TDPerk wrote:"Libertarians, seeing no farther than their arm, do not believe that using drugs hurts anyone other than themselves."
Using a drug does not, abusing a drug may well.
Your delusion is in believing they are necessarily the same thing.
In the case of Opium in China, the one always turned into the other. Sure, gravity might fail one day.
TDPerk wrote: "I point out the largest real world experiment in history, and how it brought death and destruction to millions of people, and the libertarian side says "What misery? I don't see nuthin'.""
That's because we look to two sets of facts, 1) the fact China employed much more drastic mechanism to "control" it's "drug" problem* and failed,
They burned a warehouse, after which the British bombarded their cities and killed thousands. The Chinese paid for that warehouse and legalized opium thereafter.
TDPerk wrote: and yet it is still a great power,
It descended into weakness so extensive that the much smaller Island of Japan conquered it. It suffered the deprivations of Mao, who solved the drug addiction problem by killing all the addicts, (and millions more besides) and it has taken it another 50 years thereafter to claw it's way back up to a semblanceof the prominence it possessed prior to being brought low by the legalization of drugs.
That it has NOW returned to being a great power is in no way a vindication of the darkness it went through which was the consequence of massive addiction.
TDPerk wrote: and the fact 2) the US enjoyed constitutional drug laws--meaning there essentially were none--until 1915, and simply had no such problems as you claim China had.
Why do I even bother pretending to reason with you guys? I've covered this point six ways to Sunday, and yet you still keep bringing it up as though it hasn't been addressed! There were no laws because there were no problems. There were no problems because usage was minute. It wasn't till the civil war that drug addiction started occurring large scale, and that due to how much of it had been used as a painkiller during the war. (pump primed the market.)
As usage and deaths started climbing, people began to take notice of the occurrence of addiction. Widespread usage in patent medicines led to laws requiring the ingredients to be listed. Turns out most of them were either opium derivatives or cocaine.
TDPerk wrote: *China's real problem was an ossified, sclerotic society ruled by a bureaucratic class more concerned with their own sense of privilege than undergoing the tribulations of entering the modern world. This produced a hopelessness on the part of the lower social classes where they knew their lives were worth darn little, and a Chinese government unable to preserve it's own jurisdiction over its own territory, in the face of European empire building.
And this is a variation on "China's problems were caused by everything EXCEPT drugs." I will point out that Chinese society had existed pretty much unchanged for the previous several thousand years.
TDPerk wrote:
""All of that misery was caused by something OTHER than legal drugs.""
That's your strawman, you own it.
And look how it worked out! You just said it up above! Can I predict you guy's arguments or what?
TDPerk wrote: I freely acknowledge some people will become addicted to their drug of choice and unable to function in society. These people are drastically small in number and warehousing them until they off themselves is far cheaper and more merciful to them and to society than the costs of attempting prohibition.
And what on God's green earth leads you to believe that these numbers of people are "small in number"? In Manchuria China they were half the population, which is no small number at all! That they are currently small in number is entirely due to the fact that we don't let them have the sh*t which will cause addiction!! (i.e. the Drug war.)
Are you now going to argue that the low addiction rates (~2%) which we experience because we severely restrict the supply of drugs is now evidence that we should stop doing this?
Are you going to try to tell me that the ~2% of the population addicted to drugs will remain 2% if they are legally available? That it will not grow at all? If so, how did we ever get to 2%, because at some point we must have been at 0% ?
You sir, believe in nonsense.