uniquemand
Unbeliever
It seems to me that ethics should be a little more pointed outward than a self absorbed view. What would be helpful to someone as an enrichment of life experience, reading, writing, education, artistic release, healthy physical,
mental, spiritual growth. Those actions that open up these opportunities to people beginning at birth. The decisions made by oneself that may cause one to forgo something they desire in order to benefit another's life enrichment.
The concern for others put before the desires of oneself.
That's a great way to look at it, but it's not some sort of absolute truth. If those are your ideals, and I think they are good, communally oriented ideals, then I'm glad you have them. If you had no choice, though, to decide which was more important, but were simply programmed to hold those views and take those actions, it wouldn't be ethical for you to take them or unethical not to do so. It's the CHOICE that makes things ethical or unethical. I concern myself with that sort of choice, and with improving a person's ability to see more options and take responsibility for the selections of the options they chose from.
Okay, so lets talk about drugs.
The Game of Life is set up to give us pleasure if we do certain things. Some of these things, like forming and sustaining a 2D relationship, is a lot of work, and indeed, many people fail at it.
Drugs are an attempt to short-circuit this mechanism by gaining pleasure without doing the hard work. I suspect most of the people who complain the most about "drugs in our society" are those who resent the idea of others gaining easily what they had to struggle for.
Which is not to say using drugs to gain pleasure always works, either. And there are pitfalls to using drugs, legal and otherwise.
Lastly, when I say "drugs" I'm not trying to differentiate between different types of drugs and their effects. For brevity's sake, I'm just going over the general principles here.
Helena
The Game of Life, if some such exists, also gives us the ability to make and do drugs. It's hard work to walk home, but people still drive or fly. Work is not a measure of whether doing something is right, or choosing the hardest way would always be right, and that is clearly stupid.