What people need to realise is the financial implications of prohibition. I realised this from research chemicals in 2003/2004. I could buy a gram of a hallucinogen with an active recreational dose of 15mg for $100. So a dose cost me about $1.50. I would sell them for $8-15 depending on who I was selling them to and how much they were buying. It was amazing to me that the people I was buying the chemicals from on the internet were making money.

So you have to consider the cost of making a chemical in the modern age. Consider common chemicals, eg aspirin, paracetamol, etc. You're expecting to pay a few cents for a 500mg "dose" of aspirin. Consider chemicals like LSD, 100ug, 5-MeO-AMT (a hallucinogen I used to import and sell), 3-4 mg, MDMA, 60mg. The manufacturing cost of making those tiny quantities of these chemicals with modern processes is a few cents, if not less than a cent. So prohibition drastically alters the market for psychoactives. It drastically alters the natural evolution of mankind as a high tech species. If there was no regulation of these chemicals you would call someone charging more than $1 for 10 hits of most substances a bit of a scammer. Fermented alcohol and tobacco (or, indeed, any non-chemical psychoactive, any psychoactive derived from plants, fungi or yeast) would be considered luxury products for connoisseurs.

The limited availability of psychoactives is a nuisance for everybody, but the price aspect has a particular effect on the poor. For example if there was no regulation of psychoactives you could keep the third world high for a lot less than $1 per person per day. Probably starving people would appreciate nearly free stimulants to stave off hunger.

As an aside, deregulation of psychoactives would cure the first world's obesity problem outright.