Because you’re wrong. Further, yours is a faith-based assertion, you haven’t the slightest proof, when pressed, you offer your life experiences and what you are pleased to think of as your “common sense”.
With perfectly equal substantiation, one can offer the opposite scenario: that misery is the cause of drug proliferation, not the result. America drinks, and wraps its cars around trees, America drinks, and beats the wife, America drinks, sickens and dies.
Alcohol is America’s drug of choice, an astonishingly irrational choice, but there you have it. Nothing else even comes close, not within light years. Prohibition, however misguided, was not a result so much of a Puritan/Calvinist distrust of pleasure but the easily observable fact that alcohol was the curse of the working class, a rampant destroyer of men and their families.
Sexual permissiveness? Been there, done that, up to my eyeballs in hippies. You know what happened? They paired off, got married, and made babies. They became Mom and Dad, and, in the fullness of time, Grandma and Grandpa. As it ever was.
Are there consequences to such “permissiveness”? Sure. But my life experience and uncommon sense tells me that the consequences of ignorance and repression are far, far worse. We fight ignorance for a reason, because ignorance is dark and destructive.
Forbid drink, and people will still drink, but they will enrich gangsters and drink whatever poisonous crap they brew. Forbid abortion, and women will die in alleys and taxicabs. Forbid drugs, and people will still get high, they just will buy their drugs from thugs. And just try to forbid sex! That’s you against the Goddess and buddy, you ain’t got a chance!
Its not so much that permissiveness is so great, its that the oppression that is its opposite is so destructive and futile. Let the sunshine in.