Don't care for drugs or sex work, for all I care they should be legal. What is horrifying to me is the amount of violence / abuse amounting not only to slavery and trafficking but also the murders of the innocent these people commit. Should they be left unchecked, to flourish? Look at countries where criminal activity has gone up severely, thinking of drug cartels in Mexico for one (or other places) where normal people can no longer feel safe even if they want nothing to do with this underworld.
To be frank, I think the most parsimonious theory for why these trades involve so much violence is because we've made them black markets and forced the entities that successfully operate in those trades to be equipped to contend with increasingly military-like police forces, as well as incentivized to be secretive in their dealings, removing the reputational and regulatory pressures that many other industries are subject to, and giving them reason to harm people more often
But even if criminalization isn't creating these problems, it certainly is doing nothing to solve them, and making it harder for anyone who's found themselves involved in these activities to seek out help from more above-board sources (Including the police themselves, but also for example medical practitioners, who might report them to the police)
And of course this all leaves aside the philosophical objection I have to hunting people down and putting them in cages, not because they've harmed people, but because we think maybe something else they're doing is associated with that harmful behavior in many instances. This is just not something I can get behind
But at the end of the day, all of this pales in comparison to the systemic consequences of creating a powerful police state that has license to surveil and invade people's homes, confiscate their property, or even gun them down because of suspicion about contraband. This social cost is more than I would pay for murder investigations, let alone controlling what substances people can ingest or what motivations they have for their sex lives
> equipped to contend with increasingly military-like police forces
The real reason drug dealers tool-up isn't to deal with cops; it's to deal with robbers. Dealers hold stock and cash, and if those are stolen, there's not much the dealer can do - he certainly can't report the robbery to the police.
So as a few people have noted above, decriminalisation would result in a significant reduction in both violence and firearms offences.
