Mexico decriminalized small amounts of drugs. The violence went away. Oh,no it didn't.
Mexico is a poor example for several reasons:
First I believe the decriminalization is for mere possession of small amounts by a user. Yet the majority of the violence is committed by dealers and traders and dealing and trading is still a crime.
Decriminalizing use and possession for use does little to stop the drug trade violence because it does not remove the financial incentives for dealing and trading. All it does is keep the users out of jail, leaving more room for others.
It also doesn't reduce the price of the drug, so the real addicts still commit criminal and desperate acts to supply a habit which is unaffordable.
Second most of the violence in Mexico is not dependent on the laws of Mexico and whether the drugs are legal or illegal there because the market for most of the drugs is the United States and so it is US laws that matter.
They are not fighting over local markets, but over the routes to the United States to supply the far more wealthy US market.
Legal or illegal in Mexico does not impact the demand on the US side of the border, nor reduce the financial incentives to supply that market illicitly.
Now if both use and selling became legal in the USA the violence over drugs in Mexico and the USA would drop almost immediately.
Cartels and everyone that makes money on drugs are highly against any legalization, we saw this in California where many of the pot growers voted against legalizing marijuana because it would not longer be as profitable.
If it was legal they would actually have to compete with large corporations, and manage actual large scale farms like any other crop just to make an average living, not grow a tiny garden and reap large financial rewards.
The price of the drugs with such large scale competition would drop significantly, and so the financial incentives to smuggle or even be involved in an illicit drug trade would disappear (unless the government added extremely excessive taxes that still made it highly profitable to provide an untaxed source.)
Additionally the places most drugs come from, like all those locations in Asia or South America would no longer be producing much, because if the crop was worth little more than a vegetable, the massive financial incentive to grow the drugs would be gone.
The flip side is there would be more people that tried or became addicted to things that ruin families and reduce productivity (the big concern for politicians and government that live on taxes, they want maximum productivity.)
So the violence over it would disappear but there would be a lot more addicts, much like there is more people with drinking problems than anything illegal.
Drugs were legal in the 1700s and 1800s. Many people abused laudanum (opium tincture) and addiction was common.
The addiction of soldiers to morphine after they got a taste for it during the Civil War was very widespread. Heroine being naively invented to help all the addicted soldiers break the habit.
In the late 1800s many abused cocaine. It was popular among both aristocrats and artists, many housewives, and its abuse even though detrimental to health was encouraged by employers of laborers because it increased productivity, similar to coffee today.
The other thing is there would still be criminals that wanted something for nothing, and if they didn't have the illicit drug market they would have to resort to something else. So there is an argument that the drug trade provides a path that takes such predisposed individuals and has them become known criminals without really having them pose much danger to the average person.
Of course that could be offset by the fact that fewer addicts would need to resort to crime to feed an addiction because the drug was inexpensive. Not many robberies to feed alcohol addiction happen because it is widely available and inexpensive.
So a lot of violent crime would also disappear if addicts could purchase cheap drugs at a local store, and there is far more addicts committing crime than the amount of dealers which exist.
So the real question is whether the pros of legalization would outweigh the cons.
Perhaps they would overall, especially when you add in all the other freedoms (like search and seizure case law) lost to fight the drug war.
Even the NFA was ruled not to apply to homemade firearms, until the Raich marijuana case was used to reverse that decision
The huge cost to taxpayers would be reduced (a large percentage of LEO are employed fighting the drug war in some way either directly targeting addicts and dealers, or indirectly through the crimes that result when addicts commit crimes to feed habits, or people rob dealers, or they fight over turf and drug market) as most LEO could be laid off and all the funding and aid given to foreign governments to combat drugs wouldn't be necessary.
But you can be certain at least some family would have trouble with the widely available illicit drugs.
Drug addiction can change entire personalities for the worse, even if all the legal ramifications were gone.
It short circuits the reward system the body naturally has and that has a major impact on everything from personality to morality.
However it can also be argued that people have pursued recreational drugs as far back as history allows us to look, and laws are unlikely to change the pursuit of mind altering substances.
I would venture there is more modern addicts of legal prescription drugs today than illegal illicit drugs, is that morally superior enough to justify the prohibition?
