China would disagree.
I’m not a hardline anti-drug socialist myself, but there are arguments. China has their national trauma of the opium wars and the century of humiliation, and are now pretty anti-drug. Generally drug dealing and stuff can be seen as symptoms of the alienation under capitalism. People are exploited and lead meaningless lives and cope using drugs. It’s big money and there are lumpen-bourgeois elements that benefit, and legalization legitimizes them or gentrifies them. People run drugs because it’s an easier way to make money than other ways. If people had good jobs and stuff under socialism they wouldn’t use as many drugs. There’s an experiment that showed that rats in their own cage with access to cocaine would heavily abuse it, but rats with other rats to socialize with would only use it occasionally to party.
As for the war on drugs, it’s colonialism and the insanity that has been lied about to us. The CIA funded the contra death squads in Nicaragua by selling drugs and bringing crack to the black community, which would cause a lot of suffering and disunify them. Thus they would be easier to control and the state could use the drug trade to justify militarizing the police and locking up millions of black men, further weakening this internal colony.
There’s also MK Ultra which is imagined to be successful in a way. The CIA didn’t simply try to do mind control and fail. They succeeded in filling leftist movements with drugs so they’d be pacified. Hippies would trip and “realized” they could just solve everything with peace and love rather than violently rising up.
Not trying to start a fight, but curious what @Aliveelectricwire@hexbear.net has to say. Last this came up I argued the opposite side.