I agree with your first sentence, but without data, it's a super hard sell to the folks who think that the laws are the only thing keeping people from descendin

I agree with your first sentence, but without data, it's a super hard sell to the folks who think that the laws are the only thing keeping people from descending into hedonism. I wonder there is way to put some numbers behind it. Typically, this is where natural experiments are valuable, where somewhere legalizes something and another places don't. Then you compare. But it's hard enough to imagine any jurisdiction legalizing crack or heroin, let alone doing so AND systematically capture data to answer these questions.