For the record, it's my view that drug legalization will create more, not fewer, moms like the one discussed below. It's also my view that the constant leap to "What about alcohol!?" is not as boffo an argument as many readers believe it to be. Saying alcohol is really bad for people and ruins lives has obvious validity, but it doesn't advance the ball very far down the field by saying that therefore other substances that ruin lives should be made legal too...
In response to which I emailed:
Jonah, I think it's a misreading of the pro-legalization position to say that the argument that some drugs are no worse than alcohol is the same thing as saying: "We allow alcohol to ruin millions of lives; therefore in the interests of consistency and not being hypocrits we should allow narcotics to ruin millions more."
I would argue something more along the lines of: "In a free society, people should be able to make their own decisions about these things. Perhaps if drug use looked like leading to complete social breakdown then it would be fair to say that the need for order trumps liberty. But in fact, as with alcohol, there are millions of recreational users of, for example, ecstasy or coke, whose social lives are - at least in their opinion - enriched by occassional drug use, millions of other users who have their lives ruled by such substances, and millions who fall somewhere inbetween. This is merely the kind of cost-benefit ratio we are perfectly willing to tolerate with alcohol (and to a far more severe cost, with cars), so why not with (the softer) drugs?"
The anti-drug comeback to such an argument is often: "If alcohol use was not yet widespread, and we knew of its costs, then we would not want that to be made legally available either - we only accept the costs because at this late stage there's no turning back the tide." But this has always seemed to me to be completely disingenuous. Would you really, as a responsible drinker, choose to deprive yourself, and millions of others, of alcohol's benefits as a social lubricant, etc. if you could at the press of a button banish it from this world, in order to save millions of people from suffering the consequences of its abuse? I suspect that most anti-legalization proponents wouldn't. And this is where the hypocrisy lies.
