Some Ideas Don't Seem Like They Will Ever Work Because, People! - Granite Grok

Some Ideas Don’t Seem Like They Will Ever Work Because, People!

drug use heroinTheodore Dalrymple has some excellent thoughts on decriminalizing or legalizing drugs and why some ideas don’t seem like they will work because, people!

The philosophic argument is that, in a free society, adults should be permitted to do whatever they please, always provided that they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and that they cause no direct harm to others. The locus classicus for this point of view is John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,” Mill wrote. “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” This radical individualism allows society no part whatever in shaping, determining, or enforcing a moral code: in short, we have nothing in common but our contractual agreement not to interfere with one another as we go about seeking our private pleasures.

In practice, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make people take all the consequences of their own actions—as they must, if Mill’s great principle is to serve as a philosophical guide to policy. Addiction to, or regular use of, most currently prohibited drugs cannot affect only the person who takes them—and not his spouse, children, neighbors, or employers. No man, except possibly a hermit, is an island; and so it is virtually impossible for Mill’s principle to apply to any human action whatever, let alone shooting up heroin or smoking crack. Such a principle is virtually useless in determining what should or should not be permitted.

There has been a time in our past with little or no regulation over the recreational use of ‘drugs.’ Good times, yes, but a different culture both temporally and morally. We’ve got ourselves a very different culture today.

Fewer people feel the constraint of judgment from a power higher than their government.

The drugs seem more exotic and the drug culture less conducive to the notion of users that are able also productive or even self-sufficient.

Addiction fulfillment increasingly results in increased property crime.

Human nature, it seems, will no more bow to the will of a more open approach to casual drug use than it will to the utopian vision that the right bunch of flawed humans can engineer a perfect society out of the rest of them.

So how does the decriminalization culture claim to address the problem of human nature? Or does it discount or ignore the intrusions on people around the user who could be affected?

 

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