Oh yeah, anyone who has tried drugs must be a horrible person. That would be a very hypocritical comment if you've smoked a cigarette or tried marijuana, but I won't get into that. I'm sure you're perfect anyway

First off, cigarettes are legal, so that doesn't make any sense.

You seem to be confusing morality with legality. Clearly many illegal things are immoral, and vice versa, but defining one in terms of the other doesn't seem like a good idea; it doesn't allow one to speak of "an unjust law", for instance.

More concretely, drug use (whether nicotine, marijuana, or cocaine) is a so-called victimless crime -- it harms no-one except the person who has chosen to do it. (That's ignoring the passive smoking issue, of course, which would serve to make cigarette smoking less moral than cocaine use.) It seems like it would be difficult to get a moral crowbar in the gap and lever apart nicotine as moral and marijuana and cocaine as immoral. For a start, in order to make any sense, morality should surely be non-geographic. Does nicotine use somehow become less moral when performed in Bhutan? Does marijuana use somehow become more moral when performed in Amsterdam?

As for Mr Bush, I'm sure he's "a moral man" in the sense that he's doing what he sincerely believes to be right. I'm also sure he's "an immoral man" in the sense that he's doing what the vast majority of humankind sincerely believes to be wrong.

Would we describe Simon de Montfort as a moral man? He got made a saint by the Catholic church, which is usually an indication of being pretty frickin' moral -- but the action that won him that recognition was the slaughter of 20,000 men, women and children at Beziers because they weren't Catholics. Not that that sort of anticompetitive religious conduct was particularly out of place in the 1300s -- but I think it's fairly widely regarded nowadays as Not a Good Thing.

Peter