Addiction from a Classical Liberal PoV

This is a response to an external blog post by @dollarsandsense in which he discusses how problem of addiction affected his thinking about libertarianism.

I consider myself a classical liberal which I see as different from Libertarianism.

The classical liberal argument doesn't start with freedom. It starts with the mind. Humans come equipped with relatively well developed minds. These minds make us different from other things on the planet.

Our ideals of freedom and property rights flow from the existence of our minds.

Developing the human mind the the key to human progress.

What happens with addiction is that one looses control of one's mind. Psycho-active and addictive drugs are problematic for a free society because they diminish the mind. I do not like the anything goes relation to drugs.

Imagine a pimp who pushes drugs on the women he is selling. He is using drugs to diminish the minds of his victims. By destroying their minds, he is taking their freedom.

The War on Drugs clearly failed. But for the legalization movement to win, our society still needs to find ways to prevent people from pushing drugs on others and we have to find ways to help people who have lost control of their lives through addiction.