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Legalizing all drugs will inevitably lead to more sales, whether or not commercialization is limited. This will increase addiction and drug-related crimes.
When drugs are legalized, black markets do not go away. In fact, they thrive just as much or even more than before. This has been clearly observed recently, especially after marijuana has been either legalized or decriminalized in over 30 states. DuPont writes that “The illegal marijuana market thrives in competition with the legal market by offering products at considerably lower prices because it neither complies with regulations on growth and sale nor pays taxes on sales or their profits.” Because black market sales stay the same or even increase, while a whole new legal market is introduced, there is an obvious increase in sales.
Whether or not through a legal or black market, an increase in sales will be detrimental to health and addiction rates. As the Recovery Research Institute observes, “... because psychoactive drugs, including marijuana, do cause acute psychological impairments when people use the drug, as well as addiction (about 9% of marijuana users), the increased accessibility, de-stigmatization, and decreased price that comes with legalization, would result in more users and therefore more potential hazards and harms in the population (e.g., drugged driving) as well as addiction cases.” This is quantified by the Institute for Behavior and Health, which observes that “Although overall the national rate of marijuana use for Americans age 12 and older has declined since 1979, a greater segment of marijuana users are heavy users. As shown below, from 1992 to 2014, the number of daily or near-daily marijuana uses increased 772%!”
Most importantly, the legalization of these types of drugs will lead to an increase in the production of even more dangerous drugs. DuPont also writes that “Unsurprisingly, much of the illegal marijuana in the states with legalized marijuana is diverted from the local legal marijuana supply. It is troubling that in response to the decline in demand for Mexican marijuana, Mexican cartels are increasing the production of heroin, a more lucrative drug.”
Evans ‘19 agrees with this, writing “There is evidence of a persistent black market for marijuana which may increase the presence of Mexican drug cartels that are bringing in other drugs like heroin.” Thus, not only does legalizing drugs increase domestic sales, but it also increases cartel production of even more dangerous drugs.
If the United States legalizes all illicit drugs, all of the above will happen but on a much larger scale. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, observes that “The greatest mortality from drugs comes from legal drugs. The moment you make a drug legal, you’re going to increase the number of people who get exposed to it, and therefore you increase the negative consequences from its use. When you legalize, you create an industry whose purpose is to make money selling those drugs.” The only way for the industry to compete with the black market is to have extremely low prices with high-quality drugs. This evidently leads to more people being exposed to the drug and thus more people getting hooked.