Portugal decriminalized certain drugs. Now, they have overall lower usage over fewer related deaths and illnesses. That's cool, I guess.
Imagine if we made the whole capriciously selected array of chemicals totally legal. We could stop facilitating powerful drug cartels profiting off black markets. By instantly removing the incentive and infrastructure for smuggling and selling illegal drugs, both across the border and in the streets, we could stop thousands (millions?) of annual murders and other sundry atrocities. We could stop financing an inherently interminable domestic war and propaganda campaign out of our own pockets. We could empty out the largest part of the largest prison population on the planet, a community so mistreated by that inhumanly bureaucratic clusterfuck that most of them (that survive) will return to their former occupation and far less equipped to transcend it than before, and instead spend the billions of dollars helping better educate the people who grow up brutally having the gleaming corners of their minds polished down by the public school system till they're smooth, round, resistanceless automatons.
What will they try their hands at next? Health-care, my friends. Hold tight. Here's some articles about Portugal being kinda civilized -
Time
article
PDF of a book about it
At the end of the article you posted from Time there was a small blurb about the idea that there is some kind of cyclical nature to drug use, which is to say that just because there is a decline in numbers doesn't mean it won't rise again eventually. That sort of makes sense to me, although that is a bit pessimistic.
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