Speaking of addiction …

Let’s not overlook the biggest addiction of our times: running to government to solve every problem we believe others are having. Whether it’s alcohol, tobacco, obesity, pornography, opium, cycling helmets, cocaine, soft drinks, seat-belt use, nudity, prostitution, plastic straws or touching your cell phone while driving (that’s right, just allowing a fingertip to touch your cell phone is now a jailable offense in Oregon), there will be some group of people who think they know what’s best for everyone else, and they will sometimes succeed in getting politicians to criminalize the behaviors they loathe. Generally with perverse results, as drug prohibition has hideously demonstrated.

Articles like this are a great demonstration of the pervasiveness of that addiction. Is marijuana harmful to some people? Do some people use it in ways or in quantities that are harmful to them? The underlying (and completely tacit) premise here is that such questions are the business of government to look into.

Example: “Yet reducing the commercial appeal of all vice products — cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana — is an option, if not necessarily a popular one.”

An option? Only to those addicted to the gun power of Almighty Government for salvation from all perceived sins.

Every addiction recovery program has as one of its fundamental tenets that no recovery is possible until the addict is willing to admit being a captive. Only then can withdrawal begin.

Let’s begin with this mantra: “I have become addicted to using the State as my proxy in forcing other people to behave the way I think they should. I hereby renounce my addiction and pledge to let people live their own private lives. Only when people behave in some way that causes immediate harm to me or my friends will I call upon the State and its guns to intervene.”