Rather than attack the people who consume drugs, rather than attack the people who are looking for another way, why not question if your way, after decades and decades of failure, is worse than a failure, whether criminalization is actually contributing to the problem? The American People came to the conclusion that prohibition failed so they turned turned a different way and repealed Prohibition.
We are not chained to a bad policy. Reciting the ravages of alcohol did not make prohibition a good policy. When we were killing 50,000 people a year on the roads, about half from alcohol consumption, we did not mitigate that problem by returning to prohibition, we criminalized the behavior but not the consumption of alcohol itself.
Rather than preaching banalities that education is the ultimate answer, when you mean nothing of the kind, when you mean that criminalization is the ultimate answer, why not say so? For example, you say:
"libertine behaviors happen to affect many others; so don’t get upset when you harm another and the big ugly dude with a sharp stick adds the punctuation marks to the story"
You will see in my post #164 that I too am concerned about excessive drug use causing harm to others, indeed, I even use the example you use of harm caused to innocents from driving under the influence . I explicitly advocate punishing that behavior rather than the consumption. Evidently, you want to punish both. That is what we are doing now with drugs. That is not working. We are, vastly more proactive in enforcing drunk driving laws and policing that behavior rather than the consumption itself (the crime consists of mixing the driving and the consumption, not the consumption itself) and that criminalization has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Instead of advocating education in your response to me as you did in your first reply, you presume that I tolerate operating vehicles under the influence of drugs as a way of shutting down debate by resort to the ad hominem:
"hey, it is his right to do so under your mistaken reality, right?"
My reply # 164, written before your last, indicates that I do not.
By Attacking and imputing false motives to those who have come to the conclusion that your way is not working, that it is worse because it is counterproductive, you avoid dealing with the problems caused by doing it your way. You lament the innocent people killed by driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, so do I. But I also deplore the corruption of our legal system, the criminality, the waste of tax expenditures, the frustration of our foreign policy, all of which you inflict on me and other innocent Americans with your policy while failing every reasonable test of effective social policy.
Have you considered that those lifeless innocent bodies by the side of the road which you lament are (only in a public policy sense) your fault?
