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This makes me wonder how making drugs legal would affect the overall mortality rate. The changes in Portugal are interesting but it's not the same culture as th

• dawnbreez 11y ago
  You could argue it both ways, but I'd argue that the externalities of legalizing it (drug dealers don't have to shoot each other to compete, police officers are no longer risking their lives breaking into meth labs, etc.) make legalizing worth it.
• icebraining 11y ago
  I have to point out that we didn't legalize drugs, merely decriminalized their consumption. Just this week there have been multiple busts, ones for growing cannabis and others for selling amphetamines and hashish.
• 6d0debc071 11y ago
  > Would it make it worse (easier to get drugs) or better (less stigma about treatment). That may not be as binary as it seems on idle reflection. There certainly are drugs that used in extremes, and (occasionally) in moderation, put people in a position where day to day functioning is impossible, but equally there are drugs that cause very little harm for reasonable consumption patterns. All else being equal, who would you rather have living next door? A drunk or someone who smokes a fair bit of weed on the weekend? There's this thing that people do - certainly that governments seem to do with respect to the issues surrounding decriminalisation and/or legalisation - where the ideal, the thing they measure success by, is getting people to stop doing something that they wouldn't choose for themselves. That metric doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense.