The idea of criminal organizations adapting to legalization by going further afield into producing more dangerous and cheaper substances is counter intuitive bu

The idea of criminal organizations adapting to legalization by going further afield into producing more dangerous and cheaper substances is counter intuitive but very compelling. The extention of that is it creates a much larger underclass of addicted people whose lives will be so medieval that it will create a very polarized society, just by virtue of additional numbers and the difference in lived experience and life outcomes for the meth addicted and the not-meth-addicted. In this view, the horrible life effects of opioids like heroin aren't the consequence of their criminalization, they're from the rapacious toll the drugs take on the individual. The article's argument is the new criminal substances will just take the place of the now-legal and effectively up-market heroin, and make those addicts even worse off. The drug krokodile comes to mind as predators and addicts substituting away to cheaper more evil compounds to compete with more dominant established drugs. What shakes out of the argument for me is that the main product of the addictive drug trade wasn't drugs, it was exploiting the suffering the drugs caused. Gangs used it to traffic in human victims, and governments used it as a pretext to create paramilitary global police units - they both just managed it and leveraged it, and neither have done anything to reduce it. Imo, there are no fait accompli solutions to drug and poverty problems, but we have evidence to the point of absolute certainty about what exacerbates them, and that's public policy that directly incentivises tent cities, open drug use, capital flight from cities, exploitation of undocumented people, corruption that relies on alienation and desperation, and the reinforcement of the cycles these issues create. I'd almost guarantee that the legalization of highly addictive drugs will benefit dealers most before the benefits trickle down to the addicts they prey upon. I have other views on why they are being legalized, but there seem to be some pretty good reasons to keep them controlled, and ones worth addressing in the discourse.