The violence associated with the use of drugs would be greatly decreased if the price was lower, as would certainly happen upon drug legalization. Most drug-related crime is caused by users attempting to find funding to buy drugs at artificially inflated prices (caused by prohibition raising the risk and cost of creation, transport and sale of drugs). reference

Few illegal drugs cause as much direct secondhand harm as smoking, which causes thousands of deaths every year among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke.

A state truly concerned with the safety of its citizens would:

1. Work towards the gradual substitution of alcohol with marijuana to the extent possible by persuasion because marijuana is safer than alcohol.

2. Not bring grievous harm its own citizens (and their children, relatives, friends and associates) by putting them in jail for crimes which can only be described as political.

Drug legalization would reduce health care costs overall by reducing the probability of overdoses and accidental ingestion of an unintended drug through standardization of drug purity and quality control by state-sponsored production and/or regulation of sale. In addition, there is no evidence of prohibition significantly reducing the use of drugs; so legalizing them would not raise health care costs significantly.

There is no clear and obvious third party harm. All examples of such are caused by related activities that can be illegal without blanket prohibition. For example, driving while intoxicated is illegal, while drinking alcohol without driving is not. The harm caused to children by their parents' excessive drug use is criminal insofar as it constitutes child abuse through neglect; drug-specific laws are unneeded. By this logic, alcohol, TV, video games, shopping, gambling, cleaning, sex, reading and writing, and virtually any hobby or occupation should be prohibited as some parents may neglect their children in order to focus on having sex, running a business, or building model railways.

The vast majority of harm from drugs is directly related to the black market. Most violence and death occurs due to problems on the supply side. This has a significant negative impact on communities and those not involved in the drug scene. Legalization would eliminate black market distribution, thus cause a massive drop in death and improve the quality of life for many communities ruined by black market violence.

It is not proven whether violence is a result of drug use or an inherent trait of the individual consuming the drugs. Correlation doesn not prove casualty. Clean people need health care, are violent, and neglect their children as well. It is not provable that keeping drugs illegal curbs these effects in any way. However, legalizing drugs allows quality standards set, also reducing percieved drug-related health costs, as well as providing an additional tax-revenue base that could potentially hundreds of billions of dollars per year in tax revenue as well as reducing superflouous governmental anti-drug spending.