2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: CBS poll: 51% of Millennials voting either Republican or Libertarian (white women only 49%) [View all]DanTex
(20,709 posts)It's not just about people who drive under the influence or neglect kids, it's about the harm to the users of the drugs themselves.
And the thing is, even if we legalize heroin, there still has to be a line. Do we legalize all substances, including hospital grade anesthetics? Should all prescription and hospital drugs be available over the counter? I don't think so, at all. People will die.
The flip side is, yeah, banning heroin is a nanny state thing. It's the government telling you that you can't do something, for your own good. Basically, the government is saying, we know better than you what is good for you.
And that doesn't make a good soundbite, but the government does that all the time, and it has to. You can't sell your organs, for example. I agree with you that possession for personal use should not be a prison offense, or maybe not even a crime. But selling should be illegal. Selling medical services without a license is illegal, as is selling unsafe cars, and shady investments, and so on.
It gets to the general point that, there are times that there is a willing buyer and a willing seller, but the transaction should still be illegal. Because people are not rational agents of economic theory, they are people. Whether it's payday loans with exorbitant rates, phony pseudoscientific "medicine", or whatever, the "caveat emptor" theory of regulation, that libertarians advocate, very frequently results in people getting screwed and other people getting rich by exploiting them.