Legality of drugs and other substances
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All drugs should be legal because people have a right to do what they want, as long as it isn’t violating the rights of others.
Getting someone hooked on an addictive substance to get repeat business is predatory. It’s not an honest way to do business. Even if consuming drugs was legal, maybe the selling of drugs should still be illegal.
But that way, you pretty much ensure that only scumbags sell drugs. And they definitely don’t care about their customers.
Related to #4062, making any part of the drug trade illegal just gives gangs and cartels a leg up over law-abiding citizens.
Subjectively applies to every good product that makes its purchasers want to buy more of it. Like good food, video games, comfortable chairs.
Not all cases of wanting more of something are cases of addiction.
I want to buy a second chair because I enjoy the first one, not because I cannot help but buy another.
Getting customers addicted means making it so they cannot exercise their free will (or have serious trouble doing so). They’re effectively unable to criticize ‘buy another’ as a course of action.
Getting customers addicted making it "so they cannot exercise their free will" denies human creativity, and opens the door for all sorts of draconic laws where people are "protected from themselves".
denies human creativity
No, they’re still creative, and they could overcome the addiction if they knew how, but their creativity is being severely limited.
It is not the business of the government to prevent people from severely limiting their own creativity.
I agree, but this criticism chain is about predatory businesses limiting their customers’ creativity, not their own.
Predatory businesses can’t limit customers’ creativity without the consent of the customer, so these issues are inextricably bound.
I have zero experience on the drug market, but I think it’s fair to assume that companies that want to get business by inhibiting people’s creativity rather than enhancing it don’t particularly care about consent.
I don’t expect honest advertising from such people. I expect trickery, not consent.
I found a clip of Milton Friedman refuting my point:
… prohibition encouraged alcoholism rather than the opposite. To the young people in particular, it became an adventure to go out and get drunk, to go to a speakeasy. Today, with heroin illegal, it pays a heroin pusher to create an addict because, given that it’s illegal, it’s worth his while to spend some money on getting somebody else hooked. Because once hooked, he has a captive audience. If heroin were readily available everywhere, it wouldn’t pay anybody to create an addict, because the addict could then go anywhere to buy.
So if drugs were legal, sellers would have little to no incentive to turn their customers into addicts since the customers could go anywhere to get the drugs. Also, the sellers could always get new customers, so they don’t need to get customers addicted in the first place.
In short, making drugs illegal makes them more dangerous, not less.