Is that what we currently "teach" kids about alcohol and tobacco, which are both legal?
We tell them it's "great stuff", and to "start early"?
The Prohibitionist Mind, with its selective hypocrisy, and the logical somersaults it requires to rationalize its Tyranny, is a wonder to behold.
Of course, advocating for the nanny-state invariably requires an ever-expanding police powers, profound disregard for inalienable rights, and bigger and bigger government bureaucracies to "save everyone from themselves".
And we wonder why the Left is so successful with some of their nanny-state Tyranny? It's a mindset which infects both "sides" of our phony political spectrum, and is a very useful tool for authoritarians who seek to exceed that which is minimally adequate to govern.
It's rather hypocritical to complain about nanny-state law when it's used to attack our vision of Liberty, and then turn around and embrace it when it attacks someone else's.
Real crime exists when one person infringes on the rights of another, through force, fraud, or negligence. Absent such underpinnings, "crime" just becomes whatever "rule" some Tyrannical bureaucrat from an alphabet agency decides to promulgate.
America should not be about establishing the "lowest common denominator" of Liberty, but precisely the opposite. How can anyone who purports to believe in minimal government say otherwise?
Contraband law is a joke, and always will be, bringing with it all the Tyrannical abuses which accrue to arbitrary and unjustifiable governance: disregard for the Fourth Amendment, a bloated and unaccountable police state, asset forfeiture, murderous, mistaken "drug raids", and on and on.
I prefer the animating struggle of Freedom, as opposed to some lesser vision which relies on tidy authoritarian shortcuts.
No "minimal government" has any business threatening its citizens with prison time for merely possessing the wrong plant, medicine, chemical, or liquid spirits.
When someone's rights are infringed upon, then an actual crime has occurred.
Some adult smoking a joint in the privacy of their own home shouldn't be subject to a prison sentence under any circumstances, and if they are, then the country they're living in is anything but Free...
I don’t want more laws.
I want Americans choosing to not get stoned and drunk because it’s the right thing to do. But that’s not going to happen. Legalizing pot just says GREEN LIGHT to the young.