Why is it everyone around here believes we have a meth problem when we actually have a problem with getting involved in everyone's business? I read in the paper all the time about people getting arrested for possession, sale and the manufacture of meth. They all have one thing in common: None of them bothered me. All of these people made the individual choice to use this drug, yet we are arresting them and putting in prison because as a society we are telling them that they made the wrong choice. As a collective community, we have a problem understanding individual liberty.
Everyone owns their own individual life. There is no one with a higher claim to my life and no one owns my life as I do not own anyone else's. Everyone is responsible for the choices that they make and no one can judge the choices they make unless it violates another person's life, liberty or property. The rights of the individual are guaranteed under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - yet people want to have the government solve all the problems of today's society even though the government causes more problems than they actually solve. For people wanting to eliminate the usage of meth, the solution the community has come up with is mandating that the sale of PSE be through a doctor's prescription.
So now a person is going to have to spend money for a doctor's visit in order to get a prescription to spend money to buy something that will alleviate the symptoms they went to the doctor for. Would it be easier to just drive to a place that sells the cold medicine, spend the five or six dollars it costs to buy the medicine, take it and feel better in a day or so? One of the most important foundations of American jurisprudence is "innocent until proven guilty." Making it harder to obtain a legal product for personal consumption changes the rules to "guilty until proven innocent."
Now are the users of meth bad people, of course not, they made a choice and now have to deal with the repercussions of that choice. Are the parents of meth users bad parents, of course not, you taught your kids that you can make a choice but there are consequences of those choices, right or wrong. Do I want people to use illicit drugs, of course not because drugs like cocaine, heroin and LSD do more harm than good especially in the long run.
William Randolph Herst got the government to ban marijuana because he believed hemp would hurt his timber interests. The Women's Temperance Movement got the government to ban alcohol. Both caused more trouble than it solved. You can try banning all the illicit drugs you want (cocaine, Heroin, LSD, etc.), it just means that people are going to find new drugs to use and the cycle just repeats. We need to relearn the Philosophy of Liberty and realize the government causes more problems than they fix.
