I agree with your point that legalizing drugs is a good way to attack organized crime and to be able to focus on treating addicts instead of criminalizing them.

I agree with your point that legalizing drugs is a good way to attack organized crime and to be able to focus on treating addicts instead of criminalizing them. I strongly disagree however with your first point, 'Addiction is a symptom of other underlying psychological or neurological problems, not a cause'. You are implying that all addictions start with a psychological or neurological problem. Let's take smoking addiction as an example. In the 60's, almost 50% of the adult population in the USA was smoking. Even today almost 20% is. Not all of those people started because of some underlying mental problem. Other factors such as group pressure, role models or just plain boredom are much more important, whether it is for nicotine, alcohol or any other addiction. Furthermore, addiction can definitely be a cause to both psychological and neurological problems. The first one, psychological problems because of an addiction, is obvious. But recent discoveries have shown that certain drug addictions (e.g cocaine) also modify your brain structure.