In a way I am indifferent to legalizing drugs, because I won't buy them anyway. However, I wonder what it would be like in reality? Would it mean you could walk down the supermarket aisle and buy a substance for 9,99$ that ruins your life within seconds? The danger seems to me to signal "drugs are safe" by legalizing them - usually the government is supposed to ban dangerous foods, I think?
Sure, you can already buy cigarettes and alcohol, but I don't think they make you addicted after just one shot.
Just asking - perhaps there are plans for distributing them in a different way?
Also, even if they were legalized, would it mean those drug cartels would go away? They are now an organization embedded in society, why should they loosen their grip? Like if an independent drugstore opens to sell legal heroin, what would stop them from setting it on fire and shooting the owners?
There's not really anything out there that makes you addicted in one shot. Oftentimes people have awful experiences on first dosages of heroin, because overwhelming nausea is a common side effect of high dosages of opiates. It takes more than once to be addicted.
Cigarettes are mostly as addictive as crack cocaine and it still takes sustained high levels of use over days to develop a physical addiction to either.
The FDA would still exist, and would still have a job to do. You wouldn't be able to just sell literal poison in the supermarket alongside the oatmeal. The FDA currently classes items approved for sale into a broad number of categories: food supplements, medicines, etc., but there is nothing there for recreational psychoactive substances and there would probably need to be. The difference between that and the current regime I imagine would be that the focus is on the purity and relative safety of the product rather than 'does this have any medical use' because often it simply doesn't. And as a result of this some things would still be illegal, but it would be more about selling heroin that is only 20% actual heroin and the rest is who knows what, or selling something as marijuana when it's actually low-quality shit laced with PCP or whatever. Banning an entire class of a substance would be a rare thing, I imagine.
As to your second point, I think it's more likely that existing cartels would, in trying to transition to legal enterprise, find that running an actual business takes a set of skills that your typical pack of thugs just doesn't have, and you'd see some retaliation against legitimate suppliers who are kicking their ass on price and consistency. But unlike now where it's law enforcement taking on organized criminals with a shitload of money, they're taking on a husk of an organization that has seen its primary source of funding evaporate almost overnight. Different set of rules, there.
Honestly though I don't know what the cartels would do. It's hard to say. But one thing they wouldn't be doing is spending billions terrorizing innocent people, because they wouldn't have that kind of coin, anymore.
Sure, you can already buy cigarettes and alcohol, but I don't think they make you addicted after just one shot.
Just asking - perhaps there are plans for distributing them in a different way?
Also, even if they were legalized, would it mean those drug cartels would go away? They are now an organization embedded in society, why should they loosen their grip? Like if an independent drugstore opens to sell legal heroin, what would stop them from setting it on fire and shooting the owners?