[russellw]

It's a vexed question. Being in my teens and early 20's in the 70's, I was obviously exposed to the plethora of recreational drugs that were around at the time but didn't really fancy anything more than the Friday night puff of weed with a few mates.

We did, however, watch some of those around us ruin (and in some cases lose) their lives as some of the drugs weren't a good choice for some of the people and therein is the dilemma.

Let's look at the two current legal drugs: alcohol and tobacco. They are both heavily taxed and a great source of revenue for Govco but, in a twist of irony, the one that causes the least social issues (tobacco) is the more vilified and more restricted in use.
The commonly used argument against tobacco is the health cost but it's currently (using 2016 numbers) only about half the cost of alcohol related health issues so there's more hype than truth in the concerns.

The biggest issue that I can see is the reaction to drugs by various individuals. We all know people who become aggressive, anti-social, maudlin (etc. etc.) after sufficient quantities of alcohol have been consumed while others are less negatively impacted but there isn't much doubt that alcohol and it's abuse have created massive social and economic problems as well as being a significant contributor to road trauma and other deaths. Do we really want to add to the list of drugs that people can react badly to?

Cheers
Russ