Anarchy!

Yup, nothing should be illegal.
Nothing.
All things should be legal.
All THINGS.
Ah? Ah?
See what I did there?

Things don't cause problems. People cause problems. People are greedy, power hungry, selfish, stupid, and even disenfranchised and abused. People in those categories do things that are not always sociable. Some times, it seems that things are an integral part of the plot of a tale of woe, but they are scenery, if you think about it.

Drugs are not a problem. Addiction is. You don't need a drug to be addicted, in fact, people are at this moment ruining their lives with social media addictions. Sure, they don't go knock off a pensioner for another Facebook hit, but their addiction is no less real. It's just that face book didn't rot anyone's teeth and isn't smuggled from poor nations in the body cavities of poor people. Frankly, it's easier to blame the inanimate drug than to try to find out why people take it... isn't it? That's why drugs are illegal, isn't it? Alcohol consumes lives at a startling pace, but it remains legal. Remember when it wasn't? Would a sane person want to go back? Alcohol prohibition built the mob that the FBI had to be built to take down. Oddly enough, now that drugs are illegal, we had to build yet another TLA to take on the problem with guns, accountants, and blood. It's called the Drug Enforcement Agency, and like the FBI, they can literally get away with murder in the name of a McGuffin.

Am I advocating drug use? No, though marijuana seems to fit the "mostly harmless" category (don't give me the gateway drug spiel, none of my pot head friends would ever want to switch). However, drug use is missing the point. Or not... how have our laws against drugs done in combating drug addictions? Drug addiction is fought by social workers, not police.

This principle here, the idea that things are neither good nor bad, extends everywhere. There is a tendency, however, to blame things for the actions that people perform. This is absurd. It denies the fact that people are not suddenly tempted to do something bad by the presence of an object. People that would kill with a gun would kill without one. People who would get addicted to PCP would likely get addicted to something else. This behavior has roots, of course, and that ought to be focus of the law and the rest of society. Perfection can never be achieved, but that's no excuse not to try harder.

The first step to really cleaning up societal decay is focus on the people, divorcing the silly notion that things are bad... or good.

Nothing should be illegal. Harming others should be.