Personal freedom doesn't really equal happiness. Happiness is really a lot more complex than that, and so is personal freedom. Drugs are a good example of how personal freedom can lead to the opposite of happiness! Also, death.
You're right that personal freedom doesn't
equal happiness. Far from it; no amount of personal freedom will guarantee happiness, because everyone else will have that same amount of freedom. But I'd be willing to venture that personal freedom offers the best
chance at happiness.
I find that most people that advocate legalizing drugs are white guys who've never touched anything more powerful that caffeine, or maybe alcohol, and are arguing from a purely theoretical perspective. Me a few months ago, for example. But--I've talked to people who have experience with stronger drugs. Generally, at most, they'll advocate legalizing marijuana, which makes sense, since its effects really aren't worse than any number of legal drugs. But legalizing say, cocaine or heroine or meth? Drugs that'll hook you almost immediately and which can have potentially lethal withdrawal symptoms? And how far do we take legalization? Do we allow hard drug manufacture to say, advertise on television? To create a cultural athmosphere accepting or encouraging addiction? Look, obviously the drug war's a bust, but I think most people advocating legalization could do well to give it a long, hard look.
I definitely support legalizing marijuana, as I don't particularly like having to duck around the cops to get it.
As for the others, like I said, people should have the right to control what goes in their own bodies, even if it is likely to kill them. So yes, I think harder drugs should in theory be legalized. However, in practice, that couldn't work without first completely revamping our drug education to provide a much more comprehensive knowledge base to kids. Making the choice to do drugs like crystal meth is nearly the same as making the choice to wreck your entire life; I have a friend who's a cokehead, and he doesn't hold out much hope for his future. But you can wreck your life in plenty of other ways, so why is it illegal to wreck your life through drugs?
To violate the normal rules of debate and use a personal anecdote, when I got into weed, I came to find out that a lot of things I'd been told about it in school weren't true. (This was relatively recently.) Though it does induce a relaxed feeling, it isn't particularly addictive, which I had been told it was. Granted, I went to a public school in Texas, the most conservative state in the Union, so the actual normal state of drug education may be different elsewhere.
Part of the problems you're talking about are directly due to the illegality of these drugs. With them being illegal, we have no control over doses, over what the drugs are laced with, the quality of the drugs, and so on and so forth. A lot of the medical problems are due to these drugs being messed with or otherwise tainted by those who don't give a damn about the health and safety of their customers: they're just making money.
A person's body is their own. They have a right to do whatever they wish with their own body, and that includes taking drugs if that is their choice. By legalizing these drugs and regulating them, we can make them much safer for people to take. Will they still be dangerous? Sure. I'm not advocating legalizing the hardcore artificial crazy crap like crystal meth, because that stuff'll kill you no matter how much you regulate it. I am, however, advocating the legalization of all the natural drugs; that is, natural as in derived from plant and/or animal sources, rather than laboratory created.
As for advertising? I say let them advertise the same way we allow tobacco and alcohol companies to advertise.
Remember, the key is that people have the right to make their own decisions and should be allowed to do so. Trying to control them, even if the intent is good as your intent is, will do naught but make the government a big, huge, nanny state, and I for one grew out of needing a nanny a long time ago.
Kyronea sums up many of my thoughts on the issue. The expense and quality issues associated wtih marijuana in particular are a direct result of it being illegal. Remove the restrictions and there's no longer a point in charging so much.
Your introduction there is almost self-defeating. First you profess that your motivation for wanting the government to be a certain size is due to your personal preference for "positive anarchy" rather than stewardship and defense of the people, which disqualifies your authority on civil grounds. (Sadly, your mistake was being too honest...a mistake you will learn with time not to make, which is a shame.)
Next, you further undermine you position by saying that you favor the smallest effective government. So does anybody who tackles government from a civil perspective rather than an ideological one, myself included. Such an assertion is meaningless, and in its meaninglessness even becomes a liability. The discussion hinges on what constitutes "effective."
Lastly, you fold your entire tent in the last line, admitting that the effective size of the government "nowadays" tends to be big. I certainly don't mean to be hard on you, but your argument is off to a very poor start.
The idea behind positive anarchy is an idealized humanity that has no need for an outside intercessor because it can naturally behave in a civil fashion. I tried to make the point that this idea is in no way feasible; this being the case, stewardship and the common defense are the fallback plan. Keep in mind that I'm not necessarily arguing against the idea of a big government. I'm simply arguing against big government for big government's sake, as well as the idea that a big government is necessarily more effective.
