by Brett Stevens on March 29, 2009

A brief thought on legal drugs:

When I was a teenager, I thought drugs should be legalized and sold at the same prices. Why not just put that money toward government costs?

I thought I was really smart for telling people, “You know, people are going to take drugs anyway, and making them illegal just makes them more attractive, so legalize and < poof > the problem goes magically away!”

As I saw more of the world, I started to see how this scheme would become a scam like anything else. I then thought it would be best to legalize, nationalize and sell drugs at cost with no age restrictions. Not only enhance “freedom,” but let natural selection reign.

The more I see of life — not going to different places, but getting better at observing what’s been in front of me all this time — the more I think we need to segregate by type of lifestyle desired.

Some communities will want conservative living. This means you roughly follow European-style “Christian” morals: truthfulness, simple pleasures, hard work, cleanliness, monogamy/chastity, honor, collectivism, helping out those who have fallen prey of chance, and so on. This doesn’t include the liberal fantasy of finding the most screwed up people out there to try to “help” so you can prove to your friends what a good egalitarian altruist you are; it just means helping those in the community who have fallen into hard times… helping them out of those hard times.

For these people, legal drugs would be a big mistake and a bad idea. So, no legal drugs in those communities. If they’re smart they’ll ban alcohol, cigarettes and junk/fast food as well. Why not? They have at this point taken a stand to their values and these things are outside the scope.

I no longer believe problems go magically away through legislation. I expect this community would have drug problems, but it would have a punishment that’s actually effective: exile.

Yep, you don’t go to jail for doing drugs; you don’t get raped by bubbas and vatos and others in the joint; you don’t get called Satan. You just get told that your values system doesn’t match and you’ll be happier elsewhere. Gentle culling.

On the other hand, other communities would be liberal, and in those, having legal drugs would be a sacrament. They could pick how they’d want to implement it. This means that no one ever goes to jail or faces any penalty for using drugs. They would be drug free zones.

Twenty years down the road, we could look at each type of community and see which is the place we’d want to live in.

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