The difference here is what is destroyed by a given regulation. Drugs by themselves are typically locally destructive to the user. In the case of legality, th

The difference here is what is destroyed by a given regulation. Drugs by themselves are typically locally destructive to the user. In the case of legality, they have recourse to eliminate the destruction (rehab and other community sources) vs. the continuing destruction that is available in the modern prison system. The lack of positive recourse is destructive socially too, due to black market competition (which is far more murderous than legal competition). Drugs made legal might cause some destruction of rain forest, but might create instead better conservation. All in all, the regulations around drugs currently are nothing but negative. There is nothing positive about the ivory trade. Legal and illegal ivory trade is largely harmless at the consumer end, but at the production end we are losing an entire species, and that will have ecological costs that we can't even begin to summarize. Even if we cut off the tusks and sold those, poachers would continue to kill of those elephants as well (happened with rhinos, so this is demonstrated in a real world example). These are entirely different real world scenarios and should be treated as such.