Prohibition is a failure. It has been for a long time. How much longer do you propose we should keep failing at it before we give up and try a different approach?
If you did more than scan for keywords and respond with flame bait, you'd see I'm all for making it legal. But in the meantime, if people are getting sick and dying from using the illegal stuff, it makes sense to avoid it. My point was that the two opinions aren't mutually exclusive.
If you were advocating abstaining from black market products your comment would make sense, but saying "keep everything like it is right now" is saying that we should continue to have unregulated product on the market. Best intentions aside, abstinence isn't happening.
And where did I say "keep everything as it is" now? Perhaps I should have been clearer: by prohibition in this context, because we already have legal prohibition, i.e., it's against the law, I meant in the vein of abstinence, that we should be telling people "don't do it".
We don't exactly have prohibition. We have a perverse, contradictory patchwork of state level legalization, federal level prohibition that overrules the state legalization efforts, federal prohibitions on enforcing federal prohibition laws in states that have legalized, and then in some states, outright prohibition (with black market product flowing in every state regardless). It's prohibiting the FDA from providing common-sense regulation to provide safe product.
We already tell people "don't do it." That's a failed policy that's producing hundreds of sick people. We need to make harm reduction via regulation the default case.
