What you just said, literally, is the textbook definition of a false equivalence fallacy.

No, you just have a problem trying to understand what’s said to you, fighting some imagined war in text instead. For what?

“If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.”

I’m equating equal things. There hasn’t been an argument here on a level above them.

Also you are imagining a lot of what I’m saying instead of asking me when it’s unclear, I think this is deliberate but circumstances of upbringing made you think it’s not easy to notice, while it is and also discredits your argument.

But that’s all irrelevant anyways since you’re basically just regurgitating DARE propaganda that has little basis in fact.

Trying to present your opponent as a medium for some entity’s propaganda, thus attempting to diminish them as a subject of conversation, is something clearly incompatible with the image you are trying to create with that tone.

The fact is that drugs won’t cause a normally reasonable person to suddenly go on a murderous rampage.

A person who’d kill an attacker in self-defense - which is perfectly reasonable - can kill an innocent person under a drug causing hallucinations. That’s a very simple and a bit cinematographic example.

Anyway, use of alcohol does that. Of course there are accompanying circumstances, there always are, that’s not a counterargument.

Meanwhile there are millions of recreational drug users who go about their lives every day as productive members of society.

The conversation is about cocaine, so irrelevant.

You almost definitely know some personally.

IRL - no, I live in a country where harmless weed gets you a sentence similar to one for heroine. Ex-Soviet laws and all that.

Well, there was one guy, and yes, he’s normal morally, but I wouldn’t say adequate enough to entrust something important.

criminalization fails to prevent use by “ordinary people”.

It is the same like with sex ed. People who teach their teenagers about the risks and how to minimize them have much better success at preventing teen pregnancy or stds for their children than those that go the “wait till marriage or go to hell!” way.

In the same way countries that have introduced programs for harm reduction like drug checking, consume rooms, needle exchanges etc. suffer much less drug related deaths, or problems like HIV and Hep C.

But you cannot do harm reduction, social care and addiction prevention in an environment where the only people that drug users can talk about drugs with are other users and dealers.

I just think what it takes to forcefully keep these drugs from everyone is worse than the problems the drugs themselves create. I can get opiates if I wanted but I choose not to. Pretty sure people get addicted to illegal opiates mostly after a painful medical situation or from living in a desperate hopeless situation. Healthy people with opportunity don’t very often decide to risk their lives for high when there are other alternatives available.

I’ve done coke at parties with friends or in Vegas or whatever several times over the decades since I was young, never been addicted and my life was not ruined and I could say the same for many of my friends who have gone on to have families and jobs etc. But my life very much could’ve been ruined had I been arrested for it.