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I wouldn't stone you. If a person wants to get stoned(no pun intended) and be responsible for the consequences of his action...(meaning you or I or anyone pays for it AND it does not violate the rights of anyone else) let him be, and let it be his own business. ~~ Too many can't keep it to themselves. 160 posted on 10/24/02 12:28 PM Pacific by #3Fan

FWIW, I've always believed that on any Public Commons which exist (though I'd like to Privatize most of the "public commons"), the Taxpayer-Owners have a legal right to set "usage rules" for those Common Properties.

In short, even if society defines Opium as a "hard drug", I don't believe it would be a Moral act for me to break into the (privately-owned) house of some Chinese immigrant, smash through the doors to his basement, and drag him to jail for using this somewhat-traditional Chinese intoxicant.
But ON THE OTHER HAND, I do reserve the right to tell him to keep it off MY streets and sidewalks (as a Taxpayer-Owner thereof)... and to impose Legal Penalties if he does not.

(Incidentally, just to come back to Costa Rica a moment, I might mention in passing that "streets and sidewalks" are perhaps the only place where Costa Rican libertarians break with "traditional" libertarianism, and do advocate Government involvement therein... just FYI).

OK. I just think in any population, there is a high percentage of people that cannot keep themselves from getting addicted to things. Cheap and easy to get hard drugs would corrode any society in my opinion and I vote accordingly. I'm not the type that gets addicted to substances and you may not be either, we cound probably both have a little fun with this stuff and not be harmed in the long run. But we're different from a lot of people, most people don't contemplate this stuff like we do. When I go to work, I see a majority of people smoking at the breaks even though half of them are "trying to cut down" but can't. What if it'd been meth instead of tobacco? They wouldn't be working for one thing. Sorry, hard drugs are just too addictive to be made legal, most people don't have their defenses built up like we keep ours built up. In every society there's the 30-30-40 rule. 30% try to do right and stay clean, 30 percent purposely do wrong and 40 percent don't care. Those 70 percent are kept in line by the 30 percent that pay attention.