On an individual point of view, being easy on drug makes sense. We ought to have the right to do what we please to our bodies. But if you zoom out and look at t

On an individual point of view, being easy on drug makes sense. We ought to have the right to do what we please to our bodies. But if you zoom out and look at the collective outcome, this is the sort of stuff that takes down millenium-old empires and keeps them down for centuries - China. Being so bold to think that a good dose of superior modern intellectualism is going to make up for the fundamental flaws this introduce in a society, is a special type of belly button observationism. As a society, we shouldn't stop our inquiry by looking at the personal tragedy that this causes on the individuals. The real long term issue is at the higher order level, where a society's fabric is torn apart by the debilitating nature of many drugs when deployed at scale on a society. Addictive debilitating drugs are a powerful force bringing a people down, taking others along with them. Softness on drugs from a high minded perspective boils down to a decoupling mistake similar to the mispricing that carbon taxes attempt to correct. Drugs impose a high social cost that's hidden from sight when we just look at it from first-order individual right's perspective. But if we dig deeper, our collective individual rights are all put in jeopardy.