What drugs / narcotics should be legal for recreational use in the US?

all of them.. darwin was a smart guy.

Alcohol - It's too deeply rooted in western culture to simply do away with it (and I like it--a lot).

Marijuana - Because I guess we drinkers have to give some concession to druggies so that we don't feel hypocritical. And it is apparently a fairly benign drug.

Tobacco - but a total prohibition on the public use of lighted tobacco (second-hand smoke and all)

Everything else remains illegal. The effects of hard drug use are just too unpredictable.

Herb should be legal.

All narcotic use should be decriminalized. We should shift our resources from the prison complex to the treatment complex. This will take no less than a few decades.

Basically I think they all should be legal.

I also think there should also be incredibly harsh penalties for those conviced of DUI and the like while on these drugs.

If you are in your home and no one else is being harmed, the goverment has zero business telling you what you can and cannot do.

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All of them?

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IF they can keep it away from the kids and find a way for me not to pay for people's bad habits - ALL OF THEM.

The only drug that I know of that is completely illegal at the Federal level is marijuana, so lets start there.

All of them- customer must have either a high school degree or have reached the age of 18 to purchase, whichever comes first. Tax that shite and put proceeds towards voluntary rehabilitation/information programs.

Herb, booze and 'backy - the rest should remain illegal.

Responsible use is paramount. Unfortunately a few bad eggs spoil the party for the rest of us.

All of them. Thats freedom for consenting adults. Proper labeling and truth in advertising should apply though.

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All of them?

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All of them.

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Bonus points for giving the reasons for your answer.

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In the first two decades of the 19th century, all of the drugs we deal with today were legal and available over the counter. And there was one drug, above all others, which was responsible for the most petty crime, the most public health problems, the most broken families, and the most deaths. People were furious. They wanted it gone. And since this was the first two decades of the 19th century, they needed a constitutional amendment to do it.

So they did it. And it didn't work. It made criminals out of users and millionaires out of criminals. It made the drug stronger, and more expensive, and less safe, but not any less popular. So after 12 years, they wanted the amendment gone, and they passed another amendment.

Then, in the next few decades of the 20th century, after Roosevelt's Supreme Court gutted the commerce clause, the societal consensus needed for prohibition reduced from a constitutional amendment, requiring sustained supermajorities over time, to a federal law, requiring only a temporary moral panic among a motivated hard core (and failure of the silent majority to actively oppose). Since these other drugs were less popular, and the people they were popular with at the time tended to be black (cocaine), brown (marijuana), or yellow (opium), this wasn't a hard sell.

Worse, the federal laws were done piecemeal, on shitty evidence, and later laws (the Controlled Substances Act) did away with the need for evidence altogether. Now new drugs such as LSD and MDMA could be immediately scuttled, before scientists could even begin to do proper research, because they had the bad luck to first come to the public's attention in association with disfavored countercultures (hippies, ravers). When you give the executive total control over the scheduling process with no scientific checks, they have no incentive to allow real medical trials when there's a culture war flag to be waved.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, violent crime has been declining. It kept going down, and by now every per capita measure peaked 35-40 years ago. Homicides, robberies, you name it. Yet we have a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world. You may say tough-on-crime works. But over half of the people doing more than a year of time are doing it for a non-violent crime. What this really points to is bloated police unions and prison-industrial complexes using the selective prohibition of drugs to sustain their growth as an industry when by all objective measures it should be scaling back. So it becomes a corrosive influence with knock-on effects for the non-drug users, in the form of a militarized us versus them mentality in general cases, and a flashbang to the face and a dead dog in specific ones.

So all of them. I'm not saying it has to be done overnight or that it has to be done without any regulation. But those regulations need to be neutral, and this half-assed "well, we can decriminalize use, but still need to lock people up for manufacturing and dealing" bullshite doesn't do anything to get your supply chain free of impurities and out of the hands of organized crime, which means it isn't going to scale back any of those negative effects. The entire idea of an "illegal drug" needs to be rethought from scratch.