And yet we don’t have a black market of “lawn darts.” There are no cartels manufacturing and smuggling lawn darts. No epidemic of lawn dart users. Something about these cases is disanalogous.

All laws are concessions. You surrender some rights in order to safeguard other more important rights. It seems that the right to use lawn darts is not one that people value, unlike the right to eat, drink, and imbibe whatever they want.

Medical doctors agree that sugar is extremely harmful, hepatotoxic. There’s no upside to ingesting it unless you’re starving. Why is it legal? Because,

1. there’s no moral standing for the government to tell anyone what to do with their own body as long as they’re not harming anyone else, and
2. the consequences of outlawing sugar would be worse than the harms of ingesting it.
3. And the same is true of drugs.

Pragmatism is one way to justify policies (seat belt laws infringe on your autonomy, but they make society quantifiably better). Unfortunately, criminalizing drugs makes society worse.

Many of the downsides of drug abuse are a direct consequence of such criminalization: addicts unable to seek medical treatment and having their lives ruined, communities torn apart by drug cartels and police violence.

We criminalize drunk driving, which is the “action that can harm others,” not merely drinking, which is an action that does not harm others.

Decisive empirical evidence shows that the criminalization of drugs makes society worse. It creates drug cartels, incites crime, fills up our prisons with victims (whose lives it ruins), and balloons law enforcement budgets.

I don’t do drugs. It’s worse than that. I study metaethics.

Justifying something — a law, for example, or the civic organization of a nation state — requires a moral standard. For example, laws against slavery can be justified by pointing to harms or rights violations (or whatever framework you have for making ethical judgements). Most people rely on their intuitions, but ethics is a formal system — a bit like mathematics, actually. Such a system has to be consistent to be meaningful (this is called the principle of explosion).

Anyway, many such normative systems have been proposed. Utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics are broad examples.

None of these contains a mechanism to justify a governing body’s criminalization of drugs.

Specifically,

1. You can’t point to harms, since the harm would be a personal one, and governments have no moral standing to prevent you from harming yourself.
2. You can’t point to improved social order, since empirical evidence demonstrates that drug prohibitions cause far more social disorder and criminality (for example, by creating cartels).

Etcetera.

You think that artificially enriched plutonium should also freely be available

“Enriched plutonium” is not a drug. It’s also radioactive.

I imagine if you had a magical “drug” whose ingestion could make you explode like a mini-Chernobyl, then its access should be restricted.

Again, there is no coherent moral framework to justify criminalizing your use of (ordinary) drugs, medical or otherwise. No arguments exist in defense of this prohibition. It’s a rights violation that does nothing to help victims or protect communities, and in fact makes the situation worse for everyone.

If you have such an argument, please publish it in one of the philosophy journals. There’s no Nobel prize for philosophy, but a bunch of fusty academics will be very impressed with you.

Daily reminder that there is no coherent normative framework according to which a government has the right to criminalize your access to or use of drugs, medical or otherwise. This isn’t a matter of politics. It is a matter of fact.