As the marijuana legalization movement strengthens, you can see hints of how hard it is to hit the libertarian sweet spot where something is simultaneously legalized but remains rare and distasteful.
People, especially young people, pick up messages from society about what is winning and what is losing more than they pick up nuanced messages.
Smoking tobacco is losing so it seems reasonable to ban smoking it even in your own car while driving through a brushfire zone. Smoking marijuana is winning, so it doesn’t seem like the ban on smoking in Laurel Canyon applies to dope.
For example, legalizing pornography leads to a situation in which participants are referred to not as “performing whores,” but as “porn stars.” Above a certain IQ level, the emphasis in that phrase falls ironically on the first term, but to a fair number of teenage girls with two-digit IQs, the “star” part sounds most intriguing.
