I lost someone close to me because after eight years of prescribed use, in 2016 the ‘authorities’ decided to lower their daily intake to what the government thought the ‘proper’ dosage level should be. Doing so to an elderly person in their 80’s is criminal in my book.
So, we’re ‘solving the opiod crisis’ by putting people who need it in awful pain - all because somewhere some dude is swiping a couple of grandma’s pills and getting high.
And Grandma just has to have to deal with it. What’s a little pain when we’re solving a non-problem?
Criminalizing “addiction” and altered mental states amounts to enacting religious dogma into law, which is or should be against the 1st Amendment prohibition of establishing a religion. So are laws against prostitution and gambling.
The Temperance Movement on the Right and Progressives on the Left join forces in the earliest 1900s to form a consensus for big government enabling each other to advance their respective agendas, even though they contradict each other on some points. It is a marriage of convenience.
It is where you get “big government conservatives. A lot of “small government conservatives don’t realize that small government is not capable of nor inclined to enforcing their social agenda.
I am a conservatarian. That is basically a security/economic conservative who is also anti-abortion but libertarian/liberal on all other major social issue.