Should drugs be legalised?

Some people believe that many illegal drugs are far less dangerous than legally available ones (such as tobacco and alcohol), so should some of these illegal drugs be legalised? Would the legalisation of drugs, and their availability legally help to reduce crime? Should the government raise tax revenues through them?

At one point or another almost all illegal drugs have already been legal (mainly medical) drugs, and then gradually been made illegal over time.

It is true that according to research recently on the dangers of drugs, that tobacco and alcohol were found to be much more dangerous than many other, illegal, drugs, as is demonstrated in the following article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6474053.stm

Many people would claim that this is a good argument for the legalisation of many of those drugs, but I see it as an argument against being so hypocritical and making our minds up to either legalise them all (highly unlikely that any government would do that), or to outlaw those that are currently legal (once again not likely to happen as there would be a huge outcry at the outlawing of alcohol from the public, and that is besides the fact that the tobacco and alcohol lobbies are very powerful and influential groups around government, so no government would want to upset those lobbyists.

There are a couple of side effects of the drugs listed that do raise certain questions in my mind though.

With tobacco, although I fully accept that tobacco is deadly and highly probably responsible for all the diseases that it is blamed for, almost all experiments to show the side effects and ill effects of tobacco have been done by strongly anti-smoking groups. I would like to see some data from some more neutral sources, just to confirm the findings and put an end to any possible doubts, as when tests are run by a biased party, then the results can always be doubted by claiming that the experiment was biased to find the result that they wanted. This applies whether the tests were conducted by either pro or anti-smoking parties, any bias at all questions the validity of the test. Secondly, the claims that tobacco damages lung function, although I am confident that such claims are correct, I would like to see some testing giving a control specimen where the possibility of pollution causing such effects are illuminated. We know and accept that smoking causes lung damage, but if you are going to try and prove it through a laboratory test, then you need to have one person smoking and exposed to the normal atmosphere, another person not smoking but exposed to the normal atmosphere, another person smoking and isolated from the normal atmosphere, another person not smoking and isolated from the normal atmosphere. This way we have control specimens to discover whether it is the smoking or the effect of pollution in the atmosphere that is causing the lung damage, because we know that car exhaust fumes causes a lot more damage to the lungs than smoking, after all how many people commit suicide by locking themselves in a garage with 100 B&H? None that I’ve ever heard of, but I know they’ve done it using car exhaust fumes, so surely they must have had some effect on the test results?

With cannabis, two of the side effects found are paranoia and depression in the long term. But this makes me think of the question as to whether it is the long term usage of cannabis that causes paranoia and depression or could it possibly be that the users are using cannabis to help them deal with the onset of paranoia and depression?

The likely conclusion of any attempt to legalise previously illegal drugs will be failure as the more conservative (small c) members of society will always lobby powerfully and effectively against it, just as would happen if there was an attempt to make alcohol and tobacco illegal to fit in with the rest of the list. They would never permit the outlawing of alcohol and tobacco because of the profits that are made from them.