CONSERVATIVES GRAPPLE WITH DRUG REFORM
Following Oregon’s votes to legalize psilocybin therapy and decriminalize all drugs, a columnist for the conservative National Review contemplates this “Brave New World:”
I don’t pretend this is simple. Many of the same [damaging] claims can be made about alcohol, which no one sensible is looking to prohibit (that having worked out so well the last time). It’s reasonable to contend that using the criminal-justice system to address all this dysfunction and suffering only makes matters worse — with the added banes of gang crime, gun crime, ruined neighborhoods, and cycles of addiction and incarceration. Neither can we ignore, however, the stubborn facts that the law is the signal of what a society is prepared to tolerate, and that legalizing an addictive activity guarantees that there will be more of it, along with its inevitable train of damages.
