Agreed, Martin...all these practices you mentioned drag down society. However, I don't think that gives police the right to come into people's houses and arrest them...basically because they don't fit someone else's definition of "normality" or "acceptability". If they are actually threatening bodily harm to a partner or child, against their consent, and with violence or implied violence, THEN the police have the right to come in. Otherwise, I don't think they do.

Put it this way: In a society practicing strict legal temperance a policeman can come into your own home and arrest you for drinking one glass of wine or beer or just for having it in the house. Do you think that's right? I don't. The reason we don't think it's right is partly because we think it's "normal" to have alcoholic drinks around sometimes, but someone else might think it's not normal at all. That someone else could demand a law to allow the police to arrest people for the above situation.

Someone else could think it's not normal to pray in one's own house, or NOT to pray in one's own house, or to read certain banned books in one's own house, or any damned thing under the sun...because they thought it was unacceptable or abnormal to do so.

They have no right to force their version of normality on another person by the power of the law in the privacy of that other person's own home.

To millions of people it is "normal" to light up a joint in their own home. To me it isn't. I do not presume to bring the law down on them because they are a little different from me. You apparently do presume so. That appears to be the difference in our positions.

I agree that using drugs...pretty well all drugs...drags down society. You can't attack this sort of thing with punitive laws in my opinion...and you don't have the right to.

What will you do if other people start telling you what YOU can drink, smoke, eat, read, or do in the privacy of your own home, and it interferes with what to you is perfectly normal? What then?

Is your normality superior to other people's normality? Is it the "best" way or the "only" way to be normal? (rhetorical question :-))

I think not. I think there are a million ways to be normal, and at least half of them are quite arbitrary.