I vouched for your comment not because I agree with it, but I vehemently disagree. I also think your viewpoint is pervasive in more conservative circles.

We saw what happened in the Prohibition. When alcohol was criminalized, gang violence spiked, production was accidentally mixed with ethyl -and- methyl, tax revenues went down, and we as a populace was generally unsafer after than before. There were even cases where the US govt poisoned rumrunners' stocks to kill drinkers - they were doing something illegal, so US officials deemed it OK to kill people. It was bad enough that Congress and the president did another constitutional change to remove the ban.

With cannabis, it is mostly harmless and makes you feel weird. But as noted by Nixon and other republicans, banning and punishing cannabis users was being equated with targeting hippies and blacks.

And of course, cannabis usage completely ignores many health positive effects like prevention of nausea, glaucoma, and many others. It's not a cure-all, but the downsides are very very limited. Just compare this to say, the Sacklers' pushing of Oxycontin. I don't think "near harmless" can be used to discuss that.

When we look at harm minimization, making drugs illegal only pushes them underground, deprives tax dollars, increases violent groups to maintain illicit trade, and further reduces public safety. So yeah, you do have to look at the whole issue rather than "My uncle Jimbob sits around gettin' high". Whereas alcoholism and alcohol overdose is a significant issue which can kill people.. Yet we had that discussion a century ago, and we learned our lesson then.

just as a quick FYI, the alcohol humans consume to become intoxicated is, and always has been, the ethyl- variety. Ethanol is poisonous as varying doses but methyl alcohol, or methanol, is FAR more dangerous. This is the compound that was poisoning people back in the days of prohibition due to lack of production controls. As a fun little side note, the concentration of ethanol in black market drink drastically increased during the days of prohibition because the moonshiners could fit more "bang for the buck" into a smaller volume making transport easier and more profitable. Smells quite a bit to me like the current fentanyl predicament of the black market heroin/opiate trade.

I’m not an expert on conservative philosophy, but it seems like the conservative case for sobriety is that happiness and joy should be earned, and drugs are a short-circuit of that.

I think that's part of the case part of the time, but it's definitely not the whole thing. Other prongs include purity (drugs are a corrupting influence) and tribalism/classism (drug use marks you as an inferior and unwelcome kind of person).

Who are you to tell others how they should find happiness?

To be clear, I'm simply stating what I perceive to be the kernel of the conservative argument against drugs. I'm not personally espousing any particular position on drug use.

Was more of a general 'you'. I think they're more afraid of a counter culture than anything else. People get nasty when you threaten (or are perceived to threaten) their way of life.

who is ANYONE to tell others how they should find happiness, or what they can or cannot do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own homes?

and who are you to tell others how they should find happiness?

...I'm not?

Re-learn? Everything you described still happens regularly despite decades of warring against drugs (and even prohibition!).

> a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.

Have you ever wondered why they're drunk/stoned all the time? They're not a drunk because they're a drunk. They're a drunk for different reasons. They're depressed. They're not satisfied with their life or themselves. They're hurting. They're scared. They're angry. There's a reason for it and it's not because they can buy alcohol or drugs.

True, but destroying people’s lives with criminal records and the barbarism of the justice system is far worse than anything mushrooms have done

> Oh, and a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.

Yes, he's terrible.

Putting him in jail, and destroying any possibility of him getting a decent job, forever, hardly seems a constructive way forwards there though does it?

not to mention drunk fathers still exist, as they did during the prohibition of alcohol.

stoned fathers still exist, during the current prohibition.