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Fentanyl shouldn't be available to anyone but doctor's, but that's just the flavour of opiates. If there's a legal, mild one, people will gravitate towards that more than a hard to get, illegal, dangerous thing which more or less does the same thing as the legal one.
That's why moonshine really isn't a thing after the prohibition of alcohol ended, because it's too strong for a consumer, so it's not provided legally and despite people still being able to illegally manufacture moonshine, there's zero market for it, because who'd go for illegal moonshine when you can go buy legal beer or wine or even vodka.
Regulation is key. For instance with alcohol things milder than 3% aren't illegal for under-18's to buy here in Finland, although nowadays most stores don't sell them to underage people. However even as an adult, you can still buy them at any hour of the day. A few years back the strongest you could get from a store was 5%, now it's 8%, anything stronger than that is from Alko, a government owned liquor store chain with a monopoly on selling out alcohol. As in "takeaway", restaurants can still sell to people ofc and buy from companies which aren't Alko. But Alko has the monopoly on selling consumers unopened alcohol stronger than 8%. From alko you can buy alcohol up to 21% when you're 18. At 18, you can get stronger drinks like vodka in a restaurant, but you can't go purchase a bottle of it to take home. Only when you turn 20 are you allowed to buy the stronger stuff from Alko as well.
Something like that, but for drugs. Should work well enough. It doesn't need to have all substances ever made, but most of the basics. Weed, amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, some milder opiates, shrooms, ketamine, etc.
I just think that the ones which require more responsibility and knowledge in using them should have a licence of some sort, which can then be taken away if you're found abusing or behaving poorly.
This would actually take the drug trade away from the cartels and manage the worst abusers at the same time. This would mean that literally most visible type of crime in a lot of the most affected countries could just up and vanish.
Most violent gun crime in the states for example? Like the people who keep saying "18-year olds aren't kids" (referring to the leading cause of death study), most of the gun crime with youth is gang related. And if it's gang related, well, gangs are funded by the drug trade. So what happens when there's actually no money in hustling? Like literally? Those gangs won't be able to sustain themselves. They'll "starve".
And the people who actually are high up in the current drug trade? They would obviously keep the situation as is, because of how much it makes, but I wonder if some of them wouldn't prefer their business being legal so they could actually use all their money and wouldn't have to be worried about getting killed all the time. It's a business, and the only way they have of settling scores is violence. If they were allowed — through paying taxes and following the regulations — access to the systems other businesses use to resolve their conflicts, they wouldn't need the violence. A debt could be reliably collected without chopping off limbs or busting kneecaps.
There's seriously almost only positives I can think of. And massive positives they are. And what's the alternative, as drugs are currently completely prohibited, yet completely ubiquitous. I could have pretty much any drugs delivered to my door faster than the shops will open for alcohol. You can get them even in prison. So as long as you don't encourage abuse and have systems to take care of potential abusers, how much worse could it really be?
The worst thing I see is purely decriminalising use. Honestly. Societally, that is. Individually, it's great and it is beneficial and it's the step we're gonna have to go through. But my point is if we stop purely at decriminalising personal use, then the situation won't change for the cartels, for drug dealers, for gangs. In fact, it will improve for them, as people will buy easier.
Which is why we have to actually legalise in some form to take control of the market which will exist whether we want it to or not. We can't allow a trade of hundreds of billions be left to violent criminals just because we're prudish about using drugs.