20 years from now all drugs will be legal, and people will look back on the drug war and say, “What were we thinking??!!”.There will not be addiction or even widespread drug abuse.  People will be aware of the effects of drugs (good and bad) and will use them responsibly.  Some people will use drugs to excess, learn their lesson, and then stop (much like the great majority of us already do today).  The myth of drug addiction will be remembered as one of the many silly obsessions of the past that resulted in unnecessary and widespread oppression, destruction and death.

If you suggest to someone that we should legalize all drugs, they will say, “But then everyone will just go to Walmart and buy ecstacy and oxycontin.”  But this is absurd.  If drugs were legal I would not go out and buy them, nor would most of you.  True, perhaps we would experiment once or twice, as many of us have done, but then we’d be over it and we’d move on.  “But people will become addicted to drugs and stop going to work and taking care of themselves and their families.”  But this is untrue as well, as described on the rest of the site: drug addiction is a myth.  Of course people will stop going to work and stop taking care of their families.  They already do that today, usually without the influence of illegal drugs.  They are either bad people, or sociopaths, or maybe they just have issues.  The involvement of illegal drugs in this situation is not sufficiently significant to justify the extreme level of criminality we impose.

Mostly drugs are bad for you (however, some drugs in moderate doses are healthy, such as caffeine and alcohol).  I certainly do not condone the use of drugs.  People will say, “What about the children.”  This is a concern of course, but children are smart, smarter than some give them credit for.  If you give them the information they will make the right decision.  Many children use drugs because of the forbidden aspect – because they are rebellious by nature.  If drugs are legal they immediately lose much of their appeal.

Also many people believe that drugs are dangerous because they are illegal.  (“They must really be dangerous if the punishment for selling them is so severe.”)  Many people believe that some drugs are instantly addictive, a myth which has been thoroughly debunked.  Thus the illegality of drugs promotes the myth, which in turn promotes the illegality, in a perpetual cycle.  If this cycle is broken, drugs will lose much of their psychological power.  People will realize that the reason they want to take the drug is not that it is addictive, but because they simply enjoy taking it, or they are suppressing pain of some kind, or some other reason that can be addressed directly.

Many people are invested in the criminality of drugs for various reasons.  The child drug abuser supports criminality because it makes it easier to manipulate the parent: “Give me money or I’ll have to start selling and I’ll get in trouble.  You don’t want that to happen.”  The non-user supports criminality because it reinforces his impression of himself as being immune to addiction despite having partaken (when of course, everyone is immune).

Psychologists, doctors, entertainment, police, judges, prison guards are all invested in criminality.  This will be the real social disruption caused by legalization: many of them will have to look for new jobs.