The libertarians are always banging their pots and pans about legalizing weed. It is fair to say they are obsessed over it. For as long as I’ve been alive, every conversation with a libertarian has always turned into a debate about legalizing drugs. While they are right about many of the consequences of the drug war, they are unrealistic about the consequences of legalization. The easiest way to think about it is this. A mother is driving down the road with her pre-teen kids and on the radio is a splashy ad about the weed sale at WalMart. In a society that has banned cigarette ads, it seems unlikely that we would tolerate the open sale of drugs, even mild ones like weed. In other words, libertarianism sounds great in the lab, but it would never hold up in the wild. The people will never allow it.

Even if you can work out a convenient lie like “medical marijuana” so you can have legal weed that exists on the fringe of society, there are other problems. This is a good example. If these two coaches were at a bar getting hammered, they would maybe face some sort of reprimand or a trip to a phoney counselor. That’s never going to happen with smoking weed, like these idiots were apparently doing. The public may be willing to legalize weed to a limited extent, they will never embrace it like beer. Punishing employees for doing that which is perfectly legal will be problematic. The public, faced with a choice between banning weed or allowing their kid’s teachers to do bong hits in the teacher’s lounge will prefer prohibition.

It is the central problem with libertarianism and liberalism. Both make assumptions about humans that are not based in reality. Humans are not moist robots. We have prejudices and preferences that are not always rational from a distance. Black kids, for example, join black student groups in college despite the fact it works against them. They just want to hang out with other kids like them. In social gatherings, women hang out together, often in the kitchen, while the men find their own space. The women can all be fiery feminists and the men beta males, but it happens anyway. Some things just don’t make sense if you think humans are rational in the way your iPad is rational.

If you give people, those irrational people, the freedom to arrange things the way they choose, they will inevitably choose to do things that are not liberal or not libertarian. This is not such a problem with liberalism as they don’t mind using force. Liberals are the intellectual heirs of Hobbes, not Locke. The libertarians have a big problem. On the one hand they want to let people have the choice to smoke week. On the other, they don’t want those same people to vote for politicians who promise to ban it. There’s a reason why we have never seen a libertarian society.

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