So, I had a similar reaction. I'm about as libertarian as you can get with drug regulation, but found it odd that the article seemed to ignore the public health

So, I had a similar reaction. I'm about as libertarian as you can get with drug regulation, but found it odd that the article seemed to ignore the public health risk management arguments for drug regulation. Still, we allow plenty of dangerous things to go unregulated, or far less regulated than drug use. Alcohol use is a glaring example, but you could go through a litany of things that US society legally allows that are very risky: guns, motorcycles, chainsaws, BASE jumping, various chemical cleaners and solvents, all kinds of sexual behavior, and so forth and so on. Yes there are some that develop serious drug problems from use per se, but most do not, and those that do often (although not always) tend to be polyusers in the sense that if you look at their problems, it's often difficult to attribute it to a specific substance. So empirically there's a stretch to go from any use, to use of a specific substance, to such irreparable harm that it should be made illegal. There's also many other mechanisms society has for regulating drug use, like revocation of rights due to incompetence in decision making (legally speaking), and so forth. This isn't even getting into our hubris in uncertainty about potential benefits of substances, as manifested by changes in public discourse around psychedelics over the last century. Seen from this perspective, the article might have a point about drugs being treated differently, as if by absence of discussion, the author is implicitly asserting that risk management is not actually the issue. But I still think the article would have been more effective by making that argument explicitly. Then again maybe the author just thought public health risk management was a different, additional issue.