Michael Huemer's Essay 'The Drug Laws Don' T Work

One fallacy committed in Michael Huemer’s article “The Drug Laws Don’t Work” is when he states that “most would consider legal sanctions for smoking, alcohol consumption, and overeating to be taking things too far”. This is a fallacy because it ignores the fact that there are in fact legal sanctions on smoking and the consumption of alcohol (such as age restrictions, license to sell, bans against indoor/public smoking, drunk driving laws etc.) in order to further his point, which is that smoking, alcohol and overeating are much more damaging to an individual's health than the use of other illegal substances, but are not considered as such according to the law. I couldn’t find any particular fallacy listed in the text that covers the omission

In my opinion it’s a pointless endeavor that will never succeed as the author graciously points out, comparing it to the prohibition era and it’s direct effect on the expansion of criminal activity and government corruption. The cost of the war on drugs is also absurd with an estimated cost of fifteen-billion dollars by the federal government and even more by some state and local governments. That’s money that could be used elsewhere to benefit the country rather than continue to go to waste. Even if drugs were as big of an issue as some people would like to lead me to believe, the currents means being used to enforce the drugs laws are still costing us more than it is worth - from the cost of enforcement to the number of resources to the number of people being incarcerated on drug charges to the direct expansion of criminal activity - it seems to me that it would clearly be more beneficial to end this “metaphorical war”. Similarly to the author of the article, despite my opinion i won’t dispute the fact that the use of drugs is dangerous and can potentially destroy lives, but that brings us back to Flip and the analogy between harming his computer with unsafe software and his own body through the use of drugs. It’s his decision to misuse drugs that can be hazardous to his health and i don’t believe that the government should dictate what we can and can’t do to our