I'm very much for making all drugs legal to be bought and sold without prescriptions, but you did leave the justification below out of your analysis and it is IMHO strongest justification:
Mark Kleiman "Half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did...Of the class of people who go to prison, a lot of them are drunk a lot of the time. So that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have done it if they had not been drunk. It's just that being drunk and committing burglary are both parts of their lifestyle. Still, alcohol shortens time horizons, and people with shorter time horizons are more criminally active because they're less scared of the punishment. Most people who drive drunk are sensible enough to know when they're sober that they shouldn't be driving drunk. It's only when they're drunk that they forget they're not supposed to drive drunk."
Obviously, drug use has a social cost. But so does prohibition. Prohibition is reasonable only if it is sufficiently effective that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Creating an extensive institutional mechanism to monitor and control what I ingest is a significant imposition on me. Someone else taking a drug is not a significant imposition on me. That it might increase the odds of someone imposing on me is unfortunate, but everything anyone does has some impact on that.
If some drug inclines people towards rights violation and violence meaningfully more than say, alcohol or weed, it should be banned--this is a libertarian risk-based argument.
True only if banning improves the situation. The hard part is thinking up alternatives to a ban. Governments like bans, because they are simple, not because they are effective.
I've watched the small town over from our city, grow from two police cars to over 10 now. There's not really increase in "crime," but petty things their police department has sought to target, like illegal parking. But let's not forget how profitable it can be, anti-drug law enforcement.
I'm very much for making all drugs legal to be bought and sold without prescriptions, but you did leave the justification below out of your analysis and it is IMHO strongest justification:
Mark Kleiman "Half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did...Of the class of people who go to prison, a lot of them are drunk a lot of the time. So that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have done it if they had not been drunk. It's just that being drunk and committing burglary are both parts of their lifestyle. Still, alcohol shortens time horizons, and people with shorter time horizons are more criminally active because they're less scared of the punishment. Most people who drive drunk are sensible enough to know when they're sober that they shouldn't be driving drunk. It's only when they're drunk that they forget they're not supposed to drive drunk."
Obviously, drug use has a social cost. But so does prohibition. Prohibition is reasonable only if it is sufficiently effective that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Creating an extensive institutional mechanism to monitor and control what I ingest is a significant imposition on me. Someone else taking a drug is not a significant imposition on me. That it might increase the odds of someone imposing on me is unfortunate, but everything anyone does has some impact on that.
If some drug inclines people towards rights violation and violence meaningfully more than say, alcohol or weed, it should be banned--this is a libertarian risk-based argument.
True only if banning improves the situation. The hard part is thinking up alternatives to a ban. Governments like bans, because they are simple, not because they are effective.
I've watched the small town over from our city, grow from two police cars to over 10 now. There's not really increase in "crime," but petty things their police department has sought to target, like illegal parking. But let's not forget how profitable it can be, anti-drug law enforcement.