This runs into that paradox where the frontiersman clears out a path in the jungle, only to be rendered useless because the civilization that grows out of that jungle no longer needs rugged, coarse, etc men like the frontiersman.

It is the same situation the United States is in. Provide security and freedom to Europe and Korea, and look at the automatic results. Another reason why history is cyclic.

Individual responsibility was there because there was no other kind of responsibility available. Oh, if you shot someone a sheriff might show up and want to know why, but that was about it. For everything else, you were on your own.

Being on your own is a powerful inculcator of individual responsibility.

I have been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to craft a good response, and I can’t. I appear to be an ivory tower guy spouting intellectualisms, without being able to define a list of practical steps, even as an exercise. Disappointing. What I have come up with so far:

1. Throw out government no-smoking laws over businesses. If you want to avoid smoking, don’t frequent establishments where it is allowed. Restaurants, apartment complexes, etc, should be free to establish their own rules.

2. Throw out criminal penalties for businesses that allow their patrons to get drunk. If they get drunk, it’s their problem.

3. Set driving speed limits based solely on safety, for each particular road.

The others I’ve thought of are too vague: “Eliminate frivolous lawsuits and negligence lawsuits - buyer beware, user beware - harmful intent must be established.” “Drastically reduce all government support programs - failure should always leave you very uncomfortable. The safety net should exist but be as minimal as possible.” “Eliminate subsidies.” “Simplify the tax code to remove all social goals. This includes most deductions such as mortgage deductions and charitable deductions, by the way.” etc, etc.

The problem is, it keeps coming down to electing legislators who are libertarian in principle, and who appoint judges who are libertarian in principle. The problem is the nanny state approach itself. I refer you to Carol’s comment #19. I sympathize with all of her points, but her argument is clearly the nanny-state argument, in full.

Well, that’s the extent of my reply. It’s a sad and deficient reply, in my view.

If a husband and wife get divorced their is typically a custody battle. If the H and the W both have good jobs and neither abuse the children in any egregious manner then typically the W will get custody.

If drugs are perfectly legal, and the W is a heroin pot or meth addict (or even just a very frequent user), while the H is “clean and sober” then common sense would dictate that the H should get the kids and the W should get treatment. How would society intervene to cause such an outcome if drugs are legal.

The typical argument is that alcohol is legal, so why not drugs. One word: coverage.

Alchohol appeals to a certain percentage of people, and it causes a certain amount of damage. If you throw in pot, Meth, LSD, cocaine, Ecstasy, K etc etc then you will get *much* greater coverage of the population. Instead of perhaps 25-30% of Americans abusing alcohol, we can end up with 50-60% abusing one of he many many substances now available to us. What would that do to the number of birth defects in our country?

I think that legalization proponents also don’t visualize what their life would be like if some significant percentage of their neighbors were frequent drug users.

I think that the issue is much more subtle than “severe punishment for DWI offenders”. A functioning and pleasant society requires a high degree of civility, attentiveness and self control. I think that drug use and drug culture runs counter to those traits.

We can’t compare what a tiny racially/culturally homogeneous country like Netherlands can do with what we can do over here. The model and the calculus that governs it is simply not the same.

Thanks,

Joe

A lot of the trouble stems from the fact that the substance they abuse is illegal, and therefore they have to go through absurd complexity and permutations and jump through layer upon layer of hoops to get their fix. (And, of course, they do all this as criminals.) Their whole life becomes about that next fix. If they had regular access to it, that stops, and they become remarkably normal people. They no longer have to worry about it twenty hours a day. They don’t have to steal to get the money for it because the price comes down to a realistic level (which should be about fifty cents a fix) and the legal/illegal pressure is off.

They are perfectly useful people in most work environments (true, their noses tend to run a bit) and they tend to function pretty well.

Understand, please. I am not saying heroin is a good thing. Nor am I saying that alcohol, tobacco, or trans-fats are a good thing. Maybe ibuprofin isn’t, either. But they’re here, and they are something with which we need to deal. Simply making them illegal is not dealing with them.

When we made alcohol illegal, what we accomplished was to invent American organized crime, and forever enrich the Kennedy family. The lesson, I would think, would be clear.

Their kids are (again, surprisingly often) generally fine - once the pressure about whence cometh the next fix is off. (I wish I knew how to italicize those words. They are key. So key I’ll say it again: once the pressure to find the next fix is off these are pretty normative people, and if you didn’t know they were addicts, you wouldn’t know they were addicts.)

A

On the contrary, I give kids a lot of thought. My brother lost his family, and his three wonderful daughters while deatroying himself on alcohol and perscription drugs. Thankfully, the mother protected the daughters and they appear to have emerged as fine young adults. My cousin destroyed himself and lost his family to cocaine. He’s still an addict. My brother-in-law is permanently brain damaged and has seizures from drug use many years ago. My niece lost her husband to alcohol, though she appears to be recovering now. My step-mother was clinically insane, so I was regularly abused as a child, though never sexually.

Anyway, I think I have some understanding of the problems drug addiction can cause and I do think about truly innocent victims much thought. But the truth is that all of the above happened while drugs were illegal. True, legalizing drugs probably would result in more addicts at first. But it will also remove fear of stigma and jail and encourage addicts to seek help faster. It also will lessen the extent to which innocent spouses and children stay with abusive addicts, because they will no longer fear exposing their addicted love ones to criminal charges and their families to shame.

I believe the truth is that a certain number of people will fall to temptation and never recover, regardless of whether drugs are legal. If anything, we’ll end up with more stoners (who tend to be passive) and fewer alcoholics (who tend to be agressive and abusive and the rapists you talk about). We’d have more addicts, but fewer innocent victims. That’s not a bad trade-off and that’s before we talk about earlier and better treatment programs for addicts and before we talk about the benefit to society of treating our adults as adults, capable of making choices for themselves. Thanks for writing and reminding us of the victims.

By the way, does anyone know what the Dutch (or any other relevant) experience is regarding the kind of rapes and other violent crimes Carol is talking about?

Don’t even start with criminal penalties for raping kids. Those already exist and do very little good. Kids aren’t good witnesses as they don’t keep a calendar: Dear Diary, today Daddy raped me, so specific charges can’t be brought. Kids are also easily intimidated: don’t tell or I’ll kill your mother and it will be your fault. And if a kid is being “raised” by a group of druggies, that’s all he knows and there’s no reason for him to think there is anyone outside his “family” who is different and who will help him.

Once heroin is cheap, what is going to happen to the children of the junkies? The ones who starve to death because mom and dad stay high all the time and never think to feed them, or the ones who spend weeks on their own because mom goes out for a fix and forgets to come home.

I completely agree that prohibition just enables crime, but free use WILL NOT be any better in the long run. Someone might not break into my house tomorrow, but in a few years, the kid who was raped is going to rape me. Frankly, I’ll take burglary over rape.