Daily Inspiration Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s genius here is that he grants his opponents their scariest fantasy and still beats them with it. “Even if” is the trapdoor: he invites the prohibitionists to keep every lurid headline, every “reefer madness” caricature, every moral panic assumption intact. Then he pivots to a colder metric than virtue or vice: comparative harm. In one sentence, he swaps the debate’s usual moral register for a cost-benefit ledger, implying that the state’s remedy has become the disease.

The word “allegation” does quiet work. It concedes nothing about truth; it frames prohibitionist claims as prosecutorial, not empirical. “At face value” adds a second twist: fine, let’s pretend the nightmare is real. If the policy still fails under those conditions, it’s not just misguided, it’s structurally incoherent. Buckley isn’t merely defending marijuana; he’s prosecuting prohibition as an overreach that generates predictable collateral damage: arrests, incarceration, black markets, militarized policing, and the civic rot that comes with selective enforcement.

Context matters: Buckley was a conservative intellectual who understood that the right’s credibility depends on limiting the state when its powers metastasize. The line reads like a conservative heresy and a conservative argument at once. Subtext: you don’t have to be “pro-weed” to be anti-prohibition. You just have to notice that a government willing to ruin lives to prevent potential ruin is no longer protecting society; it’s performing punishment as politics.