Ah yes drug legalization is one of my passions. We haven't done that in Norway although we have never had as heavy handed approach to drug users as the US.

I have lived in both the US and the Netherlands and gotten to compare both drug policies. It wasn't hard to see the difference when going to college both places and seeing the difference in how college students used drugs.

Before this experience I was not pro-legalization. The American experience combined with the Dutch experience made me a die-hard believer in legalization because I could see it so clearly with my own eyes how these different policies played out in society.

In the US I saw how drug use really messed with people. People would buy from each other. Cheat it each other. They would go to dodgy drug dealers and get involved with criminals. Criminals who often wanted to sell them much harder drugs.

In the Netherlands far fewer people smoked weed in college. It just wasn't a very cool thing. Partly because drinking beer was far more accessible. But also the whole forbidden fruit as you say.

But the experience surrounding drug use was so different. In the Netherlands you could have CoffeeShops on mainstream selling weed. You did not have to go to some dodgy part of town and deal with criminals. The weed stores were properly licenses and regulated businesses. Government strictly regulated e.g. the strength of the weed they sold. Thus users did not get tricked into using ever stronger drugs to get more addicted.

It helped kill the staircase effect, where a soft drug becomes a gateway drug to stronger drugs.

Dutch legalization of weed e.g. didn't reduce weed smoking much, but it markedly reduced usage of heavier drugs, as you broke the staircase effect.