I think this is a deeply grey issue. As a philosophical exercise, how dangerous is "banning" fentanyl? Treating it as a criminal issue rather than a health is

I think this is a deeply grey issue. As a philosophical exercise, how dangerous is "banning" fentanyl? Treating it as a criminal issue rather than a health issue is arguably quite bad. Giving the government control to suppress what we can put in our bodies, and how we choose to exercise our pursuit of happiness is a dangerous precedent. Yet those who try fentanyl often become enslaved to it. They lose their freedom because they don't understand the consequences. I don't think it's so easy to apply a rule like "freedom good, restriction bad." I think the parallels to fentanyl are philosophically sound. That is cargo cult politics. It's applying the ritual of "supporting freedom" without understanding where freedom comes from. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science > They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. Letting an anti-democratic, anti human rights, arguably Han supremacist, foreign adversary exercise a great deal of influence over your people is an extremely dangerous game. China has every ability to enshittify their products to support the CPC, just like our own social media products are enshittified for their investors or advertisers. 54% percent of Americans can't read at a 6th grade level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States At the very least, if you want freedom, you must support education, but you run into exactly the same problem. What if you have an unchecked lever to choose curriculum. What if the people in power do the wrong thing? > All it takes is a president with radical views and an ineffective congress and you have a much more powerful censorship apparatus. Then you get to the core of the issue. If you want good governance, you need good governors. Good governors are one such "something essential" that separates ritual from actual. If fascists are getting into power, maybe the more important thing is to focus on how that is happening and how to prevent it. It is probably not good to let ultimately fascist entities become popular enough to get into power by being good, and then use that power for evil once they have enough that they don't need to grow anymore.