It's quite difficult to know if there's a good reason for a prohibition, vs whether it's just there to protect somebody's monopoly. In a healthier society ther

It's quite difficult to know if there's a good reason for a prohibition, vs whether it's just there to protect somebody's monopoly. In a healthier society there'd be a smooth gradient between the layman and the professional such that B.S. prohibitions would be identified and removed by informed subsets of the population. But instead we have this very crisp boundary between the in-the-know and the clueless, and to be in-the-know is so expensive that one can't afford to be in-the-know while also not being on somebody's payroll--those tend to be the same somebody's who have a monopoly to protect, so the clueless stay clueless and the capable stay under control. There's a lot of criticism in adjacent threads for these guys having cherry-picked the easy examples, but given the circumstances I think that that's precisely what we ought to be doing: Identify the cases where taking control of your drugs is relatively easy, teach people to do it, and level up gradually until that set of cases starts growing. We may never get to the point where we're making everything at home, but if we don't at least take a shot at the easy ones then we'll never know where the reasonable equilibrium point lies (i.e. the point beyond which you should leave it to a corporation). As it stands we're letting that point be decided by people who have a conflict of interest in doing so.