Reply #198: Actually, when legal they were MUCH more widely available

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Paregoric (anhydrous morphine) was available over the counter in every general store in the United States and took a terrible toll on some, but nearly as many as we would assume from today's perspective.

Of course legalizing drugs today would increase drug use today but that doesn't mean it would pose a greater problem tomorrow.

A free press would be a crisis in some nations but isn't a crisis here. When you have a free press you develop a society that can deal with a free press.

If all drugs were legal society would change in the context of that reality to ameliorate the effects. (A generation from now very few Americans will smoke cigarettes without ever outlawing cigarettes.)

To some --I hope to most-- things the government does are more odious than comparable things people do to themselves, or do individually. A law forcing people to smoke cigarettes is more odious than people choosing to smoke cigarettes.

Putting people in the criminal justice system for drugs is a completely optional act of government. The government destroys lives so dope won't have to.

Ethically legalization could do substantially more harm than criminalization while still being the right answer.

And I am in no way persuaded that it would even do substantially more harm than criminalization does.

I consider depriving a person of liberty an extraordinary act of government, not a vanilla policy-option. To justify such an extraordinary and malign act of government the benefits should be overwhelming and indisputable. The benefits of outlawing murder, for instance, are overwhelming and indisputable.

Are the net benefits of drug criminalization overwhelming and indisputable?

This thread suggests they are not. Not everyone disputing here is a lunatic or ignoramus. The benefits are hardly unambiguous.

And the fact that government policy strikes particularly at the poor and ethnic minorities adds an additional layer of burden to the anti-legalization side. (Do you know for sure that drug laws contribute less to black poverty and second-class-citizenship than drugs themselves do?)