[jjsheridan5]

Your response is a lesson in both restraint, and effectiveness. What I cannot understand is how people who believe in drug prohibition can be so confident in their belief, when it is so clearly not working, and causing terrible tangential problems. As you say, where is the “victory”, or even partial victory, that can lead them to believe that revocation of prohibition would be substantially worse than the current state of affairs?

I do believe that because we no longer have a population united around a common sense of character, and one in which behavior that is clearly destructive and immoral (under any common historical use of that concept) masquerades as good, and healthy judgementalism is shunned as bad, that we no longer have a society capable of handling true freedom. As a result, I find myself unable to believe that ending prohibition would do any good. But I just cannot understand the people who look at what drug prohibition has done and not at least lose some confidence in their position.

Maybe that is why they are so quick to resort to insults.

[nathanbedford]

I take your points. There is no guarantee that eliminating the prohibition against drugs will not result in widespread increased drug use. I think that eliminating the profit motive will eliminate much of the incentive to push. However, there is no doubt that there is always social peer pressure and we see much of that in providing alcohol to underage kids.

I rest my case as well on ceasing the collateral damage the war on drugs is undeniably causing. Most people will recognize the domestic symptoms which are so obvious like corruption, disrespect of all law, innumerable incarcerations, funding of lethal gangs and drive-by shootings to name only a few. But there are also international consequences meaning the frustration of our foreign policy. We are actually in the position of chasing down terrorists bank accounts to confiscate money which we have put in those accounts by buying heroin grown in Afghanistan. We are liable to infiltration of our southern border by terrorists who pay off coyotes and drug smugglers. The list can go on and on.

On a theoretical level I would say that, you are absolutely right, our society has lost its way and blunders on without moral compass. I don't think eliminating drug prohibition will improve that very much and might even accelerate the decline, we would have to see. Clearly, what we are doing now is not working and the moral decline is proceeding very nicely under the circumstances which presently obtain. But, and I take this very seriously, because a society is unworthy of liberty does not justify withholding liberty. That comes close to an Orwellian, elitist view of the nature of government which presumes to intrude on the private affairs of citizens to correct real or imagined harms when there is no direct victim. So we have laws against prostitution which do not exist here in Germany-at least in the same way. We have laws against gambling-but not in Las Vegas. But we are killing about 50 million babies since Roe vs. Wade and I count that as 50 million victims. We do not intervene where we should and we intervene where we should not.Let us not forget that the constitutional underpinning for allowing abortion grew out of a misplaced "Christian" moral decision to ban contraceptives.

My point, in so-called victimless crimes the intercession of the government to uphold morals is a very treacherous path which can lead to real tyranny.