Criminalization of drugs in the United States is primarily a political concern. Massive numbers of poor people and minorities have been excluded from our political process due to drug use.
In Florida, 1.6M felons were "given" the right vote again (1). Most of the large elections in Florida are decided by less than 100K votes. The governor's race was more like 35K difference. Who do you think these ex-cons will vote for?
A young citizen not being arrested for consuming weed seems good to me. When you multiply that event over the entire population, you have a huge regressive cost forced on these people. Imagine if they didn't pay that cost and instead lived their otherwise upstanding lives :) that is how you benefit society bottom-up.
By giving consumers, who are troubled balancing recreation and addiction, the proper treatment?
In my opinion, it's definitely easier to "handle" drugs when we can openly talk about them and their negative effects, without business and government telling us what to think about them.
When cannabis was legalized in Canada consumption rates did not go up. In fact, they didn't change much at all: they stayed fairly high (no pun, honest). This is evidence that making possession of cannabis illegal has far less to do "think of the children" and more to do with either mindless political dogma or else preservation of personal privilege of some elites somewhere (and those two options are not mutually exclusive).
Yeah, there are many political reasons for criminalizing it.
What I found pretty eye-opening in the sense of "Oh wow, that's so obvious, I actually didn't think about that" was that one of the reasons was the American Prohibition in the 30s, and after it was abolished, a bunch of people were about to lose their jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0
> I am not sure how full legalization contributes to the betterment of citizens, especially young citizens.
Your mistake is to assume a simple relationship between legalisation and use, and that there are no benefits to those young people already using or who would use anyway.
Keeping kids out of the criminal justice system is a huge thing.
In USA, eg, the tax revenue is used to fund drug education among other useful things. Recreational usage states in USA have also seen a decline in pot usage by school-age young adults (however, I'm thinking it's been replaced with something else and we dont have data on that yet)
