America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people โ the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering โ they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.
L. Neil SmithThe trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual and his rights as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.
L. Neil SmithWhat happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.
L. Neil Smith