Drug decriminalization in Oregon begins today
I'm a proponent for legalizing drugs. But I believe there will be negative long-term consequences from drug use becoming normalized and so easy to obtain. People who wouldn't otherwise use drugs could be forgiven (after reading about legalization in the binary and positive way it is often reported, or from walking around a city with an upmarket weed shop every few blocks) for believing it can't be that bad for you and trying it out. I can say from first hand experience with weed that it slows down your cognition and makes you less productive, and it can easily become habitual and hard to stop. I hate to think of how many new addicts we might get if the hard stuff like heroin becomes normalized. I think legalized drugs should come with scarier warnings, like cigarettes, and there should be marketing campaigns against their use, like with alcohol. The primary objective is to not lock people up for drugs, to give them support they need, and to move their sale (to people who are buying them anyway) from the black market to a taxed and regulated one. There should be a secondary objective to not get a whole lot of new people hooked.