[meowface]

Sure, and those are valid arguments to make to encourage or discourage use. I know you're just Devil's advocating, but to kind of one-up it: similar or stronger arguments could potentially be made for criminalizing things like gambling, pornography, watching Twitch for more than an hour per day, etc.

There are a lot of things that carry potential for social harm. It's the job of a nation's citizens to decide which are socially harmful enough to warrant fines or imprisonment. Ranged weapons certainly carry potential for social harm, but the US has decided they don't cross that threshold as long as they aren't fully automatic or explosive.

I think the social harm of even the most "notorious" drugs, like PCP and methamphetamine, don't cross that threshold, personally. There's a lot of pushback now, but I suspect within a century or so most or all drugs will be decriminalized in the US and many other places, even if mostly for practical rather than philosophical reasons.

Focusing solely on the personal harm arguments can be interesting to think about, too. Can a case be made for legalizing fentanyl, despite it often causing personal harm (death)? I think I lean towards legalizing both buying and selling of it as long as failure to disclosure it's contained in something is illegal; though in practice that might be too hard to enforce, in which case maybe selling should be illegal as long as there's some safe government-sanctioned source of it.

[dTal]

The problem is that the government is very limited in its levers over society. There's the financial - taxes, subsidies, fines, grants. There's freedom curtailment - prison, compulsory community service, restraining orders, use of military force. There's "soft marketing" - PSAs, presidential speeches, all forms of information war.

These sound big and scary but they are blunt. There is no government equivalent of the kind of precise, directed, powerful social pressure that your friends and family can apply. The government can't sit down and tell you, in a serious tone, that you acted like a complete turd when you got too drunk last night and if it happens again you won't be invited over anymore. There's no substitute for social fabric.

But social fabric doesn't scale. It doesn't scale with the intensity of the problem - once someone's hooked on heroin, you can't shame them back out of it. And it doesn't scale with size, either - community identity doesn't work at city sizes. Why should someone care what you think, if they'll never see you again?

So this leaves us in a position where people see drug-related problems and feel powerless to stop them. Something must be done. And the only available thing - it seems - is the blunt instrument of the law. And hey, maybe that causes other problems - worse problems, even! But something is being done, at least.