Alcohol 'more dangerous than heroin'

[Tiberius]

Nobody decides what I do with my body but me. Anything else is a form of slavery.

What if you put something into your body that alters your behavior so that you harm others? Doesn't the government have the right to prevent that from happening?

They don't have the right to try to prevent it by restricting civil liberties, no. What they do have the right to do is to try to prevent it through other means (education, etc), and by punishing those who slip through the system and do commit such terrible acts.

People are always going to be people. They will cause harm to each other in some way; it's always going to happen. Trying to prevent it by removing every possible thing you can use to hurt people isn't the way to go, as it simply results in a flourishing black market (case in point, the UK banned handguns, and now only the criminals have handguns...that worked well </sarcasm>).

If you go down the route of prohibition, you end up with problems based on what you decide to ban, and where to draw the line. The only reason alcohol isn't banned is because so many people like it; same with cigarettes. All this study shows is that the governments of the world are being completely hypocritical by claiming to ban substances that cause harm, and yet allowing the most harmful of the lot to be distributed legally on practically every street.