This country is, after the "Republican Revolution" has had its time to work its devastation, in a severe economic depression. The USA had its chance forty years ago, and decided it preferred to get sneakers with lights on them. The US culture has spent decades painting intelligent people as "nerds" while extolling the virtues of being a dumb jock or bubbleheaded bimbo. Meanwhile, other countries have valued education and have left the USA in the dust. The USA is now a third world country, except for the military. What does it make anymore? Bombs. The country doesn't DESERVE to go into space. It probably won't even survive the next five years.

>Which it really has no right to do. There is no worse tyranny than to remove from adults the >sovereign ability to have control, even choices that you might disagree with, over their own >bodies. The state doesn't own your body, it belongs to you and you alone.

    Right! If it didn't, then the state could actually dictate what substances you could put into your own body in the privacy of your home. In such a totalitarian nightmare scenario, one might even imagine a "War on Drugs".
    Of course, something like that is impossible in any society that has any freedom whatsoever.