Your big mistake is completely ignoring the scourge of drugs on society. The laws of the land are my business. Walking the streets without crime because of drugs is my business too.
Your big mistake is thinking that drug criminalization has done anything but add more problems to the mix.
“Your big mistake is completely ignoring the scourge of drugs on society”
First of all, check out post 5, my original post, in which I talk about alchohol as a blight on civilization. Prohibitionists never have any answer for that, because it is unanswerable. All they can do is pretend “hard” drugs are worse. But that doesn’t apply to marijuana.
Anyway, in the post to which you responded maybe I wasn’t explicit enough. Drug abuse has adverse consequences, but those very consequences, if but we let them, can set off self-correcting mechanisms in the abusers. We can bring the state in to punish or deter you, or we can leave people free to fail at life. The latter happens to be immeasurably more efficient, except that prevailing political, psychiatric, and other mindsets rebel at the thought of true responsibility.
I was rereading William Graham Sumner’s “What the Social Classes Owe Eachother,” which is like a good knock to the head. It wad written long ago, but even then the angels of the state saw tot to coddle abusers. His prescription was to do away with drunk tanks because they subsidize drunkenness. Leave winos in the ditch, and there won’t be as many winos. Nature punishes us for what wrongs we commit against ourselves, believe it. We need gubmint to stop us from hurting eachother, not for how we hurt number one.
“Walking the streets without crime because of drugs is my business too.”
Can you possibly be ignorant of the fact that their being illegal creates crime? Real crime, too, not the “crime” of using drugs, which can only be considered criminal with a perverted sense of justice. I imagine the argument runs in your head like so: drugs are bad, and if people can abuse drugs with impunity they won’t be able to work and will turn to lives of crime.
Well, we have that anyway, seeming as how all prohibition does is push it into the black marks. Plus, we have lives of crime subsidized by black market trade. Plus again, we have all the loss of freedom to go along with gubmint’s increasingly desperate mission to do the impossible.
I can see you assuming that drug abuse would be worse in the absense of the Drug War, even subtracting the concomitant trafficking crimes. But I’d be happy to trade, for then we’d be punishing actual crimes. You know, malum in se crimes, not the “crime” of self-abuse. That could always be handled by nature, as I said, if it’s so bad.