The essential arguement delivered by society is drugs are bad, m'kay, because drugs are bad.
This is crap. Doing bad things is bad.
We have been doing drugs, as a species, ever since Ogwaga threw those leaves on the fire and everyone had a REALLY good time. Mankind has carefully experimented with the pharmalogical effects of every plant in any area they have inhabited to find good ways of getting out of their skull. Taking drugs is a human as the other essentially human activity, story-telling. Why is this 'suddenly' wrong?
Drugs should be legal or decriminalised (as a Dutchman for the difference) as making them illegal causes HUGE problems.
People get them anyway, but huge crime organisations build up to supply the drugs, prices of drugs rise, and users of harder drugs are very likely to steal to support their habit. People not connected to the use of drugs suffer, either as victims of spill-over violence related to drugs, or as victims of police forces rendered ineffective by waging an unwinnable war of drug enforcement. The USA jail poulation is over 2 million, over half of which are there for non-violent drug offences. That's a million people imprisoned for doing what they want with their bodies. And Bungie Jumping is legal...
Obviously someone on drugs who breaks some OTHER law, breaks the law and should be dealt with, but it is utterly ridiculous to make the taking of the drug itself illegal. It serves no ends, is a violation of human rights, and we are already protected from a drug user doing bad things whilst on drugs by other laws.