It doesn't take a whole lot of doublethink to want laws around marijuana relaxed while at the same time preferring to keep the FDA.
What takes doublethink is imagining that, once these powers are in place, they won't be used against one's preferred substances.
How many people are in prison for violating FDA rulings? I'm sure there are a few, but policing egregious behavior is probably a step that a reasonable society takes out onto that slippery slope of having rules about a thing.
The War on Drugs has involved arresting and imprisoning a lot of people, because a lot of people really want drugs. Once the soft enforcement mechanisms (reprimands, misdemeanors, fines of legitimate businesses) fail, then if you really want to suppress the act, you have to ramp up the level of force. The reason that fewer people are imprisoned under FDA rulings is, I would say, because the FDA is more lenient, and because the things it bans are far more niche and less desired. You can have effective, or you can have gentle, but you cannot have both.
I do believe that you can tell store fronts not to market literal gasoline as a restorative tonic without automatically escalating to violent raids. As far as I can tell, a rule against marketing gasoline as a restorative falls afoul of the standard you declare in your first sentence. People aren't very comfortable shrugging and not doing anything about perceived problems (illicit distribution of the restorative gasoline), but we'd be better off if we did that more often.
(I do understand that the example is ridiculous because there is no demand for a restorative gasoline tonic amongst competent adults, it's just that there is ample evidence that people want some assurances about safety. A less ridiculous example would be requiring people buying cocaine to go through some sort of educational material that made the risk of forming a habit clear, and regulating the manufacture of the cocaine that is eventually sold so that it is not adulterated)
If someone was convinced that gasoline would cure their hair loss, they couldn't get it through a pharmacy, but they could still get it from someone making no such promises. If someone was convinced that cocaine would cure their hair loss, they can't get it any way, any how - even just as something labelled "dangerous goods, do not consume". That's the prohibitive authority that leads to raids and cartel warfare. And that's the power that many people still support the FDA/DEA/government having, and which I am pointing out is the root of the problems with the drug war.
Surely there is middle ground. A drug can be regulated but not banned. The way a drug is prescribed could be regulated. This needs to happen with opiates. That doesn't mean they should be banned but the addiction potential is very serious for these drugs (and vastly underestimated when they first entered the market).
You can put whatever the hell you want in your non-FDA-approved snake oil supplement - but then you won't have the legitimacy of the medical establishment behind you. This legitimacy depends on your drug having verifiable, understood effects. You can't have it both ways.
My point is really that, if somebody's solution to the problem of people overdosing on drugs is to ban them or prohibit access, then they're defacto acquiescing to the tools that make the War on Drugs possible. People seem to expect drugs they don't like to just "go away", without any of the nasty raiding and shooting.
The milk salesman wasn't raided for selling whole milk. He was raided for selling unpasteurized milk... Across state lines.
Generally speaking, clearing the bar for FDA tolerance of nutritional supplements is quite easy. They don't care that your product works, only that you don't put actively dangerous things in it. It's caveat emptor for efficiency, but not for safety - which is a pretty reasonable place to draw the line.
The FDA approach to regulation goes after dealers and manufacturers - not their customers. So yes, we absolutely can end the War on Drugs, and keep the FDA's enforcement mechanisms.
I honestly have a lot more sympathy for an addict, or a bystander, whose life was destroyed by the state, then I do for his heroin dealer. I think most people opposing the War on Drugs on grounds other then ideological anarcho-capitalism share this assessment.
Well, sure, the current way it's being done. But you'd still have cartel warfare for selling territory, adulterated goods, and to effectively shut down distributors, you'd have to define smaller and smaller amounts of substance as qualifying for "dealing", as dealers learned what they could and couldn't get away with. Perhaps I should not have used the capital-letter "War on Drugs" to refer to this. But you would still have much of what you have now.
Now, would it be net improvement if enforcement of drug laws moved towards a dealers-and-manufacturers model? Sure, I think so. But my point is that there would still be no principle in place preventing that model from expanding again into a broader prohibition, involving new substances, posessions, uses, or what have you. It would be like saying "we'll have free speech, except if it's bad, or we don't like the person saying it, or some other reason that we might think up later." There's no sufficiently strong principle preventing prohibitions from continually increasing.
> I honestly have a lot more sympathy for an addict, or a bystander, whose life was destroyed by the state, then I do for his heroin dealer. I think most people opposing the War on Drugs on grounds other then ideological anarcho-capitalism share this assessment.
That's probably true. However, I don't think sympathy is an effective basis for judging whether things should be legal. And if observing that a government with an expansive power to ban things will probably use and aggrandize that power makes me an anarcho-capitalist (rather than, say, just a boring classical liberal) then so be it.