The ‘Legalize Drugs’ policy currently increases crime, but it shouldn’t do that. It should decrease crime. Drugs are one of the most popular crimes in the world. If it’s illegal, people do CRIMES to get drugs, and buys them from the CRIMINALS who sells drugs. Drugs doesn’t always make you mean or vicious. If drugs become legal, ‘crime’ should decrease heavily, because people don’t have to do crimes to get them anymore. It makes perfectly good sense to decrease crime instead of increasing.
Drugs impair judgement, awareness, motor skills… as a start to the problems. It is elective slow suicide. That is not good for the fabric of society. This is aside from the black market provisioning, or addicted seekers stealing to fund a habit that has broken their ability to purchase the product themselves.
When people pursue socialist funding of their respective lives instead of personal responsibility it is self evidently a financial drag on society.
I lived in Colorado for all of 2015 and the heroin use, which had been quite high, was dropping since the legalization of cannabis. If you look at the CDC link I have attached you will see that the states with hard drug use problems that are increasing are not those states which legalized it. Colorado has been seeing an enormous population increase the last two years and some numbers are distorted. For example, the over all accident rate dropped the first year after legalization but is now higher but then so is the number of people living there.
There might be other factors, but the evidence is that legalizing cannabis lowers harder drug use rates.
Milton Friedman once said that he had calculated that drug prohibition produced an extra 10,000 homicides per year in the United States. He also said that the main effect of the drug war was to multiply the number of innocent victims instead of reducing them.
For the effects of marijuana legalization in a few American states, check out this report by the Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org/resource/so-far-so-good-what-we-know-about-marijuana-legalization-colorado-washington-alaska-oregon-