Who is to decide who the better self is? You? Um, no thanks. This is the justification for all tyranny: “I know better than you, and so I have the right to command you how to live your life.”

However, the premise of this article is that excellence is promoted, fostered, maybe even created by treating drug users, particularly MJ users, as criminals. Please show me the stellar achievements and laudable personality traits that you can attribute to putting people in jail or prison.

One in a thousand might decide as a result of being incarcerated that they are going to turn their life around. That’s not enough to justify the negative effects of the war on drugs. Read in my other post about the intransitive effects Paul brought up a few months ago. Then add the other effects, like the cost of enforcement and prisons and the activities of drug cartels.

Human excellence is not the primary objective of human existence, especially when you attempt to “help” others achieve it by coercive means. I do NOT “endorse behavior that diminishes personhood”, nor do I advocate “accommodating drug use.”

I also have never used any illegal drug, nor abused a legal one. I tasted alcohol once, when I was tricked into having some spiked eggnog, which I found foul and spit it out.

Your own religion teaches that excellence can NOT be achieved through exercising control or dominion or compulsion upon others. Ride with some drug force officers and watch judges and jail guards and tell me their activities lack those qualities, let alone result in excellence. Show me the excellence that has resulted from the drug war!

Ironically, your argument leads to the conclusion that you support “accommodating” tobacco and alcohol use. I know you don’t, but that fact only underscores the weakness of your argument.

I return to your argument about intransitive effects. You promote a system that causes huge intransitive effects on ALL of society, as opposed to the limited intransitive effect you are concerned with. Most of society (especially those you mingle with on Sunday) objectifies drug users as criminals worthy of incarceration, or worse; law enforcement, the judiciary and prison guards become draconian and abusive (even criminally abusive); and the user himself comes to view himself as “bad” instead of sick. Talk about intransitive effects.

If your own child becomes a drug user, I hope you would want him or her to be treated as a person who needed medical and/or psychological help, not incarceration with hardened, experienced, actual criminals. Good luck with that.