The year Mexico legalised drugs

<i>…there was no intrinsic link between drug addiction and criminality. In fact, it was only the high price of drugs, generated by prohibition, that led users to commit crimes, he said.</i><p>This statement is a real eye opener for me.

Given the choice between not being able to get adequate pain relief due to DEA intervention, and legalizing drugs, I would choose legalizing them, provided legalizing them would not limit dosage to insufficient levels for pain relief.<p>It is incomprehensible to me that it is somehow acceptable to solve the &quot;opioid crisis&quot; by making people with serious pain suffer and by persecuting their doctors for trying to help them.<p>However, it would be totally appropriate to allow limits on employment, insurance, and government benefits due to drug use. While I support their right to choose, I shouldn&#x27;t be required to subsidize someone else&#x27;s destructive choices.

I think the right approach to drugs is to regulate use by neighborhood. And with monetary fines only.<p>Outright bans cause too many problems. Illegal production makes drugs more dangerous. And allowing everything has some social costs too. Each approach eventually leads to many people wanting the opposite policy, so it will just go back and forth.<p>Regulating it by neighborhood will allow people to keep drug abuse away from their kids, while still allowing those who want to use drugs to access it without too much trouble. They can just travel to a neighborhood where it&#x27;s allowed. Avoiding fines will give them an incentive.<p>Neighborhoods that do allow drug use will pick which drugs to allow and be able to tax the activity and have rules to handle the activity. There are red light districts for prostitution. Why not handle drug use the same way?

And they had to stop because of the US... no surprise there.

The British East India Company, the largest drug trading organization of the 19th century, is to be blamed for most of modern drug trade.<p>It is very likely that the opium poppies in modern Mexico are direct descendants of the ones planted by the British.<p>After the British lost their colonies in the Americas, they tried to fix their economy by selling opium to China. A few decades later, many Chinese workers moved to the Americas, among them, opium poppy planters. Few decades later, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and many of them moved to Mexico.<p>Total death toll? millions of people.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Opium_Wars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Opium_Wars</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fgQahGsYokU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fgQahGsYokU</a> (animated explanation)