Originally Posted by Redundant

People are able to argue that they were drunk when they did bad things because it is the truth. Why would you not want people to use the truth in a court?
Surely that does not mean that being drunk is an excuse to do bad things. It just means that their rationality was unable to function properly in that situation.
If being drunk cannot be used to evaluate how bad a crime is, then what can? Anger? Ice cold development of a strategy to harm someone? Not only the result of an action matters in a courtroom. How those actions came to be matters as well. It is a great difference if someone kills his wife during a fight or plans the murder for several weeks and executes it with a calm mind. Intoxication is also a factor that needs to be taken into consideration unless you think that being willfully ignorant is a good thing.

Originally Posted by Redundant

We could declare that the act of advertising drugs is immoral and proceed to ban pro drug ads. I see no problem with that, seeing as ads tend to be very manipulative and that drugs are viewed upon as negative thing in general. That does not limit a person's personal freedom to choose to do those drugs, nor does it heavily affect the economy. That would be a healthy way of going about this situation.

Originally Posted by Redundant

Compared to actual problems we have with drugs, that seems to be a rather minor one.
There are drug related problems that are far greater. Look at South America, for instance. Drug lords vs police.
Drugs are already banned there. The drugs that got prohibited gave those druglords the ability to gain insane amount of moneys by circumventing the laws. Those people have no interest in a change of those laws.
I dare to suggest that prohibiting things that are high in demand is the root of a lot of criminal acts all around the world. Gotta ask yourself what's worse: Legalized junkies or war on the streets. People who want to do illegal drugs can do illegal drugs already. They don't care about them being illegal. It's just insanely unsafe and many people suffer due to that.
Why not provide an environment where those people can do drugs safely in a way that does not endanger people as it does today?
Legalizing it does not mean condoning it, and you still can take measures to prevent people from taking those drugs, as long as those do not interfere with the freedom to choose.

Originally Posted by Redundant

We could also get a take on firearms as well, I guess, since this thread seems to be about everything now.
Banning firearms in a country where the general populace believes that the possession of guns is immoral is correct. If it is the consensus and generally agreed upon there is no problem with that.
The problem occurs once you try to ban firearms in a country where guns are an important part of the culture, and people own firearms traditionally as well as for safety reasons.
In those countries banning firearms would be immoral because people have a high demand for them, and taking away their rights to secure their own safety is not a very clever way to deal with a criminal environment. When a person feels the need to protect himself you should examine his situation closely and then form an opinion if his environment is, in fact, dangerous. Declaring right away that those firearms should be taken off the streets no matter what is a very ignorant way of dealing with the situation.
When there is a high demand for firearms there will be firearms, even if there is a ban. The only thing you are going to accomplish is that many more people will become criminal, some people will make a lot of money with being criminal, and in the end you caused more problems than you solved.

Originally Posted by Redundant

Of course that does not mean that firearms should go totally unchecked. There are certain ones that are more dangerous to your own safety than others. A grenade, for instance, has very little value in a street fight. You cannot defend yourself with it. It can only be used offensively. Therefore the access to grenades should be restricted, and I believe that most people all over the world would agree that the access to grenades should be restricted. The primary function of a grenade is causing a lot of destruction, which is a bad thing. So a ban would make sense here.
The primary function of a handgun, however, is not destruction. It's security. So saying that owning a handgun in general is a bad thing would be wrong.

I could write more now, but I am getting lazy and tired.
Go ahead and plow through my reasoning.