U.S. vs. Europe insanity challenge

Having experienced life both in Europe as well as in the United States, sometimes I can't help but compare those two places in different regards. Yes, I realize that Europe is not one country, but there are certain comparisons for the sake of which it could be treated as "close enough" to one, and those are the ones I wish to write about here. What is interesting to me are the instances of laws regulating the same aspects of life being extremely different on both sides of the Atlantic, and different in a common way: being reasonable in one place and absolutely insane in the other. (The standard of "reasonableness" and "insanity" I am applying here is of course that of my own subjective judgment. Though I have to add that many people agree with me on what follows.) Here, then, is a list of some such differences in legal regulations. In making the comparisons, I am only interested in formal rules, i.e. laws or law-like regulations that are in the books somewhere and are at least supposed to be enforced; I'm not concerned with informal social rules though of course I realize those can be just as powerful. I didn't research the topic, so the list is incomplete: it only contains things that come to my mind immediately. I'll most likely be adding to it later. Here goes:

1) Freedom of speech. Here the U.S. is normal and most of Europe is crazy. The U.S. protects it fully, for the most part, while most of Europe has stringent libel laws that can (and are) used to stifle free speech, as well as Holocaust denial laws which open a whole another can of worms. As if that was not enough, some European criminal codes also prescribe punishment for speech denigrating heads of state or religious sentiments.

2) Drug war. On the principal count--indiscriminate drug prohibition--both parties are criminally negligent; but the U.S. adds its own bits of insanity that do not exist in most of Europe. Some European countries (such as the Netherlands or Switzerland) have ceased penalizing personal use of marijuana. The utter lunacy of mandatory sentencing for drug possession, drug-related asset forfeiture by law enforcement, no-knock warrants etc., is an American phenomenon.

3) Sodomy laws. Here Europe is normal (as in: doesn't have them) and the U.S. is batshit insane. I don't think this point needs a lot of explaining. It's a good thing that in most of the U.S. those laws are not enforced. Added: As pointed out by a commenter, in 2003 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled sodomy laws unconstitutionally insane, so this shouldn't really be on the list. I'm keeping it as an honorary mention though, just because laws so deranged were actually in effect as recently as eight years ago.

4) Genetically modified organisms. On this count, the U.S. is reasonable (i.e., allows genetically modified crops) while Europe is bonkers (i.e., forbids them). There are no environmentally sound reasons not to allow engineering and trading GMOs; the true reason that the EU bans them is good old fashioned trade protectionism. Plus, EU wins some more insanity points with their staggering hypocrisy: they have just allowed producing and selling a genetically engineered potato developed by a chemical corporation called BASF. I'm sure the fact that BASF is German had nothing whatsoever to do with that decision.

5) Gambling laws. Here most of Europe is sane while the U.S. is nuts. Most gambling activities, including such benign ones as playing poker for cash or betting on sports games, are illegal in most of the U.S. Similarly to sodomy laws, I don't think it's very hard to see why this is crazy; however, as opposed to sodomy laws, those are actually enforced.

This is it for now, although as I said I will be adding to the list as I find new items. I don't think I'll keep a tally; some pieces of insanity are worse than others, so in order to come up with a scoring system I'd have to figure out how to weigh them relative to each other. Which I do not feel like doing.