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All your points are thoughtful and well considered, but unfortunately, beside the point. My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

Is there any doubt that we are now under multi-lateral assault from well financed terrorists that are such a threat that we now must declare war on them? And that these terrorists include the FARC narco-terrorists of Columbia? They have connections with Castro, the IRA, and Ozama Bin Laden, and we have been funding their takeover of both Columbia and Venezuela with US drug proceeds. Even if the fantasy world of Libertarianism could dawn tomorrow, wouldn't the fact remain that the real, long term, and most devastating damage done to our country is not a matter of legality, but of the physical "drugging" of our future? Argue for or against this point, and we can have a real debate.

My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

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No reasonable person on FR is arguing your point that drug abuse is a terrible problem.

You are not able to face the reality that the use of a WODs, - OR, a war on terrorism, - to infringe upon the basics of our constitution, in the name of 'protection' subverts the very idea of our free republic.

We all know that some personal liberties have to be a temporary casualty of war. -- But, as per '1984', a perpetual 'war', is just tyranny, by another name.

All your points are thoughtful and well considered, but unfortunately, beside the point. My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

Drug abuse becomes a threat to our citizens only if and when the drug abuser deems fit to commit a properly defined crime, or round of crimes, on its behalf. Then - and only then - do we have the proper duty to prosecute and punish said drug abuser, and on the grounds I enunciated above: what you consumed before you commit a crime is irrelevant; otherwise (and I say this cautiously, not wishing to give anyone else any other bright ideas) we would be waging wars on chocolate cake because someone on a sugar rush decided to beat the living crap out of someone else for no good reason. Our proper domestic enemy is a properly-defined criminal. One who merely indulges a vice, however distasteful or disgraceful said vice might be to you or to me, is a threat to none but his or her own self; should he or she harm or destroy a fellow sovereign or said fellow's property in the indulgence of said vice, that is something entirely different, and something against which we have every last right to act accordingly.

Is there any doubt that we are now under multi-lateral assault from well financed terrorists that are such a threat that we now must declare war on them?

We are and have been under such threat for a very long time, irrespective of the drug issue. That is part of what I was trying to say when I posited above that, had we not permitted our properly-construed government to become an improperly consecrated State - that is, a State which acts beyond its legitimate and constitutional bounds, while neglecting its legitimate and constitutional bounds - such a threat would be inconsequential to us, because we would otherwise have provided and sustained the proper enough defence of the nation and her citizens' lives, liberty and property that few if any would even contemplate such attacks upon us. And we must draw very carefully that line which distinguishes between declaring war upon real enemies and declaring war upon our own citizens, a line which has not been drawn so carefully in the recent enough past. Not coincidentally, our systematic destruction of our fellow citizens' rights to defend themselves against all manner of predators probably has more than a little something with leaving us prone in general to such terrorism - when the target can strike back promptly enough, the terrorist has a few less weapons to deploy effectively. (Which reminds me: the pilots' union has a point when they press now for flight crews to be allowed to carry a weapon on their flights. Any bets on how successful the WTC bombings might have been if the stewardesses could have whipped out pistols and told those hijackers don't even think about it? And what the hell would have been the matter, at the nation's airports, with the local police departments dispatching contingencies to handle airport security, that is something which would come into the legitimate purview of proper police work and training? I mean, that is one of the reasons why we have police, right? Not to mention letting the airlines themselves take responsibility for their own security - you're not going to be terribly lax in that department when you're responsible for securing your own property.)

And that these terrorists include the FARC narco-terrorists of Columbia? They have connections with Castro, the IRA, and Ozama Bin Laden, and we have been funding their takeover of both Columbia and Venezuela with US drug proceeds.

Had there not even been such a thing as the War on Drugs, I should think that not a dime worth of "drug proceeds" would get into their hands. The nature of their beasts is that their market is the so-called underground market. Remove the underground market and they have no market and, thus, no profit of the sort which makes their activities possible. Castro, the IRA, and bin Laden are sure as hell not getting their financing by manufacturing lines of small appliances, or automobiles, or liquors, or cigarettes, or computer chips.

