Yeah, it's easy to undo the war on drugs in terms of laws; just write new ones. To undo the cultural damage will take generations. In Norway there's increasin

Yeah, it's easy to undo the war on drugs in terms of laws; just write new ones. To undo the cultural damage will take generations. In Norway there's increasing political support for decriminalisation of drugs after the Portuguese model, but culturally I see much less progress. Because now the debate is couched purely in medical terms. "Imprisoning addicts is wrong", "replace fines with medical treatment", etc. While not wrong, these perspectives are missing the bigger picture. We're merely changing drug use from being something we want to eliminate by law enforcement to something we want to eliminate by medical treatment. The "want to eliminate" part is the real problem. We shouldn't want to, because we fundamentally can't. We need to instead have a culture of responsible drug use, like we already do for alcohol. Most people who drink don't drink very often, because that's the cultural norm. For illegal drugs, the dominant cultural norm is total abstinence. The problem occurs e.g when you try to give advice to a young person who just discovered they like weed. When you come at it from a total abstinence point of view, you will seem out of touch to them, and they will subsequently ignore everything you say, even if a lot of it is true.