Visualize a world full of moderate users of every alleged vice. You might not approve, but what’s the big deal? The moderate users do their jobs, live in homes, take care of their families, and keep their friends. They’re not perfect, but who is?

The picture doesn’t change if you add thriving legal businesses supplying all these moderate users with their desired products. Sure, you’re afraid of those who produce illegal products. I know I am. But as Prohibition shows, making an industry illegal turns it scary – and relegalizing it turns it back. You might not admire alcohol producers, but you don’t fear them either. Keeping “purveyors of vice” illegal is thus an exercise in futility.

At this point, you might protest: Are you blind?! Do you not see the urban camps full of drunks and addicts living in squalor? Spreading filth through the neighborhoods they inhabit? Do you not notice their aggressive begging? Their obvious theft of shopping carts and bicycles? How can you speak of outright legalization when the wreckage of partial legalization is all around us? For God’s sake, read San Fransicko!

My answer: I am not blind. While I have not visited the Bay Area in years, I went to college in grotesque Berkeley, California during the People’s Park volleyball lunacy. During Covid, I lived in Austin for months. Encampments were rarely out of eyesight. Last month, my whole family bumped into the hellish addicts’ village just outside the train station in Hannover, Germany. Like normal observers, I’m horrified by such situations – and strive to steer clear of them.

[You will never eliminate vice, because we live in a fallen world. But we can punish the vicious, so why don’t we? –DS]