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Alcohol prohibition is not entirely wrong...
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Unpopular Opinion
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The problem with treating addiction like a health issue is that the US does not treat its health issues.
Agreed. But I wouldn't suggest that we legalize every drug just because prohibiting them occasionally fails and a small subset of the population still get addicted to them. We need to start treating these health issues. Why don't we just deregulate freon since people know it was damaging the ozone layer so nowadays they won't use it. Right?
Problem is we know human nature is more complicated than that. That's why some stuff is made illegal. It's ok to prohibit objectively bad things (and drugs like pain killers that offer some benefits under controlled circumstances are in fact allowed to be used under the supervision of authorized experts. Its not like we just blindly outlaw anything "bad" despite their being genuinely good uses for them.)
I agree, but I think there should be overwhelming evidence of endemic society-wide danger to support the banning of things instead of needing overwhelming evidence of the safety of things for them to be allowed.
Most drugs, like alcohol, have the potential for abuse but aren’t abused (to the detriment of others) by the vast majority of the population. The minority of people who have problems with them should have mental heath support available (if we actually did that in most countries) or be helped by a reformative (or isolating) legal system if the drug use enables violent tendencies.
The fact that a few people abuse anything doesn’t mean that we need to, by default, outlaw that thing. There should have to be a really good reason for it (e.g., garage bioweapon research)
I don't think treating addiction like a health issue implies some libertine approach to drugs, there's plenty of room for regulation.
The real problem is that allowing addictive drugs to proliferate in a society where a large percentage of the population wants to die is a good way to collapse the economy. Why keep suffering when there's a way out?