Even if the fantasy world of Libertarianism could dawn tomorrow, wouldn't the fact remain that the real, long term, and most devastating damage done to our country is not a matter of legality, but of the physical "drugging" of our future? Argue for or against this point, and we can have a real debate.

This would seem to assume that, upon the end of the War on Drugs as prosecuted now and the concurrent legalisation of drugs, the majority of us would rush forth to blow tootski post haste. I don't believe that would happen. In fact, I don't believe there is much more than a comparative and profound minority among us which abuses drugs with any great regularity. They were not illegal, by the way, until the Harrison Act of 1914 began the ball rolling, mostly, and if you don't count the occasional hiccup of embryonic big government from Washington on isolated occasions to that point, no one exactly thought the nation was going to hell in a handbasket because of whatever stimulants a comparative few were or were not indulging.

This country has been damaged by far worse devastations than the comparative minority of our fellow citizens who, for whatever reasons, choose to abuse drugs. You and I would most certainly retain the right to speak against abusing drugs; indeed, we should be fools if we did not so speak. (I don't believe, by the way, that marijuana use is of itself dangerous. Just because many if not most harder drug abusers began with marijuana, it does not follow that all those who smoke marijuana will graduate to the harder stuff.) The government's proper business is not to tell us how to behave, but to protect us against real predators; for telling us how to behave, that is why we have such things as the church or the synagogue, and various and sundry extracts of social power (in the proper sense of that badly abused phrase), it being so that social power is always preferable to (and should be deemed superior to) State power because the former offers considerably less room for abuse than the latter.

But aside from that, one who makes such a choice has, really, no bother upon us, other than our distaste for what he does (you and I probably dislike a good many things - let us say you and I both despise hip-hop music, shall we have hip hop fans rounded up and arrested post haste merely because we might deem hip-hip an aberrant deconstruction of the musical art and thus detrimental to our society's cultural advance?), until he plans and/or executes a properly defined crime against a fellow sovereign citizen, at which point we are most certainly entitled - indeed, mandated - to prosecute and punish his crime.

And we should certainly speak loud and long when the government, which is supposed to protect us against true criminals, engages (as it does, liberally enough) in the misuse and abuse of our fellow citizens' rights on behalf of prosecuting a drug war; indeed, on behalf of prosecuting a goodly number of "crimes" which were not in fact crimes but, rather, politically incorrect activities. (Cases in point: Hunting down financiers whose explosive success provokes enough people to assume one could not possibly have attained such rapid and visible success unless one had committed crimes to do it, that the government felt compelled to trump up a charge that all but amounted to illegal and unconstitutional ex post facto law; case in point - Michael Milken. Or, hunting down software stars whose mousetraps became so popular that the cats ganged up on them demanding tribute, and went whining to the State to do it for them, thus sending the economy overboard and promising only to throw a less heavy anchor this time: see Microsoft.)

We'll never get it absolutely perfect. (Sidebar: Properly defined libertarian sociopolitical philosophy acknowledges the impossibility of imperfect man creating the perfect temporal society, and that it is the far better part of valour to prosecute men and women for what they do or are truly planning to do, rather than what we think they are going to do.) You know that without my even having to say so. But we can sure as hell do it a lot better, and with a lot less abuse of power and distortion of the rule of law, than is done now.

We have been "drugged" by a far worse narcotic than drug abuse; namely: the narcotic that the State is the be-all and end-all of our temporal life, that there is no earthly problem that can be resolved among individuals except by the solvent of State power which inevitably must plunder other citizens to make the attempt. That narcotic has done far greater damage to the American experience than any pot smoker or coke blower has done, which is not to say that I would prefer living in a society jammed with pot smokers or coke blowers.