Originally posted on 03/21/2015:

You are welcome to come up to the great white north anytime!

/on soapbox

While we Canadians are slightly better at less aggressively going after the personal vices, we are not even close to where we should be in my opinion.

In my opinion, all personal vices (drugs, gambling, prostitution) should be fully legal. It is should not be the business of government to control personal vices. Alcohol prohibition should have been the final lesson on that. The business of government should be about educating and addressing the downsides of the vices, like they have partly done with tobacco, alcohol and to a lesser extent gambling.

Overall, government should treat a problem and not punish it. Canada is slightly better than the US in this regard, but the differences are very slight and also very debateable and inconsistent applied.

Independent of the potential tax benefit, the staggering amount of $$ that could be saved in not policing/punishment and then a fraction of that savings applied to treatment and education of problems, a significant first step fixing a significant problem within our societies would be taken.

off soapbox/