They frame the debate in terms of the essential liberty of the human soul to find happiness without state interference, but it really comes down to the liberty to get high witout suffering risk of state sanctions. That's it.
There are a myriad of ways that the human soul can achieve, grow, find happiness and fulfillment. All of these way are rigorously defended by our laws and Constitution. But deny libertarians this one indulgence--to smoke pot until their brains are pickled green--and they weep and wail on account of their "chains." Pathetic.
The only libertarian more pathetic than the doper libertarian who defines his core existence in terms of THC concentration, is the libertarian who proudly asserts he is a dope-teetotaller but suffers unbearable agony because he cannot freely smoke a substance he has never smoked and has intention of ever smoking.
False. Your expressed dismissive attitude serves you poorly, by allowing you to disregard substance in favor of an appearance cultivated by the "drug warriors", hardly a group of dispassionate observers. Let me suggest just one substantive argument against the current prohibitions.
As any competent economist will inform you, prohibition of any commodity for which there is persistent appreciable demand will result in the creation of a black market for that commodity, with attendant disruption, violence, corruption of law enforcement and the courts, poor quality control, and collateral damage in the form of injury and death to innocents.
We have already experienced this phenomenon empirically in the attempt to prohibit alcohol (1919 to 1933). Crack cocaine itself was the unintended result of prohibition of cocaine in powder form: the smugglers were motivated to develop a more concentrated, less easily detectable product to smuggle, and voila! We now have crack-heads to deal with.
The libertarian objection is to prohibition as public policy per se, not to prohibition of any specific commodity.
If the objections to "dope" prohibition are motivated only by the desire to get high, how do you explain objections to prohibition raised by people like Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, Jr.???