We don't have a huge problem of throwing people in jail for small drug crimes, that's a common misconception. It actually makes up a rather small fraction of the mass incarceration problem and legalizing all drugs, even the hardest ones, would barely matter.
I actually disagree with this, as always in theory, as eliminating the illegality of the drug trade also eliminates all the criminal situations related to it. Especially regarding the avenues of dispute resolution available to those participating in illegal activities. Also it changes the makeup of who you engage in business with and how you engage in business with them.
Prostitution decriminalization and legalization, even de facto,
can show drastically improved situational health (i.e. including general safety from violence, I don't mean just cleanness, etc.) for everyone involved from the Johns to the ladies compared to when it was criminal. Someone like Assimilate may point to shithole nations to our south as if they are counterexamples to my proposition*, but that's not comparing like situations for like situations. Yes, being a prostitute in Paraguay may be terrible, but being in Paraguay in general gives you a high chance of being a terrible situation compared to being in the United States. You'd have to compare the situation to Paraguay prior to even start. Nevada is essentially our only variable and even there it's so strictly regulated as to arguably be on the level of controlled substances.
A lot of states also handle sentencing in a manner in which those small drug crimes add weight to your conviction. (Something which a good prosecutor who truly wanted to become Governor someday would have ground Amir0x's balls into dust with.) They may "in fact" be going to prison for a higher level crime, but if they're a repeat offender that's altering their sentence.
This is just an aside thought but I saw a study, yes I know booo benji you're supposed to hate them, once regarding burglars and their recidivism. At the end of thirty pages of analysis, the paper finally included a part where it essentially said that due to the sentencing guidelines of the state where the study was being performed the actual dominant variable was their number of drug/intoxication arrests. (Not convictions or jail time or any of that, just arrests.) And this also applied to car theft and a couple other similar "blue collar" crimes. I believe they had controlled for it by the highly scientific (though arguably proper) method of zeroing it out. (iirc, car thieves showed more of a tendency to steal cars for the sake (pleasure?) of it...and based on what I know from TV and film, this is absolutely 100% true)
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