By exhorting them to stop. By providing them a model of those who do not use. By preaching from the pulpit and opening church and temple doors to them. But the one thing we ought not to do is to enlist the government to prohibit them from doing drugs. We have learned that that simply does not work, obviously you must agree with that limited observation because your second sentence is,
Almost everyone I know uses legal or illegal drugs.
At this point, conservatives generally argue that society has a right to protect itself against the undeniable harm which comes from using drugs.
When we turn to government it should not be to enlist the physical force of government to prohibit drug use, it should only bring the criminal law to bear on crimes which occur as a result of using drugs, such as driving under the influence of drugs. For the most part we do not criminalize the consumption of alcohol but we do criminalize many acts which might be enabled by the use of alcohol and we should consider the same approach for drug use.
At this point the liberal might say, the use of drugs is medically contraindicated and causes the taxpayer huge amounts to treat people who are ill as a result of using drugs, as a civil and decent society society must do. When addicts swamp our emergency rooms, when they swamp our law courts, our divorce courts, our criminal law courts, society has a right to pass laws which address the cause rather than symptoms.
It is at this point of the libertarian says, merely because the left has forced the taxpayer to subsidize healthcare does not give that taxpayer the right to curtail liberty to reduce costs of healthcare. An American Indian thinks he has a First Amendment constitutional right to practice his religion and smoke peyote. Shall the government have the power to forbid and prosecute this practice merely because it might lead to heavier drug usage and social dislocation including increased health costs? Where will that end in a world in which the left has an infinite appetite do "good?"
We sacrifice so much liberty in a war on drugs that is doomed to make matters worse even as it fails.