I support, like you Hadriel, the right of people to control their own bodies. But that's not the real issue here. The real issue is the acquisition, possession, or distribution of dangerous substances. This, in contrast to bodily self-control, should be regulated--and heavily. Such control is vital to, variously, human health, public safety, ecological integrity, and sometimes even civil stability. Drug control is related to issues like toxic waste disposal and gun control, both of which concern the status of dangerous substances (or materials).
If you want to kill yourself, that's fine. You don't need illegal drugs for that. The reason drugs are illegal is that practically all of them are habit-forming, and the vast majority of them are clearly detrimental to human health. They're also expensive as all heck, and remain so even in places like the Netherlands where many drugs are legal to use. This triple combination is very harmful to society, because people get snagged into these spirals of chemical dependency that sap them both of their health and their money. This becomes not only a failure of society to care for its people, but a drain on society because of the inevitable expenses involved with policing and treating drug abusers and drug dealing operations.
The government ought to be empowered to control hazardous substances, and usually it is. Rightly so. With drugs, most of the opposition, ironically, comes from the leftist half of the spectrum--people who either have a personal stake in drug legalization, or support the drug-friendly lifestyle either in practice or in principle. I propose to you that these people have a bias in their judgment that renders them less fit to decide on the issue.
I don't know the exactitudes of the law, so there may be some room for a legal rebuttal here, but as I see it, the pro-legalization camp is begging the question by trying to make this a case of self-control when in fact the sticking point is substance control.
I'll grant you that most drugs are habit-forming and detrimental to human health. But I don't agree that this constitutes a reason to control them. Virtually anything can become habit-forming to one person or another. Why is it not then illegal to watch porn, or to play video games? They've destroyed people's finances and lives just as surely as any drug. And besides, if we were going with the logic that drugs constitute a clear and present danger to others by virtue of impairing one's decision-making, alcohol should still be banned. Do you think alcohol ought to be a controlled substance as well?
On the issue of income tax, I regard income tax as theft because it is the
dictionary definition of theft: that is, taking something from someone without their consent. But I personally can live with it because I don't like to watch others suffer. As for the people who don't care, it's their rights being protected as well. You could say income tax is the worst method of maintaining a society except for all the others that have been tried.
This is not true. In fact, personal freedom when thrust upon people who are not prepared for it, results in crime and oppression externally and mental anguish internally. It is one of the (many) reasons that democracy has not flowered at the barrel of a gun in the heavily Islamic countries of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Humans are creatures of habit, routine, comfort, and familiarity. I suspect most animals are. "Personal freedom" is a repudiation of that mindset, and cannot be taken lightly. Despite America's endless rhetoric about freedom and liberty, these things are not the beginning of a happy existence. They require many prerequisites. Naked freedom is a menace, not a virtue.
Perhaps I neglected to say this earlier, but I did not mean to imply freedom with no restrictions at all. Personal freedom offers you a chance at happiness, but it must be coupled with knowledge in order to actually achieve that. It isn't because they're free that people in Afghanistan and Iraq are miserable, it's because they don't know anything about how to put a government together.
The father of the world's richest man does not subscribe to the Great Man Theory, which lionizes individuals who pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Nobody makes it alone, he says. A person's physical comfort and opportunity have almost everything to do with the society into which he is born. Lucky if it's America; unlucky if it's Bangladesh or Botswana.
Imagine, he says.
"You'll never have a million dollars, never $100,000, never even $5,000, however smart or ambitious you are. The conditions of society don't allow for that. And you'll probably die of AIDS.
"That's the way it is. Those institutions and those phenomena of an orderly society don't exist in a vacuum. They exist because people pay taxes. If you stopped, all those things would die the next day. The police, the courts, securities markets."
I'll get to his assertion that no one born in crappy countries can ever have a decent life later (as in tomorrow, because I need to sleep). Right now, I want to talk about the individual.
While there is a great deal of truth to the idea that no one makes it alone, in the end, the individual catalyzes whatever achievements (and blunders) they have to their name. Why is the Nobel Prize for Physics not awarded to everyone the scientist has ever known that's helped him out at one point or another? Why is the Oscar for Best Actor not given to both the actor and the actor's theater instructors? It's because we as humans do recognize the idea of personal achievement; we know that the person we're giving the award to was the primary driving force behind whatever it was that he or she did. Individual achievement is the entire impetus behind capitalism; if one does not believe in this fundamental principle, one might as well support communism. And as we've seen, communism is every bit as likely to work as the positive anarchy I mentioned earlier.
