[1lint]

If the justification for criminalizing a drug is its propensity to cause societal damage, then by far the most important drug to ban is alcohol. Heroin addiction may promote theft and property damage, but that doesn't even come close to the mayhem, permanent injury and death caused by drunk driving accidents (as well as the social service costs of managing our country's subpopulation of alcoholics). Because alcohol remains legal, I believe less harmful drugs, including many if not all of the drugs decriminalized by Oregon, should be legal as well.

>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.

The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.

[DiggyJohnson]

Crack, heroine, meth, and opioids are demonstrably more damaging to the individual than alcohol. You're conflating total magnitude (individual harm * number of users) with individual harm.