Not defending cigarette companies, but it really actually does suck that meth is illegal in all 50 states. The United States has the world’s largest prison population, it’s the most authoritarian country on the planet, and that is heavily facilitated by throwing people into prison for using drugs.
most authoritarian country on the planet
Are you by chance familiar with countries that kill LGBTQ people, beat women who don’t cover their hair, and kill drug addicts?
‘Authoritarianism’ is a bullshit vague idealist concept that can’t be linearized into ‘more than’, ‘less than’, ‘most’ or ‘least’, and make any sense.
The USA throw people in prison for decades and enslave them for being a victim of the drug trade. They have one of the largest proportions of imprisoned population in the world.
They also allow socialists to own guns and propagandize, to a larger degree than most countries.
Liberalism is complex, contradictory and idealist, so terms like ‘authoritarianism’ are basically meaningless to apply to the real world.
You ironically found yourself pointing out something valid. Banning companies from putting addictive substances into everyday products has always been a good idea (Meth in Cheerios, no thx). Banning an individual from choosing, by their own free will, to make a bad decision that doesn’t do any great harm to anyone else… is oppression my guy.
There’s a big difference between banning addictive industries and oppression. There’s a big difference between ‘a government not letting people do something’ and ‘oppression’. There might be a case that this way of eliminating tobacco usage, by just making an addictive substance illegal, can be cruel if there isn’t adequate social support alongside it, but banning smoking by itself isn’t cruel, malicious or arbitrary.
I think there are some reasonable arguments for not criminalizing tobacco, and that this is a silly ineffective way to approach a chemically-and-socially addictive issue, but it is harmful to health for the user and others, society and therefore economics. And this can’t be rationalized away by ‘it’s someone’s own free will’ when it’s chemically-addictive, socially-ingrained and still being marketed to vulnerable teens. And, keep in mind, the medical costs of this are socialised, so it’s not like the person smoking pays for all the consequences. It’s a systematic, non-trivial problem that significantly affects people who do not choose to partake.
With all that said, fuck the ‘war on drugs’ style of criminalization. It just creates an illegal market and fills prisons, and in some countries with a similar system to the US, creates a legalized form of mass slave labour.
