Life's Pleasures Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman’s provocation works because it refuses the comforting premise that drug policy is mainly about protecting people from themselves. He leads with an almost chilling libertarian axiom: self-destruction, if chosen, is still a choice. That bluntness is strategic. It dares the listener to admit what many laws quietly assume - that the state can justifiably override adult autonomy when the behavior looks immoral, risky, or socially embarrassing.

The subtext is even sharper: prohibition is not a moral stance so much as a harm multiplier. By framing illegality as the engine of “most of the harm,” Friedman shifts the story from chemistry to governance. Drugs aren’t merely dangerous; black markets are. Criminalization inflates prices, rewards violence, corrupts policing, and turns users into fugitives rather than patients. The line is a piece of economic reasoning disguised as moral candor: when you ban a product with persistent demand, you outsource its distribution to the least accountable actors.

Context matters. Friedman was arguing against the War on Drugs at a time when “tough on crime” politics treated enforcement as virtue and addiction as deviance. His phrasing also anticipates a later public-health critique: overdose deaths, adulterated supplies, HIV transmission, and mass incarceration are not side effects; they’re predictable outcomes of policy design.

There’s a deliberate discomfort in “kill themselves.” It’s meant to puncture paternalism, but it also exposes the tension in his worldview: freedom is the first principle, even when the “free” choice is tangled in dependency, despair, or unequal access to help. That’s the wager - and the sting - of Friedman’s clarity.