Unfortunately too many parents are no more mature than their offspring. A few years back the 'state' of Missouri, had to restrict driver licenses for 16 year old new drivers graduated up to the age of 18. WHY because the stupid parents ignored and neglected to supervise their own children.
My exposure to dopers is limited but there is a wasteland of burned up minds creeping and crawling all across this land. There is no liberty in burning up ones brains. What is the cost of to tax payers caring for and coping with fried brains?
I can't begin to guess the threshold price at which it would be practically impossible to afford drugs, but a complete swag would be $1000 per hit. A quick google search revealed that the cost per hit is about $20 for grass. Unless we institute capital punishment for drug trafficking we are not going to get to $1000 per hit.
I think the hysteria over drug use is just that - hysteria. Few people know it, but narcotic drugs were legal until they were prohibited in 1914. Alcohol prohibition followed in 1919. In other words, for hundreds of years, the people of this country went about their business fine without significant restrictions on either narcotic drugs nor alcohol. How is it that legislators suddenly figured that the country needed to divert scarce police resources towards regulating something that can't really be stamped out without draconian measures that the public will not countenance?
I don't understand the half-assed regulations that have been instituted against them. If we are going to stamp out these addictions, we need more than band aids. We need to start executing dealers and users alike. All we're doing now is wasting police and penitentiary resources while making a select number of drug dealers very, very rich, while even homeless indigents can afford to get high. The drug war is a miserable failure because *anybody* - from slum-dwelling indigents to captains of industry - can afford to get high and dealers are ubiquitous.
The reasoning behind the laws was presumably that if anybody can get high, then everybody will get high. The reality is that while drugs were readily available prior to drug prohibition, most people did not get high. Even today, when drugs are easily available and cheaper as % of income than they have ever been in this country's history, a small minority of people use narcotic drugs. Meanwhile, we have drug cases making up 1/3 of the justice system's caseload.
I am not a libertarian. A libertarian would not approve of applying the capital offense to drug cases. I think we should execute dealers and users alike. However, I understand the libertarian case for abolishing the prohibition of narcotic drugs. It's got nothing to do with libertinism and everything to do with the impossibility of delivering a death blow to the drug trade given the limited policy tools at hand, combined with the massive drain on the criminal justice system that drug cases represent. These are resources better put towards thefts, murders, rapes, burglaries and other actual crimes that the perps did not inflict upon themselves.