It should be sold by the government then. Similar to how government handles the lottery, if they didn’t then some organized criminals would do it instead. They can control the stores and the packaging so it doesnt seem fun and cool and is just dosage information and a bunch of health facts and treatment plans. They can then direct the revenues to treatment and education.

If you just decriminalize consumption without legalizing some way to buy it then the black market and a lot of the problems with the war on drugs continue: crime, violence, lack of regulation etc.

I don’t have much faith in us handling it this way though considering the way we just effectively legalized gambling and now the most predatory companies are flooding addicts with advertisements to get them to gamble more.

So do alcohol companies, and they have a way higher marketing budget to convince you it’s harmless and just a fun thing to do when you hang out with your attractive friends.

Yeah, but it’s be hard to tell whether legalization would lower the rating or raise it as there’s a lot of confounding factors. For example overdoses and direct mortality would probably go down since people could dose properly instead of guessing. Crime and financial issues could also go down with an open market making it cheaper and safer.

On the other hand larger scale societal problems could be revealed by mass availability. Also more health problems from chronic use could be revealed once legalization allows for more and larger studies. Or maybe current studies on it are overestimating the harms because current illicit cocaine users tend to be unhealthy for other reasons and your average person will have less problems with cocaine use.

Either way I think it’d be hard to argue cocaine isn’t at least on the same level as alcohol and should be legal. Contrary to mainstream discourse that views it as some evil powder that will make you addicted if you even look at it.

It’s not, most studies put them about even, possibly more for crack but definitely not several times more addictive.

Meanwhile Sugar/sweetness is more addictive than cocaine but no ones calling to ban jolly ranchers.

Most drug harm experts think so:

Source

That statistic is about cocaine related deaths, not necessarily overdoses. Often with cocaine related deaths the user is taking multiple drugs at once, usually opiates, and often alcohol too, but it usually doesn’t get blamed.

This is also more a problem with prohibition then cocaine itself since people don’t know the dose of what there getting or adulterants. If it were legal like alcohol there would be far less deaths. There were far more deaths from alcohol under prohibition when your “whiskey” was full of methanol and industrial alcohol

Also overdose isn’t the only danger from drugs. One that alcohol is miles ahead of every other drug is DUI, which kills about 13,000, meanwhile cocaine, by itself, is rarely implicated in DUI. Alcohol impairs your driving ability way more than cocaine. There’s also chronic health concerns, which are harder to weigh. Alcohol is a carcinogen and chronic use fucks up your liver, meanwhile cocaine will fuck up your heart.