Look at the influence alcohol has in the US today though.
"An estimated 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States"
I could google statistics for violent crimes committed while under the influence of alcohol, drunk driving statistics, etc. Whether we like to admit it or not alcohol has left a giant, negative, impact on our society.
> Whether we like to admit it or not alcohol has left a giant, negative, impact on our society.
I don't think anyone disputes that. The question at hand however is if the legal status of alcohol has any influence on the impact, and if so, what it is.
The assumptions of drug or alcohol prohibition are that
a) Making a substance illegal reduces consumption of that substance.
b) Reduced consumption results in reduced harm.
The thing about b) is that not every drinker is a violent drunk and not every drug user is using drugs in harmful way. Prohibitionists are assuming that it not only reduces the number of users, but also that it reduces the number of problematic users.
Now the casual pot smoker or the "one beer after work" drinker is not causing trouble for society. At the same time, they are the ones most likely stopping consumption should the substance become illegal. However, the alcohol or heroin addict may not cease consumption the day his substance of choice (or at this point, habit) becomes illegal but instead acquire it through the black market, potentially causing more damage than the substance itself would.
The lessons from the abolition era were that people were going to get alcohol, and the after-affects were so violent and crime-ridden that the government was better off legalizing it and producing laws around the consumption and distribution of it. The same lessons are applicable to drugs outside of alcohol. 88,000 people is terrible. But most of those are due to people knowingly breaking laws. Laws that were written for peoples safety.
When there are no laws around drugs except for "dont do it", you're gonna get gang violence like the abolition era had. Organized crime is not something you want.
Many drugs at the population level cause more damage than harm, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise. (e.g. alcohol, marijuana)
Unfortunately, so does banning them.
There's an individualistic vs societal interest aspect to this as well. For some people marijuana is the best treatment or their illness, so do we inflict suffering on them for the greater society?
It doesn't mean that novel approaches couldn't be effective. It would be relatively easy to contaminate/poison the supply rather than stop it, but rather morally reprehensible.
Also, the current political climate benefits from a drugged populace (dumber, less motivated) with the second-class citizens (cheap labor) criminality creates.
Implying that you wouldn't have those same effects with prohibition in effect (people very easily got their hands on alcohol, nor is it possible to ever prohibit it, considering how easy it is to make) in addition to organized crime and black markets for the stuff and lost tax revenue.
Or used it to incarcerate a portion of the population and use it as an excuse to violate people's rights. Although it's unnecessary now that we can use terrorism as an even better excuse.
Drug crackdowns still abuse minority parts of cities. The people pushing drug laws still would like to keep those minorities in prisons without the right to vote.
Criminal drug prohibition belongs to a whole category of policy ideas that don't work and cause tremendous harm and yet are tried over and over and over again for ideological reasons.
Others include things like (to be equal opportunity and criticize both left-wing and right-wing ones) abstinence based sexual education, rent control and price controls generally, extreme trade protectionism, military driven attempts to re-make foreign societies, full scale command economies, legislating religious and social customs, etc.
