We're currently in the middle of the long process of realising that a lot of things that were thought to be harmful or ""degenerate"" actually aren't, and that more harm is done in suppressing them; conversely a whole range of ""normal"" behaviour is non-consensual and actually harmful.
Maybe the line should be like they have over in Czechia - weed is illegal but police ignores it for single individuals as necessary evil addressing human weakness, but prosecutes sellers and manufacturers. So the "hard line" is given, i.e. legally the line is not pushed more towards hard drugs as next generation might argue "we have weed legal, why not heroin? It only affects some people!", pushing the line further, damaging more people because some can't or don't want to attain mastery of self-control and delayed satisfaction.
BTW, when you look at the beginning of communism in Russia, they tried these kinds of experiments and it fell like house of cards in ~20 years, leading them to be even more repressive than what their conservatives would be. Our estimates of what is harmful are too often incorrect. I am not saying that the algorithm in law we have now is perfect, but it's definitely organic and a result of many optimization procedures. It could be local optima, there could be much better optimas, but it's hard to predict if a given step leads to another optima or wrecks the whole civilization like the Chinese population addiction during Opium wars.
> It could be local optima, there could be much better optimas, but it's hard to predict if a given step leads to another optima or wrecks the whole civilization like the Chinese population addiction during Opium wars.
Ask yourself, why is it that almost every society on the planet had access to opium during this time period, but it was only the Chinese who suffered government destabilizing consequences as a result of opium availability?
The answer is that opium was weaponized in China by the British. The British government (along with some rather wealthy US citizens) essentially forced opium onto the Chinese population in an attempt to equalize trade deficits. This was effective at not only re-balancing trade in favor of the British, but also weakened the Chinese population considerably, allowing for Britain to more easily control the population.
You know what happened whenever the Chinese government was finally like, "hey this stuff is harming our population, we're going to attempt to curtail the widespread consumption of opium"? The British intervened with full military might, crushing the Chinese resistance and forcing the continued exploitation of the Chinese people. Twice.
The reason opium was so destructive to the social fabric of 19th century China is that opium was weaponized, and as a result it fulfilled the role of any other weapon.
We're currently in the middle of the long process of realising that a lot of things that were thought to be harmful or ""degenerate"" actually aren't, and that more harm is done in suppressing them; conversely a whole range of ""normal"" behaviour is non-consensual and actually harmful.