. I personally knew two people who died that way.

Your argument is like saying that we should make insider trading legal because people still do insider trading. Or that we should abandon financial laws and regulations because the great recession happened in spite of them. This is incorrect. Regulations prevent financial collapses. If harsh punishment were distributed to everyone who engaged in corporate crime then corporate crime would plummet. And I truly believe that if affluent white kids had a real, tangible threat to their short term well-being in response to drug use then we would see a massive decline in their drug use. I know that HN hates this opinion but I'm just being honest. Go ahead and hate me. Downvote away.