Maggie's Farm

America’s Invisible Pot Addicts - More and more Americans are reporting near-constant cannabis use, as legalization forges ahead.

I could have told you government granting people the liberty to choose what they want to do with their own bodies was a bad idea. I remember well back in aught-diggety when, in a fit of unbridled benevolence, government granted people the liberty to choose which foods they wished to consume. I said at the time that some day a greedy capitalist preying on food addicts would invent a food emporium where food addicts could freely buy as much non-nutritious food as their greedy little pig hearts desired, even to the point where these poor addicts would need some sort of mechanical mobility device to traverse the shelving of the food emporium. Or worse, someone would come up with the idea of allowing food addicts to stay at home and order their foodstuffs via electro-telegraph devices and have their purchases delivered by bicycle-messenger boys.

Nope, it was a bad idea to grant the peasants more liberty than is good for them, the poor ignorant deplorables don't even know what's for their own good and will simply abuse their freedom of choice to make poor choices. And now I've heard some sophists even go so far as to claim that "everything that is not permitted is forbidden" is a poor way for a government to operate, as if always seeking permission from government before taking any action is not demonstrably the wisest way to run things. Why, if you allowed people to do what they wished with their own bodies, you'd have not only food addiction and drug addiction but some day such abominations as abortion, sodomy, prostitution, atheism and who knows what all under the banner of "my body, my choice."

Except for the repeal of laws forbidding the rental of labor for less than $7.25 per hour, of course, nobody's insane enough to believe that freedom of choice extends to allowing consenting adults to determine for themselves the value of labor.