You quote a very US centric reason. So why aren't any other countries legalizing it?
Drug scene in Soviet Union was massively different then the one in the West. A lot of western drugs were not available and came only with the fall of the Union. The actual issues were alcohol and sniffing. The actual drug scene was something that came with opening of the borders and society needed to adjust.
Soviet Union doing something is not proof that American policy was not what I said. Soviet Union did stuff for own reasons. They did not forbid just drugs either, they forbid half the things existing outside of their borders.
Nobody claimed the US was the sole cause of the global war on drugs, but it is a major reason given their stance and political influence.
Psylocibin and MDMA are getting established (again after many decades) in psychotherapy in the US.
In general consumption of many hard drugs are tolerated legally and in practice in lot of places around the world.
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That said heroin, homelessness, mental illnesses and addiction are simply things with a "nuisance profile" and has a super high correlation to crime. So it's not surprising they get the prohibition treatment.
which ALWAYS fails. it leads to fentanyl instead of regulated pure heroin which we tax. It leads to the money that could go to put these people in addict centers in to drug lords' pockets. people are going to use it anyway. prohibition does nothing but fill our jails with minorities. Tax it, limit daily use, use the billions flooding to violent cartels to fund social solutions to addiction. It's pretty simple. and undeniable the war on drugs is a failure.
The billions required to build housing-first luxury rehabs with hookers and hypnotherapists for everyone are there ... spent on the War on X (pun maybe intended?) and shipped to warehouses where cartel bosses keep their proceeds.
The whole thing is a clusterfuck of neglect, underfunding, and ... in general short-term thinking or more precisely the relatable but oh-so-wrong "hot heads in the soothing sand" policy.
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[In Seattle] People walking by homeless camps have seen bike "chop shops" there, but the police won't do anything. In the police's defense, on the rare occasions they do arrest homeless people for theft, the county attorney will just drop the charges.
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Oakland PD is the D league of police in the Bay Area. It doesn't have adequate funding and the population is the most hostile. So most A tier cops avoid it, while OPD gets rookies and the leftovers. Then there's the fact that they have half the police they should that similar size+crime cities do. Guess how many police are patrolling at one time among 430k people in the crime that Oakland gets? 200? 100? It's 30! 30 officers to respond to whatever mayhem is going on. One officer busy filing paperwork and driving 2 hours to Dublin jail for every 40,000 people...
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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-inc...
All while the smarter ones upstream knew it was all a lie and just a way to screw over groups they always wanted to screw over, not even getting in to the benefits their corporate masters gain from the free labor of prisoners who get 20y for dealing something that should be dealt over a regulated counter and the police force to capture those that get caught. All while systemically undermining and undeserving areas who have the most need of social programs. Hopefully logic eventually prevails. as shrooms and dmt become legal in some places i hope we can eventually do the logical thing and stop funding violence and start funding social progress.