Of course, the elephant in the room about both of these things is that they hinge on the illegality of weed. When weed is legal, consuming it doesn't generate curiosity about illegal substances any more than alcohol or tobacco do. When weed is legal, you don't buy it a guy who gets regular phone calls from people who regularly murder eachother to control who distributes where.

I'm not so sure I believe that. I'm not confident that a weed distributor is going to never give any advice to someone on how to access mushrooms, acid, or ecstasy. The issue is how deeply are people going to dive into recreational drug use, and then continue on recreational drug use and begin getting involved in the criminal element for other recreational drugs.

weed doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be a gateway drug. But it kind of is, because they made it one.

It's not so much that it's just weed, it's that there is a drug culture out there, and most of it is criminal. And sure, if you remove the criminality to it... you then allow the massive fucking incentive of the other drugs themselves to fucking destroy people. You'll transfer people out of prisons and into hospitals and homelessness camps.

It becomes a total wash. This is because, in the end, drug abuse is a social problem, and social problems can't actually be solved by the government. They can only become solved by the society. A moral prohibition by the general population is what would fix it, and basically nothing else.