Devil’s advocate–some of the examples in this thread are of people doing drugs to the point of triggering negative externalities.

Is there a point at which drug use should be considered antisocial and unacceptable?

Legalizing drug use does not shield them from liability for committing crimes.

But it allows for an increase of the frequency at which those crimes are committed - at which point it’s too late. Sure, can punish the criminal afterwards, but the victim has already sufferred.

> In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others

You have to make the argument that drug use doesn’t harm others. In a libertarian thought experiment maybe it doesn’t, but in the real world it does.

In particular, we tend to criminalise behaviors that increase the risk of harming others. Consider drunk driving. Nobody is harmed if I don’t have an accident. But the risk of an accident increases, so we criminalize it. The same is true of hard drugs. The probability I will harm others conditional on meth addiction is higher than the background probability.

This is not as tricky as you think. Drinking alcohol is legal. Drunk driving is not. Taking drugs is legal. Driving while high is not.

When you start using eg meth, you open up, with reasonable probability, a whole host of other externalities beyond impaired driving. (The same is true of alcohol, except with far lower probability, which is a key disanalogy.) Hard drug users commit property crimes and violent crimes at a much higher rate than people who don’t use. Crime increases during binges, suggesting causality. But you really don’t really need academic study to demonstrate causality here - it’s obvious to everyone but the libertarian fringe that people steal to fund addiction.

And yes, you can prosecute them for whatever property or violent crimes they commit, but for the victim, it’s too late! They have already suffered. A better outcome is if we decrease the amount of usage of drugs like meth and fentanyl via law enforcement, and subsequently decrease the externalities that society has to bear.

Arguably, the effect of an altered mental state through addiction is another issue in terms of culpability and remediation.

Diminished capacity while drunk or high is not an excuse for committing crimes.

Of course not, but how to deal with the crime afterwards is more complicated than if the person was sober, I should think.

Why?

Intent is less clear, and even if prisons in the US were much more humane, addicted people would need extra resources (including human effort) to break the addiction and hopefully prevent further incidents. Really, addicted people are a liability because they'll do pretty much anything to get more of their drugs (and they're often violent); it's just a matter of how prevalent this has to be to be a serious issue. Of course, they're not solely responsible for pervasive drug usage.