You Can Have Free Drugs, but Only If You Don't Behave Yourself

A libertarian (and disease model skeptic) response to the Vancouver plan to offer drug maintenance for cocaine and methamphetamine addicts:

The rhetorical and policy contortions produced by prohibition are something to behold. Instead of allowing adults to obtain oral stimulants for whatever purpose they like (which was the situation in the U.S. until the government started requiring a prescription for amphetamines in 1954 and even for a decade or so afterward, when prescriptions were easy to come by), the government drives them into the black market and then allows the select few who are sufficiently fucked up to get oral stimulants at taxpayers' expense. Meanwhile, doctors commonly prescribe stimulants to people who have trouble focusing and paying attention, a condition that used to be self-treated but nowadays is recognized as a disease requiring professional diagnosis. If you take these drugs without that diagnosis, you also have a disease—drug dependence—that one day, if we're lucky, may be treated by giving you the drugs.