Singer Tony Bennett calls for legalizing drugs

[FrodosPet]

39. No one illegally sells legal products?

No one is bootlegging booze and smokes? No one is hijacking trucks? No one is doing smash and grabs at party stores and tobacco shops?

For what you are proposing, drugs would not only have to be legal, they would have to be wide spread and affordable, otherwise if they are taxed the way people advocate, then the criminals will steal legal supplies and/or keep producing them and still managing to make a nice cut.

Or they will just turn to theft, robbery, and violent crime.

As for the Portugal experiment - drugs are decriminalized, not legalized. In general I like their approach of pushing treatment instead of incarceration.

I found what seems to be the most authoritative site on the Portugal solution at http://www.idt.pt/EN/Paginas/HomePage.aspx

In particular, I would like to call people's attention to a paper on the Portuguese Drug Strategy:

http://www.idt.pt/EN/RelacoesInternacionais/Documents/2009/estrategia_eng.pdf

And finally, I found an interesting story in The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_specter

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"For people caught with no more than a ten-day supply of marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, or crystal methamphetamine—anything, really—there would be no arrests, no prosecutions, no prison sentences. Dealers are still sent to prison, or fined, or both, but, for the past decade, Portugal has treated drug abuse solely as a public-health issue. That doesn’t mean drugs are legal in Portugal. When caught, people are summoned before an administrative body called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction. Each panel consists of three members—usually a lawyer or a judge, a doctor, and a psychologist or a social worker. The commissioners have three options: recommend treatment, levy a small fine, or do nothing. In most respects, the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen."

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"Unfortunately, nothing about substance abuse is simple. For instance, although many people maintain that addiction would decline if drugs were legal in the United States, the misuse of legally sold prescription medications has become a bigger health problem than the sale of narcotics or cocaine. There are questions not only about the best way to address addiction but also about how far any society should go, morally, philosophically, and economically, to placate drug addicts."

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Portugal seems to have the best idea that I have seen, but don't mistake that they have legalized drugs, or are accepting of them, or that they are consequence free.