With "vice laws," rascals and tyrants profit while rights and users as well as abusers suffer. All "vice," substance use, gambling, sex trades, unhealthy foods, with all their attendant personal and social problems, must simply be legal, and not unreasonably taxed or controlled. If a person's behavior transgresses others, then that person may be subject to judicial oversight, but general prohibition violates the individual's right.

Education and regulation must supplant prohibition. Besides the principle and ideal of human right, there is historic justification for the evil of prohibition, which is inevitably attended by black marketeering, judicial and legal corruption, criminalization of a vast segment of society by taboo rather than any real transgression. Note that the ones who LEAST want liberty are those who profit, the black market gangsters who profit from prohibition-inflated prices, the industries, like prison builders and suppliers, who profit from fat government contracts when transgression-innocent people are incarcerated, and of course the many politicians and other leaders, especially allegedly religious leaders, who profit politically and financially by posturing toward the public's misguided fears and cherished taboos misnamed "morality."

In our third century since the modern Liberty revolution began on our world, it's distressing how little humanity has learned this basic fact of history and principle of liberty. Puritanism has been in its way as much a tyrant as the Taliban type. How many more aberrational decades like America's woeful alcohol prohibition of the past, or the American-inflamed world-wide "war on some substances' users" of the present, must we suffer before people will be free?

Probably needless to add, with the seeming rise of Islamic extremism, Christian extremism, and other taboo-enforcing orthodoxies and authoritarianisms, including political correctness which overcompensates for insufficent regulation of the past (e.g. real transgressions like second-hand smoke or drunk driving, both of which have become better-addressed over time) it seems our struggle for liberty is, as Rumsfeld told the West Point graduates about the war on terrorism, just begun.

I'm sure I've already distressed the editor with the length of this, and will be subject to either extreme excision or (preferably) remaining unpublished. Would that I were as succinct as correspondent Graeme Phillips, but Graeme's shorthand of "divine right" is not an argument some will appreciate. I would address every point if I could, such as that of N.J. of Cambridge, who rightly (if naively) recommended consistency from the law, albeit in the opposite direction than that which the principle of human liberty suggests.

Other correspondents put forth the usual arguments for Prohibitionism which ask us to consider "social costs" of legalized vice, but before the principle of liberty, this is circular reasoning because these consequences of social-ist thinking are largely in opposition to liberty as much as is Prohibitionism. Social arguments are the most insidious (in terms of word-producing) to explicate their inherent error. A smoker who dies young doesn't really "cost" us, despite the tragedy, because it was the smoker's life to "spend." We may not really count as ours the unhatched chickens of so-called "lost productivity." I know painfully well the familial damage potential of vice, but these are personal, family, medical, and religious, not immediately legal matters. I abhor tobacco, suffer from alcoholism, and pity all self- and soul-destructive habits and forces! I pray there will always be close friends, concerned family members, religious and social agencies to attend and intervene with any who are needy from substance abuse, unhealthy gambling or sex or shopping obsession, or whatever other poverty of pocketbook, mind, or spirit. Nevertheless, there need not be a requirement that innocent taxpayers pay excessively for the evils people due to themselves. All peripheral costs, like cleaning up after drunken-driving accidents, just as with the mess of a depression-suicide, or just plain natural disaster, must be borne as a collective cost, of necessity and of social liberty, when such costs cannot actually be billed to the transgressor. In symbol, the lifetime smoker is not owed lung cancer treatments by society. Socialist arguments mean deeper revisions of thinking than merely a new attitude toward vice must accompany enlightenment regarding repeal of corrupting taboo enforcement.

When examined thoroughly, the total cost of prohibition will always exceed any alleged benefits, and dealing with legal, controlled substances will always prove superior for society to repression and tyranny by taboos and socialisms. I think it curious that the liberal (American style) is as supportive of prohibition as the Conservative (US), when there are such strong arguments, human liberty on the left and Constitutionality on the right, that prohibition ought to be forevermore a non-issue! Intelligent people who love rule of law and respect individuality should have but one cry in this ancient battle: REPEAL!

(Kudos to the sage who put the amusing picture and caption of Gadaffi with the article!)

Further self-inflated opinion: http://www.mindfulwebworks.com/mindful/radical/

DT