Comment by buu700

Exactly. It's more helpful to look at this from the perspective of solving problems that push people toward unhealthy choices than from the perspective of how we can limit the freedom of adults for their own good. A few other thoughts:

1. US tobacco policy is far more liberal than the War on Drugs, yet which of the two is a successful case study in curbing harmful addiction?

2. The recent opioid epidemic is far more complex than "the government tried legalizing opioids and it failed". Whatever policies did exist weren't legalization of opioids, and didn't exist in a vacuum. You can't model that policy without factoring in the wide availability of contaminated street drugs and absence of safer OTC cannabis alternatives. More importantly, the drugs weren't merely available, but actively pushed in a way that should have been legally discouraged.

3. The above analysis completely ignores the most important point raised in the top-level comment: prohibition simply redirects capital from businesses that are regulated to those that are not. Say what you will about Big Pharma, but they usually don't go around hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.

4. Even if drug prohibition were the optimal policy for reducing addiction rates, at some point protecting people from their own choices ceases to be a valid excuse for harming the rest of us. We've punished countless marijuana users who mostly aren't addicts, inflicted terror and destabilization upon our neighbors to the south, and created what at least half of America believes to be an illegal immigration crisis.

5. The claim that drug prohibition even helps the people it's ostensibly supposed to help is extremely dubious. We're subjecting addicts to more dangerous substances than the ones they're actually seeking out, and locking up the ones who survive. Maybe there's a narrow slice of people who really want narcotics but lack the motivation to navigate black markets, but otherwise who is this all for? We're hurting everyone in our confusion just to enrich a cabal of warlords.