So America of the 18th and 19th Century (when most of the drugs you are talking about were pefectly legal on all States and Territories and most localties) was some sort of hopelessly flawed society? A den of inequity where the social fabric of society could not be held together?
Sorry, I don’t buy that arguement. The country got by perfectly well BEFORE most of our current drug laws were enacted and I’m willing to believe it could get by perfectly well without them now. Sure, there were and would be some people who would get themselves into trouble by abusing them....and some who would even be made more likely to commit violent crimes because of that.... just as there are right now, and just as there were in the 18th and 19th centuries..... and those people could be punished for the violent crimes they DID commit.
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of illegal drugs are not nearly as dangerous as they are made out to be. The college kid that smokes a joint a couple of times a year is NOT likely to turn into some strung out killer.
The vast majority of people today don’t abuse drugs because it doesn’t make any sense for them to do so. The same would be true if most drugs were legalized today. We wouldn’t turn into a nation of addicts, anymore then we were in the 18th and 19th centuries. The vast majority of people who have used some sort of illegal drug at some point in thier lives..... are NOT addicts.... they are not hardcore criminals. Most of them leave full, productive and generaly law abiding lives. They are probably all around you and you wouldn’t know it. Thier flirtations with drugs were generaly quite brief...and had no lasting effect of any kind.
I'm talking about a distilled essence of opium in a form that did not exist until the 1990's. Opium (particularly in the form of heroin) itself did a great deal of damage during the last century, and the attempt to replace it with a purportedly non-addicting substitute (methadone) was a disaster of epic proportions. Crack is another two or three magnitudes above that. If you had to look in the eyes of children consumed by it, and see the wasted souls within, you, like me, would want to blow the brains out of the bastard who first sold it to them.
Criminality and evil do cross paths at points before the act of murder. The theft of a life is evil, but so is that of a soul. That is what I'm talking about here. I don't want pot to be illegal, or hash or Ecstasy. I'm talking about a drug that destroys the lives, hope, families and communities of people who often don't have the means to protect themselves from it. Call it compassionate conservatism, if you will, and sneer if you will, but they deserve a chance too.