The war on drugs should never have happened. It's been used a tool of foreign and domestic terror and control for a century. It was designed and popularized by corrupt people who stood to gain wealth from restricting the freedom of others.

To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.

We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].

It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.

You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].

The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.

I'm curious to hear your own position.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.

"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx