Addicts had little or nothing to do with the founding of the FDA. Check out this history.

The FDA began by supporting, then eventually replacing a perfectly functional beginning private system of voluntary organizations that regulated the drug industry.

Like with most other government regulatory organizations, the FDA then began working towards the goal of taking over pretty much everything visible on this side of the horizon and expanding its power beyond anything its founders could possibly have imagined.

The private regulatory system, like many others that grew in our nation's early years, faded out in the face of the Federal juggernaut.

Your negative attitude on drugs is unusual for a liberal, although with the typical liberal view that the stupid oafs comprising the majority of the American population need to be led around on a leash and can't be trusted with free choice, it is admittedly more consistent.

It is obviously inconsistent to treat alcohol differently than marijuana, an argument that trips up an awful lot of conservative commentators. Many of them actually fall back on the odd argument that alcohol is legal, and that makes all the difference, which is an argument so circular it comes very close to collapsing into a singularity.

If marijuana is illegal, then alcohol really should be as well, for the exact same reasons, and one could make an excellent case on the same grounds for making cigarettes illegal.

Prohibition didn't work. Created an entire new class of professional criminal, including the Kennedy regime, and the laws were flouted anyway. Most libertarians know those arguments.

What they don't normally know about is another feature of Prohibition: alcohol abuse and its ill effects on society were actually reduced considerably. From that viewpoint, Prohibition DID work.

A lot to think about. Freedom or nanny state? Which way to go?