People in this thread have said that harms caused by criminalization exceed harms caused by legalization. I think that's wrong.
My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here. Diffuse harms are hard to measure and usually underestimated. Whereas larger harms focused on a small number of people are very noticeable, draw a lot more sympathy, and are easier to measure. But the diffuse harms generally end up being greater in sum.
> My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here
Of course - we all do! :-)
I just thought you possibly have seen some more numbers/details about those diffuse harms, rather than merely a belief they must be bigger (which is totally fine, we're all entitled to our opinions or lack thereof, it's just that I believe that opinions are impossible to debate meaningfully until they become supported by facts).
This said, I think I understand your logic, but even without having any numbers I also think it's really hard to weigh different harms against each other, especially when it comes to such diffused harms.
As a simple contrived (and strictly synthetic, not connected to real life but merely a very naive thought online-comment-grade thought experiment to demonstrate the point) example - what's better, millions coughing or hundreds behaving aggressively? Or, say, thousands jailed for possession? (All numbers absolutely not related to real world situation, only to have different scales for the argument purposes!) How do we assign some "weights" to those, on what scale, and how do we "sum" those weights (it could be that a naive arithmetic sum is not the appropriate operation in the field of social well-being)?
My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here. Diffuse harms are hard to measure and usually underestimated. Whereas larger harms focused on a small number of people are very noticeable, draw a lot more sympathy, and are easier to measure. But the diffuse harms generally end up being greater in sum.