by Theodore Dalrymple

About the author: Theodore Dalrymple is a physician who treats patients in a British prison. He is a contributing editor to the quarterly City Journal and a columnist for the Spectator, a British weekly magazine.

There is a progression in the minds of men: first the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then it becomes an orthodoxy whose truth seems so obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought differently. This is just what is happening with the idea of legalizing drugs: it has reached the stage when millions of thinking men are agreed that allowing people to take whatever they like is the obvious, indeed only, solution to the social problems that arise from the consumption of drugs.

Intoxication and Restraint

Man’s desire to take mind-altering substances is as old as society itself...