[Entelechy]

Your rights end where others begin. If you are an idiot and get drunk and smash into someone with a car, then you are infringing their right to life.

OK. So ban alcohol.

If you are an idiot who wants to get wasted on smack, and you cost the government money in terms of emergency health services, public disorder, and hospital treatment, you are infringing others rights to enjoy their property.

Putting aside the issue of whether the government should pay for health care . . . the "public disorder" argument sort-of works. If a high person goes and breaks a window they're infringing on the rights of others. So arrest him for vandalism. Duh.

Basically, by creating a nation of addicts,

Fallacy #1: Assumption of increased addiction due to legalization. No evidence given for this.

you people impose costs on the rest of us to clean up the mess behind.

Fallacy #2: Assumption that society must bear the costs of individual stupidity. A socialistic premise.

Where do you take into consideration our rights, the people who are not stupid enough to be tempted by narcotics?

Fallacy #3: Statement reveals a false belief that you have demonstrated how drug use itself violates the rights of others. All your examples are of someone violating rights while they are high, without even demonstrating how being high contributes to that behavior let alone how it causes said behavior.

[Cultural Jihad]

Having to pay higher insurance premiums does not equate with socialistic programs. Having to wait three times as long in the hospital emergency waiting room because of irresponsible people undergoing unneeded suffering is not the result of socialism, either. Not having a cure for cancer for your Mom next year because the person who would have discovered the cure died of AIDS last year also equates a payment of some kind, albeit not in a socialist sense at all.

[MadIvan]

Entelechy:

You really don't want to deal with history do you - when all drugs were legal, and you could get heroin and morphine through mail order, it created a public health problem. The figures I cite about addicts prove this.

Second, you really don't want to deal with simple economics either. When the price of a thing falls, greater consumption becomes possible. While there is a certain natural limit to consumption of heroin, those who would consume it could take more, and those who wanted to experiment with it would find it more available.

It is not a socialistic premise to suggest that addicts are going to leave a mess. Even the most wild eyed libertarian believes there has to be a police force to maintain law and order. It is also not a socialistic premise to suggest that it will create a public health problem. Even in the libertarian state, charity hospitals would be overburdened with the addicts, victims of their own stupidity.

Edmund Burke stated also, "In order to love one's country, one's country ought to be lovely." It is hard to see how any country could be lovely in the hedonistic vision of the libertarians present. A vision, I might add, that has sole concern with the rights of the addict to blow their brains out, and absolute ZERO concern for those who will, in one way or another, be forced to deal with the mess that is left behind.

Ivan