Only One Justification Needed to End the Insane War on Drugs
by Rick Gee
When New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson announced on CBS’s 60 Minutes that he had used marijuana and cocaine in his younger days and – gasp! – liked it, a cacophonous uproar ensued. Elected and appointed officials from both major parties knocked each other over in the rush to denounce the governor for this unpopular and dangerous stance and vowed to oppose any decriminalization or legalization schemes.
Of course, Johnson waited until after he was reelected to drop this bombshell on the public, but who could blame him? Politicians, even a maverick like Johnson, live for the next election. If he had publicized his controversial views before the election, Marty Chavez would now be the governor of New Mexico instead of settling for his old job as the mayor of Albuquerque.
Drug prohibition is a recent trend, historically speaking. Most of the laws originated during the “Reefer Madness” era of the early 1900s. The unmitigated failure of alcohol prohibition should be a model for the legality of all mood-enhancing substances. Alas, the War on Drugs is really a War on Some Drugs. Alcohol and nicotine are legal for adults of a certain minimum age despite the fact that those legal drugs kill far more people than all illegal drugs combined.
Self-medication has been a hallmark of human civilization since man first pulled himself out of the primordial swamp. So why are marijuana and other drugs verboten? The obvious answer is that the ruling elite love to control the rest of us. In 2000, over 730,000 Americans were arrested for the heinous act of simply possessing or using marijuana. Our prisons are so full of drug users (most of them marijuana users) that the United States now houses 25% of the world’s prison population.
Drug-legalization proponents have offered many common-sense reasons to reform our nation’s destructive drug laws. One of the most common arguments is that drug dependence is a health issue rather than a crime issue, i.e., treatment makes more sense than incarceration. Others point out that rates of illicit drug use bear no meaningful relationship to enforcement efforts. Most reasonable people recognize that smoking a bowl is not tantamount to armed robbery or rape. Therefore, those individuals who are inclined to try mind-altering drugs are not likely to abstain from doing so just because a bunch of corrupt politicians pass some laws.
Some argue that illegal drugs are not nearly as dangerous as the government and media would have you believe. After all, far more people die as a result of taking legal prescription and over-the-counter drugs each year than die from ingesting all illegal drugs put together.
Civil libertarians decry the loss of privacy and Constitutional protections. “Know Your Customer” regulations forced upon banks are ostensibly designed to ferret out drug dealers. Asset forfeiture – the despicable practice in which government thugs with guns are permitted to seize private property upon the slimmest suspicion that the property in question might be remotely connected to illegal drugs – has rendered the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure impotent. And forget the presumption of innocence; victims must prove they are not guilty to regain their property, despite the fact that in the majority of such cases, no charges are filed.
Civil rights spokesmen expose the racist dimensions of prohibition: blacks are incarcerated at a rate grossly disproportionate to their population, and penalties for crack cocaine use are harsher than those for the powdered variety.
Critics of bloated government point out that the War on Drugs is a massive waste of tax dollars. Realists maintain that even successful interdiction operations make only the slightest dent in the volume of drugs coming across the country’s extensive borders and into its countless ports. Armchair economists recognize that supply will always meet demand.
All of the above arguments (definitely not a complete list) for ending The War on Some Drugs have merit. Some are practical, some are self-serving. But none of them carries the moral weight of the single most important reason for complete drug legalization: If I am the owner of myself and my body (and surely I am), nobody may tell me what I may ingest into it.
In a free society that recognizes private property rights, the right of the individual to determine what he will ingest, smoke or inject into his own person should be paramount. What right does the politician or bureaucrat have to tell one otherwise?
An exchange with a do-gooder nanny wannabe typically goes something like this:
“If drugs were legal, we would experience an epidemic of drug addiction.”
“So, if drugs were legal, would you use them?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why then do you assume everyone else will?”
“Well, I can control myself, but some people can’t.”
So what? In a free society, some individuals will make poor decisions about a whole host of things: what to eat, what to drink, what college to attend, what career to pursue, whom to marry, or whether or not to ingest “illegal” drugs. None of these decisions should be usurped by government. Each and every one of them must be left to the sovereign individual.
If you are over the age of twelve, you very likely either have smoked pot yourself or know someone who has. Did it ruin your life or the life of those you know? Did smoking pot reduce to rubble the lives of the two men who vied for the presidency in the contested election of 2000? Did you ever hear one of the talking heads who lobs softballs at the candidates in presidential debates ask, “Do you believe you would be better off now if you had spent ten years in prison for your youthful indiscretions?”
The War on Some Drugs is really The War on Some People. If you want to drink a fifth of Scotch a day and die from cirrhosis of the liver, that’s OK as far as the government is concerned. But if you want to relax after a hard day at work with a few puffs on a joint, you are a criminal and may go to jail.
This assault on free men and women must end, and it must end for one reason: your person and your body are your property, and you should allow no one, least of all some politician in the statehouse or in Washington, to get away with dictating what you do with your property.
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A version of this column originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of The Valley News.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
The War On SOME Drugs
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
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