Too many vested interests and it's a vote loser, anyway. Never mind it makes sense, but if drugs WERE made legal, the "saved" monies would no doubt just be used to prevent Social Secuirty from going insolvent for another six months or to give the senior citizen voting block all the free drugs they can choke back or poured into public schools to "improve" education by increasing teachers' salaries or some other entitlement program.

I used to make comparisons like "If the government can spend X on Y, why not <insert hobbyhorse space project here"?!>. For example, for what the US government has poured into nuclear fusion research or particle accelerators/colliders which have not yielded any public good in a economic sense, the US could have built enough space infrastructure to build lunar/NEO-sourced SPSes and solved the energy crisis (maybe).

But taking this tack is useless. You just have to deal with the here and now and accept political and economic realities. If what the Russians say about having a $20m-paying tourist being lined up for nearly every scheduled Soyuz taxi are true, this might show the feasibility and profitability of space tourism. RLV R&D companies might start getting a little more serious attention from venture capitalists, designs for orbital tourist complexes might get a little more consideration. If tickets were $5m or $10m rather than $20m for a week-long stay in space, how much bigger is the potential tourist market in the near term? Double? Quadruple?