Here’s my opinion:<p>1. In the US, we tried to make alcohol illegal, and failed so abjectly that nobody wants to try that again.<p>2. There’s a decent argument to be made, that in a counterfactual world where alcohol hadn’t been discovered yet, that if we invented it today we would immediately label it so obviously harmful that it should be banned. But we don’t live in that world.<p>3. While it’s hard to discuss whether this or that individual psychoactive drug should be legal, it’s relatively easier to evaluate whether they’re more or less harmful than alcohol. For example, coffee: clearly less; heroin: clearly more.<p>4. Besides the fact that prohibition failed, everyone sort of likes freedom? Like, yes, there must be limits, but those limits should be so much on the far side of what ordinary people consider acceptable that they never even have to think, “will the government let me do this?” That seems like a good guiding principle.<p>5. So here is the Schelling point: everything less harmful than, up to and including alcohol, should be legal, and everything more harmful should be illegal.<p>6. Like most Schelling points, the results favored by this rule are arbitrary, but the reason we ought to stick to it is not that it’s a good rule per se, but rather that it’s a rule which is easier to find agreement on.<p>So everything less harmful than alcohol should be legal, and everything more harmful should be banned. Thanks for reading. Have fun, everyone!