> If there were a cheap-ish test that detected bombs with this accuracy, wouldn't we want to use it? Even if a few innocents would be unjustly searched? Good p

> If there were a cheap-ish test that detected bombs with this accuracy, wouldn't we want to use it? Even if a few innocents would be unjustly searched? Good point, though it's slippery slopes everywhere you look: What it if works on bombs, but only in 1% of the cases? What about 0.01%? What if we had a similar test for other, more trivial misdemeanours? Either way, I'm sure that even fairly strict prohibitionists will agree that carrying around a bomb is a more significant threat to others, so it shouldn't be surprising that a more significant invasion of people's rights is tolerated. How much bigger the threat and how tolerable an intrusion is in each instance, that's exactly the crux of the matter. I suppose that was your point, too. Edit: Another point: Seeing this, it's not surprising that there is such a range of opinion about it. People have very different evaluations towards the threat posed by drugs, and different people also have very different attitudes about how tolerable those kinds of intrusions are. This opens up a 2D space, where I suppose people often fall on a diagonal or end up in opposite corners.