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It absolutely is reasonable.

Making a chemical legal doesn’t preclude disallowing it becoming a food additive. And food regulation is a very serious matter, that can, and is, being strongly enforced.

If that’s the only reason you’re against legalisation, I have good news for you! You needed worry about it, at all.




There is a quite wide range of reasonable options on this. I don't think it is unreasonable for drugs to be mostly legal in many cases, no, but I don't think that small fines for personal use is unreasonable either.

A good explanation is driving above the speed limit on roads. An unreasonable system would put people behind bars for years for any kind of speeding. That is roughly what you have today in USA with respect to drugs and I understand why you'd want to remove it. However removing speed limits is not reasonable either, even if you personally can handle it we can clearly see that deaths increase significantly with higher limits so in this case we care about their lives above your freedom.

If making a particular drugs more legal to use causes a lot of deaths then I don't think it should be legal to use, no matter how much you think that your liberty gets violated if you aren't free to use it. I value their lives above your freedom. Cannabis doesn't kill people so I don't care much about it, but harder drugs often do.

Edit: As an example we can see how making opium more available to people (prescribed via doctor) killed a hundred thousand people in USA the past 10 years. Making it easily accessible even without prescription would likely be worse. I don't think that properly regulating the substance and saving that many people is unreasonable.


So you’ve moved the goalposts, as always happens with these discussions.

I’m sorry, but if your counter argument just ignores what I said, I’m not going to bother addressing your points either.


Aren’t consumption of alcohol and cigarettes (and advertising for them) much higher among the poor? Is there a reason why other drugs would be any different?


That’s a completely separate issue to the one mentioned by the OP.




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