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RE: I used to be a fan of Steven Crowder ...
Thanks, man, I appreciate your honesty.. I think we can also agree on the more important philosophical idea that Adam was trying to reach for, which is that it's not up to any body or person (government, businesses ie) to decide what an individual consumes... And that's what the big picture is, the realization that the war on drugs has failed and is a racket... or it's only doing what it was intended to do: erode our freedoms?!
Well... I realize the war on drugs is very costly and doesn't stop willing people to do drugs. Plus illegal drugs are involved in gang violence, police corruption etc. On the other hand I'm not for complete deregulation of all the drugs. If that only affected the individuals willingly doing drugs and just give people their personal freedom, I wouldn't mind. I have 2 notes though:
How would You like drugs like heroin and crack treated? Similarly to tobacco and alcohol now (age restrictions, high excise taxes, regulations of advertisement, penalization of driving under influence) or w/o restrictions?
Awesome. I respectfully disagree. Again, what I think is more important is the moral question. A person or group has no right to force or prevent ingestion of anything on another person or group. Simple moral behavior, I think. Whether one becomes addicted hasn't to do with the substance, but the individual. Sex is potentially addictive, so ban porn? ban types of sex? No? That's ridiculous? Well so is banning a plant. Should we ban sugar? We know people die from it every year, causing great "detrimental" effects on their loved ones and "broader" society. It's really not practical to ban substances... Do you know about alcohol prohibition? Al Capone? If you're concerned about addiction and the detrimental effects of "drugs" on society at large, be concerned about opioid and pharmaceutical genocide, drunk driving deaths, and the 6 million deaths globally attributed to tobacco... And yes all drugs should be legal... Less laws = better/ more freedom
Yup, prohibition was a dumb idea, I agree. Just like the recent bill prepared by Dems to ban over 150 different guns (shameless advertisement of my blog 😎). I don't think the guns are the problem (they're just tools), people are, although I wouldn't advocate for making nuclear bombs available to the public ;) There need to be some regulations, imho.
In case of alcohol, if the excise was dropped, the 0.5l (16.9oz) bottle of vodka in Poland would cost below 2$ instead of current 6$. Surely extra money in my pockets and smaller government would be cool (although not so much for beer and wine producers), but I wouldn't call that price drop moral.
If Your government decided to deregulate all drugs, leaving the responsibility to the citizens (drug producers and potential customers), the low production cost, high supply and competition would inevitably bring more users and more addicts. In the current state I bet if You wanted to do e.g. heroin, the government regulations wouldn't stop You. The responsibility is on You. It wouldn't change if goverment agreed on more drugs and at the lower prices to flow on the market, it'd make it just more tempting (imagine <$5/gram instead of current ~$400).
I think we both agree it's government's job (to some extent) to keep it's citizen's safe. The question is, should it be limited to just providing military, simple laws and efficient law enforcement or rather go further. I consider myself a libertarian-leaning conservative, so I guess we don't differ much. I just don't think deregulation of hard-drugs would be a responsible nor moral thing to do, as it's consequences (at least until society adapts to the new situation and learns doing some drugs, no matter how cheap or well advertised would they be, is not worthy) would be bad. And not only drug-users would be affected (family members, victims of crimes commited under influence, etc). I think at least some drug regulations should stay, just like there should be, imho, anti-monopoly regulations in the economy.
Thanks for sharing Your thoughts, newtreehints. Cheers!