The thought experiment: Imagining skiing as an illegal drug
In the first installment of this series, we proposed an uncomfortable scenario: what would happen if we treated skiing exactly as we treat illegal psychoactive substances today? Closing slopes, persecuting equipment, criminalizing the practitioner. The natural question that follows is simple but revealing: in that world, would there be more skiing accidents or fewer? More problems or fewer?
This exercise, attributed to the writer Eduardo Hidalgo in the original version of this text, does not seek to argue that skiing is harmless, but rather to isolate a variable we often confuse with the substance itself: the legal framework. When a persistent human behavior is pushed into the shadows, almost everything surrounding it worsens, and skiing serves as a mirror here precisely because no one associates it with a moral panic.
What would happen with “illegal skiing”
It is worth breaking down the foreseeable consequences of that scenario, as they are the same ones we recognize in the case of drugs:
- Health: Without regulated slopes, certified equipment, or accessible training, accidents would not disappear; they would become more severe and more invisible.
- Economic: A black market for boards, bindings, and boots, with the consequent loss of tax revenue and public spending diverted toward persecution rather than prevention.
- Judicial and penal: Courts and prisons saturated with people whose only “crime” is sliding down the snow.
- Geopolitical: Tensions between countries that produce equipment and consumer countries, with all the attendant trafficking and violence.
- Civil liberties: Cuts to the right to information and the right to decide on one’s own leisure; families torn apart upon discovering that someone “practices” in secret.
A world without skiing—like a world without drugs—would never arrive, and the attempt to impose it would cause more harm than the phenomenon itself.
Skiing, by the way, is older than the wheel: we have been sliding on boards for millennia. No law would erase that inclination; it would only change who manages it and at what price. And here is the first conclusion of the experiment: applying the treatment we give drugs to sports would multiply the problems and reduce the benefits in every aspect of public and private life.
Turning the mirror around
If applying the logic of drugs to skiing makes everything worse, it is worth asking the opposite: what would happen if we applied the way we manage sports to the realm of substances? Regulation, information, training, harm reduction, and the assumption that the activity will exist regardless. The hypothesis of this text is that there is a lesson to be learned here. Can we do better? The honest answer is that we almost always can.
The consent argument
The ethical core of this approach is autonomy. Introducing a substance into one’s own body is, in itself, an act that affects—setting aside the environment for a moment—the person who ingests it. That is why the comparison sometimes leveled against this position (“homicide or cannibalism are also atavistic, yet we do not accept them”) does not hold up: in those cases, there is a victim who did not choose to be one, who has no say in what is done to them. Drug use, unless administered to a third party without their consent, does not share that structure. Hence, it makes perfect sense to prosecute harm to others and very little sense to prosecute a decision made about oneself.
The act of introducing a substance into one’s own organism affects, first and foremost, the person who ingests it.
Why a “drug-free world” will not arrive (and wouldn’t be better)
The idea of eradicating drugs clashes with a stubborn fact: we are surrounded by them. Even if cocaine, cannabis, or heroin disappeared, alcohol and tobacco would remain, and beyond that, solvents, glues, varnishes, or industrial products that are far more toxic would be used instead. Again, the cure is worse than the disease.
The text goes further, asserting that such an abstinent world would not even be desirable. Homo sapiens abstinentis does not exist: almost all of us take something—coffee, tea, wine, beer, psychopharmaceuticals, sodas—and the search to modify one’s own consciousness runs through all of history and all cultures. The underlying inconsistency is difficult to defend: why are alcohol and tobacco acceptable, but MDMA or cannabis are not, when the criteria do not appear to be strictly health-related? Much of the critique is built upon that contradiction.
Like it or not, we live and will always live in a world with drugs.
From war to sustainability
The proposal, consequently, is a change of framework rather than detail: replacing the metaphor of war with that of sustainability. If evolution has failed to eliminate the impulse to alter consciousness, a law is unlikely to succeed. Once that is accepted, the reasonable goal is not universal abstinence, but rather that those who use drugs can do so in the least problematic way possible—for themselves, for their environment, and for the ecosystem. The author calls this horizon sustainable hedonism, or “sustainable drug-philia”: dismissing the war and beginning to manage pleasure as we manage other accepted social risks.
Critical reading
The thought experiment is powerful, but it should be read with a cool head, noting its limitations:
- Not every substance behaves the same. The analogy with skiing illuminates the effect of prohibition but flattens real pharmacological differences: addictive potential, toxicity, and overdose risk vary enormously between substances. A serious regulatory framework must distinguish, not homogenize.
- “It only affects the user” is a simplification. Consumption occurs in a context—family, work, traffic—and certain situations (pregnancy, driving, minors) involve third parties. The autonomy argument is solid, but it does not close the debate on social effects.
- Regulation is not just liberalization. “Sustainability” can mean many different things, from controlled dispensing to the decriminalization of the user. The text sets a horizon, not a specific model, and specific models have costs and results that should be evaluated with data.
- It is an opinion piece, not a study. Its claims about the antiquity of skiing, the universality of consumption, or the ineffectiveness of prohibition are reasonable and widely documented in drug policy literature, but here they function as rhetorical arguments, not quantified evidence.
Harm reduction
Beyond the political debate, there is a practical field that does not depend on any law changing: that of not exposing oneself to avoidable harm. Without delving into consumption patterns, some basic premises of the harm reduction culture are: inform yourself about what you are going to take and its interactions, especially with medication or alcohol; do not consume alone or in fragile emotional states; keep in mind that the purity and composition of the illegal market are unpredictable, which multiplies the risk of adulteration; and know how to recognize when a situation requires medical attention, calling emergency services without fear. Sustainable pleasure management begins, precisely, by taking risk seriously.
