I understand your & BULLFROG's points but beg to differ.
Caffeine, nicotine & alcohol.......the number 1-2-3 mood altering drugs in this society, though, I forget the actual order. All of them kill, caffeine not so much. And they all cause social disruptions. The history of the temperance movement is one worth some inspection, with attention paid to the arguments the leaders of the movement made. Note that to a great extent that movement was driven by women.
Of course fentanyl and meth and any number of other particularly potent drugs are far more dangerous than caffeine. Yet the foundational desire and the addictiveness of them all is basically the same physiologically. Nicotine is particularly addictive if introduced to a young forming brain, by some authorities it being as hard to kick as cocaine.
The "greed" argument as applied to the cartels is of no count as the same can be applied to Jack Daniels or Miller Brewing or Maxwell House or......I could go on. In all these instances a consumer demand is being served by a enterprise of a sort, some legal and sanctioned by government, and taxed, some not so and therefore causing us to spend tax dollars to stop them.
In all instances, through history, when there is a demand for a item someone will figure out how to fill that demand.
Now you can argue that demand is "created"......which to a extent is true. Yet.......a consumer with the choice of a legal product, one of known quality and condition as opposed to one of unknown quality and condition, that consumer will normally take the former rather than the later. This is assuming the government does not intercede with taxes and regulations such that the price of the legal can be significantly undercut by the illegal. Think untaxed cigarettes' being smuggled to this day in this country.
It is a VERY complex issue. And if one has some "moral" standard that he is holding his fellow man to, a "moral" standard that the other man may not hold or recognize then there is a impasse.
But for the great majority of us ( Is it most of us? Maybe not? ) what we are after is a resetting of the terms and conditions using reason and rationality in a effort to engender a better situation than we've operating at present.
And now......I need coffee......my morning drug delivery system of choice, a choice that thankfully is seen neither as immoral nor labeled as illegal by our overloads.