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> ergo, one of their arguments is going to be that SR created a drug market, and made addicts of innocent children who were looking for my little pony pictures and got tricked into taking smack.

Doesn't that seem reasonable? Not in the extreme form you've taken at least, but in a milder form. It seems reasonable to me that a number of people who otherwise would not try heroin due to lack of access might try it if getting it becomes convenient enough.

It's naive to assume that just because getting drugs is relatively easy that making it easier won't increase the number of people who decide to use drugs. Just as it is wrong for prosecutors to bend reality to fit their interpretation of the facts, it is wrong of those in favor of drug reform to bend reality to fit their interpretation. I would love to see more reasonable drug laws, and I'm probably far more libertarian than most in what changes I'd like to see, however, I recognize that by improving access to drugs you probably will also increase the number of people who do drugs, all else remaining constant.

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But that's the thing - I don't believe that it did increase access in any substantive fashion - you can go virtually anywhere on the planet, and find someone selling the usual suspects. From those who I know who used SR (fully aware this is apocryphal!), usage actually generally decreased, as rather than buying large quantities infrequently from a local dealer (less risk), folks would buy smaller quantities more often, and thus moderate their consumption.

The only things which certainly proliferated more readily as a result of SR would be RCs (Research Chemicals), which your shady park dealer does not usually carry.

Either way, I reckon that this argument will be pivotal in their case, and they will, over the course of the trial, present hockey-stick graphs showing that SR has turned the entire planet into heroin users.

So - I don't reckon this will have increased the number of people taking drugs. I would rather think that it may have encouraged people to experiment more than they otherwise would have due to increased access, but only in the case of people who are prior users of recreational substances - and as above, if anything, it reduced consumption in areas where a "street" supply already existed.