Sorry, but that doesn't prove your claim that eliminating restrictions on harmful substances will lead to less drug users and make the Mexican cartels go away.
It proves that drug prohibition creates widespread addiction and the very existence of drug cartels. For starters, take away the massive profit motive and drug cartels cease to exist, it's basic supply-and-demand economics of the sort that you love so much, drug cartels are the product of a distorted market of artificial prices. The experience of alcohol prohibition in America proves beyond a shadow of doubt that that banning a substance results in increased abuse rates and increased harm from unregulated products, creates a profit motive that becomes a natural incubator for organised crime, and that by legalising and regulating the sale of the object of prohibition is a dagger to the heart of organised crime structures that rely on the profits of the illegal goods.
Secondly, there is ample epidemiological evidence to suggest that regulating drug use actually leads to reduction in use. For instance, studies in Switzerland have found that by medicalising heroin addiction and providing a medically administered heroin maintenance programme that not only does heroin abuse, and most of the problems associated with it (crime, health problems etc), decrease but so do heroin uptake rates. Heroin addiction becomes increasingly stigmatic as young people begin to see heroin users less as romantic, disestablishmentarian figures and more of the sort of sad losers with a medical problem that they are. Not only that, but wherever drug law reform has been instituted, whether be decriminialisation in Holland or Portugal, or heroin trials in Switzerland and Canada, the re-regulation of illicit drugs, the bringing of the drug market back into the fold of the state, has resulted in a reduction in addiction rates and a reduction in overall drug abuse.
The War on Drugs is an abysmal failure, a stupendous waste of capital and resources and a ridiculous market distortion that make drugs the most profitable and unregulated market on the planet, the implications of which are felt on a daily basis from Ciudad Juarez to LA, Afghanistan to Brooklyn, Burma to Parramatta. Billions of dollars are leeched out of the economy every year, violence and corruption plagues everywhere drugs come in contact with, millions of people are sucked into webs of addiction and misery, all because of a market distortion imposed on the drug trade by misguided governments. No matter how you look at it, the minor harm impacted by re-regulating illicit drugs pales in comparison to the huge damage that leaving the market unchecked, untaxed, and masively overinflated. Not even close.
