[caseinpoint]

I disagree with you on legalizing drugs. For me, the closer analogy to legalizing drugs today is not what happened with prohibition but what happened with abortion. When prohibition was tried and abandoned, the general populace was still very much self-regulated by their faiths and work ethics where state welfare was not a parachute for failure to support yourself. For those reasons alone, habitual intoxication was never part of accepted culture. Those who did usually had short, brutal lives.

By the time abortion was legalized, faith had eroded big time. Kids were no longer grounded in honor and morality but instead steeped in “Do your own thing”, “if it feels good, do it”, “there’s no right or wrong”, “Imagine no religions” etc. When abortion was legalized, its proponents were claiming that there were approximately 140,000 “backstreet abortions” a year. They argued that abortion would still be rare but safe. What happened is that the government imprimatur on abortions sent a message to our younger generation that it was “okay”. Abortion skyrocketed because government has become the ultimate authority for irreligious kids. Today we see abortifacient pills advertised on television as a way to cure a “mistake”. The act of legalizing abortion defined the morality of abortion for millions of people.

Now consider the drug trade. The same effect will probably happen. Nor will it do much to curb illegal trade. Any government-sanctioned drugs are likely to be tame compared to what can be compounded by illegal drug producers. The legal drugs will whet the taste for drugs and the drug people will be glad to produce higher highs and lower lows for a price.

I do understand the argument of legalizing it but I don’t think it would work for long and we would be at the same point but with more damaging, more intoxicating, more dangerous drugs and destroyed drug addicts on our hands. With our nanny state mentality, those druggies would be burdens for decades.

[fr_freak]

With our nanny state mentality, those druggies would be burdens for decades.

I have seen this argument before, and I could not disagree with it more. The flaw here is that it uses one government expansion of power - the socialization of health care - to justify an even greater expansion of power. Nanny-staters passed legislation making the government a health care provider, but rather than seeing the folly in that, they use that status to say "well, since government is your health care provider, it has the right to regulate your life to make sure you don't hurt/poison yourself." People have used this logic to justify a whole myriad of nanny-state legislation, from seatbelt and helmet laws to anti-drug laws.

I say, legalize all the drugs and use the same tactics as MADD does with drinking and driving to socially stigmatize drug abuse. Then, if we do see an increase in costs to government as healthcare provider, we use that as a justification to REDUCE government's participation in healthcare, not increase it.

If we keep going down the road that you are advocating, we will be under total government control in no time, because if government is going to take care of us from cradle to grave, it is also going to demand we live by its rules and under its control.