All drugs should be legal to sell, produce, distribute, and to be consumed by consenting adults.

Liberty is a very important part of the founding of our nation and our nation altogether. A very important part of this Liberty is the idea of negative liberty. The notion that a man is free to do as he pleases unless he is harming somebody else. Another important necessity in America is the notion of private property rights. Private property is essential for a free and productive society. The most absolute ownership you can have is ownership over yourself. In order to own yourself, you must be able to do what you please to your own body. Be that use drugs, or kill yourself, ownership of your life is very important for the liberty of a free state. Your justification for a ban on all drugs might be that they are harmful to the users of the drugs. People are often involved in many possibly harmful activities. Some people enjoy skydiving, some people enjoy eating, some people enjoy smoking cigarettes and some people enjoy drinking alcohol. Would you suggest we ban skydiving, computers, alcohol, cigarettes, eating unhealthy foods, and other things that might be harmful to others simply because you disagree with their lifestyle? Should people not have control over their lives and not have to ask permission from you or the government to do something that you or the government might consider risky? Do you personally engage in any behavior besides what might go on in your typical day? Sure, drugs can be harmful to the people who use them- but so can many other things. The key to this is that people own their lives, and thusly must make decision for themselves- 'is skydiving worse the risk?', 'Is smoking worth the risk', or 'Is eating this pizza worth the risk?'- and that these decisions are not the governments to make. You might argue that drugs are harmful to other people. Drugs are not harmful to other people, drugs do not cause crime- people do. People who commit crimes on drugs do not do them so much because they are on drugs, but because they are criminally minded people. Furthermore, even if they are doing it largely due to drug motivations (such as meth, for example, which some people might commit crimes for meth money) it is STILL the person committing the crime. It is their actions that cause the crime to be committed, not the drugs. Crime is often surrounded by poverty- poor people tend to commit more violent crime than rich people, so does that mean we should arrest all poor people so that they have no chance of committing crime, arrest them for thoughtcrime.... or should we let them make their own choices? Should we let them decide for themselves if they will actually commit the crime, and then punish them if they commit the crime- or should we punish them regardless, blanketly? Not all drugs are even harmful. For example, cannabis is a drug which has very few negative side effects, is hardly associated with crime and simply alters some of your perception. Many people have tried it, in fact the majority of adult Americans have tried it at some point in their lives. They are not killing people, they're generally normal people. While there may be some social issues with some users, that can again come with absolutely any love or hobby. Saying that cannabis might be a gateway drug is confusing cause and effect, sure people who did hard drugs might have done cannabis, but that does not mean cannabis use causes the use of hard drugs. Using that argument, you could argue that water, oxygen, or the color red are all causes of the use of hard drugs. The argument is simply fallacious. All drugs should be legalized in the name of Liberty, in order to stand by our principles of Negative Liberty and private property rights required for any capitalist (productive, free) society. You may argue that drugs are harmful to the people who take them, however the drugs are only harmful to the people who take them because they make their own choices on the matter. In fact, not all drugs are harmful- cannabis is less harmful than many legal drugs today, like Alcohol or Tobacco. You could make the argument that drugs cause harm to others, however that would be incorrect as well- as people make their own choices on whether or not to harm others. It is hypocritical to throw drug users in jail while not throwing other, perhaps just as risky people in jail, such as mountain climbers, computer users, the poor, the black, or skydivers.