Picking what to believe based on what your supposed opposition believes is a stupid way to go through life. You cut yourself from large bodies of ideas formed by guys who think like you before different ideologies rearranged themselves. For instance, libs used to be imperialists and started wars, whereas conservatives, and I don’t mean just libertarians, argued against them just as we argue now against other forms of Big Government. The realignment took place when the New Left took over the Democrat party and hawkish libs became “neocons.” Now Newt Gingrich can accuse Ron Paul of attacking fellow Republicans from the left, but in my mind neoconservatives never became actual conservatives. They stood still while our party shifted to the left.
This is not to impugn the likes of Reagan, who went from New Deal Democrat to post-realignmemt conservative. His conversion was genuine and is well documented. Also, it’s not impossible for a real conservative to be a cold warrior and National Security State/military-industrial complex champion in his manner.
As for drugs, I think our side got distracted by the dirty hippies, and confused their funtime with their leftism. So that there would be no mote hippies, and purportedly to prevent the decent from civilization to aimless self-gratification we ossified into Law and Order types. This was a confusion, though, of our famous “social conservatism” and ethos of personal responsibility and our fusion of the proper sphere of government. It was good for people not to use drugs but bad for government, especially the national government, to assume responsibility for stopping it.
Forgotten was previous conservative opposition to previous anti-personal responsibility crusades like Prohibition. Lefties were too obviously opposed to the Drug War for us to join them, even if we didn’t favor it on our own, which we did. Too late to for you, apparently, to go back and admit the dirty hippies were right. Just like we may never admit the War on Terror was a waste. That’s mean our enemies were onto something, but that can’t be. They are always wrong! That’s why they’re our enemies!
No, they’re mostly always wrong, and they could have been right for the wrong reasons on the Drug War. We are not always right, anyway.
The drugs and hippie stuff wasn’t a coincidence. The mental changes went hand in hand. You do this, legalize, and you’re going to see the more users blue up. Guaranteed.
What you’re omitting from your otherwise sage observation is that there is a cohort of the ‘conservative’ movement that consists of moralizing whinges, Bible-thumping pecksniffs and the like.
These were the people behind Prohibition - and they were the people behind the start of the “War on [some] Drugs” - eg, Bennett and his sermonizing ilk.
These people need to find a hobby or something, because after 100 years of their whinging about the “evils of [insert something you can put into your body here]”, I’ve well and truly had my fill of these morons.