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A lot of this results from the fact that these drugs being illegal causes them to be tremendously profitable to manufacture and distribute. There are no cartels fighting each other in the streets over the right to distribute alcohol.
Yes, the US is already authoritarian in many ways but it is also extremely free in many ways. For example, on the one hand a person can go to jail just for manufacturing LSD. That's really authoritarian. On the other hand, the US has the world's finest free speech protections as far as I can tell. That's really liberal.
The US would become significantly more authoritarian if we followed your ideas about how to reduce crime.
The approach that I favor is to significantly increase police funding and to use the money to improve the standards of police work. For example, I would pay police more so that I could hire a higher standard of person and so that the hires would be more incentivized to do things right rather than to cut corners. At the same time, I would completely legalize all recreational drugs except maybe a few rare ones like fentanyl that are so concentrated that they can essentially be used as weapons. This would free up police resources - maybe not immediately, since there would likely be a spike of drug-fueled asocial behavior following legalization - but eventually, as those drug users who truly could not handle their shit without being asocial would get taken off the streets. I would have more cops patrolling the streets. I would also create special tent city areas for homeless people on the peripheries of cities and provide them with police and medical services, while at the same time using police to crack down on stuff like aggressive panhandling and making a mess on the sidewalk everywhere else.
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