[agentwiggles]

This is one of the things that bothers me when it comes to prohibition - whether it's marijuana, vaping, or even more obviously harmful drugs like opioids.

Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. We actually are capable of using regulation, taxation, and education to help encourage people to make smart choices on a society-wide scale. It's rare, it takes decades, and boy oh boy do a lot of incentives have to align. But it can be done!

[mrguyorama]

>Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior.

It only took over 60 years, entire generations, and millions dead. Meanwhile giant corporations profited immensely, literally advertised to children, and made up shit science and fostered a general anti-science and anti-intellectualism vibe among the ones who need education most. Glad avoided prohibition for that! It was so beneficial to society to allow people the freedom to inhale literal poison for the benefit of an insanely addictive, mild stimulant, with awful withdrawals, all while poisoning the people around them.

What a goddamn victory for liberty.

[agentwiggles]

We have real, effective tools for dealing with substance abuse that don't involve a giant prison-industrial complex.

One of the major problems with prohibition is that it closes off a lot of the avenues we could otherwise use to reduce harm, while creating a black market and, in the case of the utterly senseless "War on Drugs," pushing tons of people into the criminal justice system and creating a massive industry for incarceration of low-level users.

After all this voluntarily created human misery, we've still got a crisis of opioid and other drug abuse in our society, and it's not clear that prohibition does much at all to reduce real rates of usage on the ground. A quick Google suggests that over 100,000 people died of overdoses in 2021.

What a goddamn victory for prohibition.

The decline of tobacco use is proof that there is a better way. It's just harder, takes longer, and, yes, despite the sneers of those who think they know better, has to respect individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom of choice.

[BiteCode_dev]

Prohibition on drugs didn't work, on alcohol didn't work, on prostitution didn't work.

I fail to see how it's an alternative to something that took a long time and cost a lot... but worked.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Liberty is not the freedom to be obnoxious.