3D Printers and Drug Legalization

In a recent American Thinker article, I wrote on some of the problems surrounding calls for legalizing the drug ecstasy. In general, my view is that the traditional libertarian perspectives on this topic are naive, and not grounded in a proper analysis of the complex negative externalities that arise from drug legalization.

In both the comments to this article, and in a recent piece from the National Post in Canada, drug legalization proponents have raised the issue of 3D printing, and how this possible future technology revolution "will have rendered the drug war obsolete."

3D Printer Scales UP

PEEK through the inspection windows of the nearly 100 three-dimensional (3D) printers quietly making things at RedEye, a company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and you can catch a glimpse of how factories will work in the future. It is not simply that the machines, some as big as delivery vans, run day and night attended by just a handful of technicians. Instead it is what they are making that shows how this revolutionary production process is entering the manufacturing mainstream.