5 Reasons to Legalize Drug Use in the United States

There are millions of regular recreational drug users in America. But drugs don’t always have bad consequences. Smoking marijuana has been proven far less dangerous — in terms of individual health and on society at large — than alcohol consumption. Countries like the Netherlands highlighting positive examples of drug legalization and its impacts on a country and economy.

Here are 5 reasons the United States should legalize some drugs, like marijuana:

1) Illegal markets and official corruption will disappear, organized crime will be destroyed

Illegal markets exist because drugs are demanded by the society but are not supplied by the legal market. Illegal markets are the origin for crimes and brutal fights about drug control with innocent victims. As well, corruption of police officers participating in profits on the illegal drug market will disappear.

2) Drug consummation will become safer

When drugs can be produced legally, they are subject to a certain quality-control of official institutions. Drugs that have been altered with unknown and adverse chemicals will disappear.

3) Demand for drugs will drop

For teenagers, the thrill to do something forbidden is gone. There will be less group pressure to join in taking drugs because they will be less cool if they are legal. Because the social taboo of drugs is gone, the handling will be more relaxed and open.

4) Crime rates will sink

To produce drugs industrially will make them cheaper than producing them secretly. Consequently, if addicts have to pay less for drugs, they won’t run out of money and therefore will not have to commit crimes to finance their addiction. There will be more police resources available to fight against crime and abuse. The theoretical and statistical links between drugs and crime are well established. In a 2 1/2-year study of Detroit crime, Lester P. Silverman, former associate director of the National Academy of Sciences' Assembly of Behavior and Social Sciences, found that a 10% increase in the price of heroin alone "produced an increase of 3.1% total property crimes in poor non-white neighborhoods." Armed robbery jumped 6.4% and simple assault by 5.6% throughout the city.

5) Legalization would save tax money

All efforts to interdict the drug traffic cost $6.2 billion in 1986, according to Wharton Econometrics of Bala Cynwyd, Pa. If you regard the cost to finance detained drug users, traffickers, and those who commit crime to pay for their drugs, this sum rises above $10 billion.