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its pretty sad that the general public will never understand and maybe never want to understand difference between drug addction and recreational use.
I dont think drugs will be legalised/decriminalised untill the people understand that there is a clear difference between the two, there must be a massive amount of people out there that have this missimformed idea of what a drug user is
It's a tough call the whole addiction / recreation debate, and I think the older I get the less clear-cut the answer seems to me.
Take alcohol, the vast majority of people who like a beer / glass of wine or 3 on a weekend do so with no adverse effects, bar the odd bad hangover. This to me is typical recreational use; using a substance for the positive effects it has on the user's life and using it in a way where the negative effects are vastly outweighed by the positive.
On the other hand, you have the pure alcoholics, who cannot function without the sauce. These are the people which the alcohol affects either short term (affecting social relationships, family etc) or long term (physical damage to the body requiring expensive medical treatment). Obviously I think we can all agree that these people have taken it too far.
Then you have the 'middle category', the people who consider their alcohol use 'recreational' but any objective observer can tell they drink too much. They might get absolutely fucked at weekends, start fights, smash windows and get in trouble with the police but still manage to live a normal life during the week. Eventually, this level of drinking will have a profound effect just like the alcoholic, but it takes longer / the end result can sometimes be more dramatic i.e. they get knocked over by a bus when blotto or punch some poor passer-by one night who ends up banging their head on the curb and dying.
For legalisation to work, the population needs to be A. sane enough and B. educated enough on the dangers of taking substance use too far.
In our tribal past, regulation of substances was done by the shaman / witchdoctor and the special place these chemicals took in the mythology of the tribe. You got fucked for a reason, whether it was community bonding or some religious / spiritual journey of discovery. I know a lot of people on this board have the same sensible ideas about drugs and respect them. People who have their heads together / have good support networks and have a life outside of substance use. My worry is with legalisation that there are so many down-and-out people in this country (through no fault of their own) that straight up legalisation would just put another collection of far stronger chemicals in circulation ripe for abusing.
I think the best (and probably most expensive way) would be some kind of social / mental testing to see if you were eligible, followed by rationing through someone like a GP i.e. if you knew you were going to a rave on the weekend, you could go to a clinic and pick up a prescribed amount of decent MDMA exactly the right amount for your age / sex / size. Problem is though that there would still be massive demand on the black market so it doesn't really solve anything, unless the drugs were of particular quality in that case people would be happy with their lot.
for that solution to work the mental health and social test would have to be objective and even a cursory look at either field would show there is little that can be objectively tested pre autopsy. there are so many crazy ideas and theories chucked around in the fields of psychiatry and psychology and the best of those do little better than scratch the surface at present.