> If personal possession and consumption stopped being a crime, that would effectively end the War on Drugs overnight. Well, sure, the current way it's being d

> If personal possession and consumption stopped being a crime, that would effectively end the War on Drugs overnight. Well, sure, the current way it's being done. But you'd still have cartel warfare for selling territory, adulterated goods, and to effectively shut down distributors, you'd have to define smaller and smaller amounts of substance as qualifying for "dealing", as dealers learned what they could and couldn't get away with. Perhaps I should not have used the capital-letter "War on Drugs" to refer to this. But you would still have much of what you have now. Now, would it be net improvement if enforcement of drug laws moved towards a dealers-and-manufacturers model? Sure, I think so. But my point is that there would still be no principle in place preventing that model from expanding again into a broader prohibition, involving new substances, posessions, uses, or what have you. It would be like saying "we'll have free speech, except if it's bad, or we don't like the person saying it, or some other reason that we might think up later." There's no sufficiently strong principle preventing prohibitions from continually increasing. > I honestly have a lot more sympathy for an addict, or a bystander, whose life was destroyed by the state, then I do for his heroin dealer. I think most people opposing the War on Drugs on grounds other then ideological anarcho-capitalism share this assessment. That's probably true. However, I don't think sympathy is an effective basis for judging whether things should be legal. And if observing that a government with an expansive power to ban things will probably use and aggrandize that power makes me an anarcho-capitalist (rather than, say, just a boring classical liberal) then so be it.