Hammer time

I am fortunate to be surrounded by a number of opinionated people, and by surrounded I mean they have blogs. It's always better to have a dumb opinion than no opinion, and if you have a dumb opinion ideally you'll write a blog about it so I can drop the hammer on you.
First, the issue of fully legalized drug use. The same people who advocate total legalization seem to think it would save taxpayers money because the RCMP wouldn't have as many investigations to do, jails wouldn't be as full, and worldwide terrorism would disintegrate (that's what it says!). By the same logic, if we de-criminalize murder and theft the RCMP wouldn't need to exist, jails would be empty and converted to schools, and the Rapture would begin. What nonsense. Making a financial argument in favor of de-criminalizing narcotics is to completely ignore the crippling burden that would be placed on our already sapped health care system. The reason Canada has a national health care system is because people are willing to part with their hard-earned dollars in order to benefit society. While drug-users wish for freedom, they forget that if you want the legal right to smoke or inject yourself with whatever you want, you can't then expect society to fund your rehab clinics and medical support systems. That's why society gets to tell you what you can and can't put in your body, because they have to pay for it.
If you're REALLY clever, you'll have already picked out a bit of a flaw in that argument. You'll say that society deems smoking and alcohol legal but not marijuana, how does that make any sense? It doesn't. Like the article mentions, prohibition didn't work. The problem is that we'd be trying to go backwards and frankly it's too late. Historically, governments have shown that they are perfectly willing to allow their populace to dumb themselves down on some mildly addictive substance, witness the dirt-cheap, readily available amounts of vodka in the Soviet Union. Tobacco farming has generated a lot of domestic income in the United States and Canada, so it's not going anywhere. The biggest change we're likely to see anytime soon is the government easing up on marijuana, and that still has some hurdles to climb. Bottom line, if you want to be able to run around promoting unrestricted narcotic use, you'd better be advocating a market-style health care system and a libertarian-style "government," because you won't get it both ways. Hands up who's going to lead that charge? Didn't think so.