Drugs should be illegal

Like everyone else in America, I had never really listened to the arguments of the drug legalization crowd because ... it's not going to happen. These people are like scholars whose area of expertise is an obscure bug in a Third World country. Their theories could be completely insane, but no one cares enough to bother listening to them.
The most superficially appealing argument for drug legalization is that people should be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies, even if it ruins their lives. Except that's not true. Back on Earth, see, we live in a country that will not allow people to live with their own stupid decisions. I have to pay for the stupid decisions of others.

"The most superficially appealing argument for drug legalization is that people should be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies, even if it ruins their lives. Except that's not true. Back on Earth, see, we live in a country that will not allow people to live with their own stupid decisions. I have to pay for the stupid decisions of others".

Why isn't tobacco illegal? "Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States" (US Department of Health and Human Services) and "Exposure to secondhand smoke causes nearly 50,000 deaths each year among adults in the United States" (CDC). Secondhand smoking is not something you can control, so are you saying that if drugs effects others that it should be illegal? I would also like to point out that alcohol contributes to a greater amount of "stupid decisions" lol.

Furthermore, I would like to say that drug related violence due to the illegality of drugs, outnumbers drug induced death.

Precisely because you can see a difference in smoking a cigarette and smoking crack means there is a huge difference between the top of the slope and the bottom -- which is why pure slippery slope arguments are always stupid. Let me just ask: Before he serves you, would you prefer that your bus driver or investment banker had smoked a cigarette, or meth?

English philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) said there were some things people could not be permitted to choose to do with their own bodies in a free society: "The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom." Drugs enslave people.

So do cigarettes and alcohol, you might argue. Indeed, alcohol and cigarettes are likely no better (and probably worse) than many illegal drugs.

As Gary Johnson, governor of New Mexico (and only the most recent Republican to figure out that the path to fawning media coverage is to adopt a dumb liberal idea) puts it (as summarized in a fawning article in The New York Times): "Last year 450,000 people died from smoking cigarettes. Alcohol killed 150,000, and another 100,000 died from legal prescription drugs. How many people died last year from the use of marijuana? Few, if any. From cocaine and heroin? Five thousand."

Accepting all the drug-legalizers' statistics at face-value, I'll demonstrate that their arguments are still dumb.

The 450,000 number refers to all "smoking-related" deaths. A "smoking-related" death is any death that under any circumstances could be connected to smoking, including heart attacks and a plethora of cancers. If an obese 100-year old smoker dies of a heart attack while shoveling snow, his death is placed into the category of "smoking-related."

Indeed, the books are so cooked on the "smoking-related deaths" alleged by the American Cancer Society that a 1993 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology was able to show that by using the exact same methodology, smoking SAVES 277,621 lives each year. (The methodology also proves that 504,000 people die each year from insufficient exercise, and 649,000 die from improper diets.)

It is known that marijuana smoke, for example, is much worse for the respiratory system than is cigarette smoke. The only reason you don't hear about a lot of people dying from marijuana is that -- well, for one, like the old man shoveling snow, a pot-smoker who dies of emphysema goes down as a "smoking-related" death.

Also, people don't smoke pot like they smoke cigarettes. One reason for that is: Marijuana is illegal.

Even granting the pro-legalization community their manufactured stats: Assume (correctly) that even legal substances such as alcohol and cigarettes induce dependency, ruin lives, cause disease, depression, countless traffic injuries and fatalities, and increase the incidence of homicide and suicide.

This is supposed to be an argument for legalizing other drugs like them?

"The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom" (Mill).

Mill's argument is inconclusive. Everyday, people willingly engage in contracts, giving up some of their freedoms, in exchange for goods, services, or experiences. But lets focus on your claim that drugs enslave people. Do you have proof that drugs enslave people? If, for example, a man uses recreation marijuana for the first time, is he enslaved? Sure, you might argue that marijuana is addictive, but people can be addicted to caffeine. The truth is, people willingly participate in drug use, and just like entering a contract, they accept the terms. You might try to say that contractile slavery is still illegal, but the simple fact is that drugs are no more to blame than Starbucks.

Your argument about deaths from smoking is valid, but it is a undisputed fact that drugs are not the leading cause of death. Like I said before, drug violence accounts for a greater number of deaths than a heroin overdose or a coke-head murdering his friend. We can look at the mexican drug war as an example. After Felipe Calderon's crackdown on drugs, "an estimated 70,000 people died in violence related to the country"s ongoing drug war" (FOX News). Legalizing drugs would diminish the black market, and protect innocent lives.

I apologize for not mentioning this earlier, but your definition of drugs is vague. Should medical marijuana be illegal? What about those people that abuse painkillers? Should we outlaw those as well? The fact is that you might think cocaine is bad, but in some cases cocaine is therapeutic. Drugs are a broad range of compound and simply saying that drugs should be illegal means that we can't use advil.

So I must redefine my argument as well. All drugs need to be regulated, but recreational drug use should be permitted in appropriate amounts (not for me to decide).