Government Intervention and Individual Freedoms: The Drug Dilemma

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Huemer discusses the governments abilities to limit individual’s freedoms by making drugs illegal. The first argument concludes that the government should prohibit drug use because the government should prevent people from doing things that harm themselves, and drug use is harmful to users. The problem with this argument is that the government does not prohibit everything that harms user. We have the choice to have unprotected sex, to smoke tobacco, eat too much, etc., therefore we should have the choice to decide if we want to use drugs. However, Huemer wants to show that these other examples are different from allowing drug use. He does this by considering three options: drug use harms other people besides the user, drug use is more harmful then these other activities, and drug use harms in a different way than those other activities. In option one, Huemer says that it is not the governments business to prevent these sorts of harm. Huemer then discredits option two that drug use is more harmful than these other activities by explaining that while drug use can result in death so does tobacco and obesity; yet, the rights to these activities are not infringed upon like it is for drug use, and in fact, drug use has a lower chance of death then these other cases. He also discusses the notion that drug use could be harmful to one’s …show more content…

Hallucinogens should be illegal though because you cannot also predict the behavior of those using hallucinogens and could result in violent behavior. For other drugs, if someone wants to spend their time in an alternate state of mind, then that is an individual’s decision. Rather than making it illegal, governments should spread educational awareness about the effects and the consequences of these drugs. All the government should do is try and protect their citizens, but they do not have the power to override their

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