Several powerful arguments can be proffered in support of the notion that drug use is a poor life decision. It has a negative impact on health, like eating too much sugar or using tobacco. It can be well argued that it is a wasteful way to spend one’s time, like playing disc golf. And it is mind numbing, just like watching Hannity or Hardball.

All of these choices are harmful to their practitioners. But should any of these decisions, however foolish, be illegal? Any harm they inflict is only upon their practitioners; not abstainers. No matter how much cherry-picked clinical data is used to argue otherwise, no one is harmed by another person’s ignorance, poor health, or choice of hobbies.

I write from the perspective of someone who has shifted from conservatism to libertarianism; as such, I am at least passingly familiar with the conservative arguments against legalization, which reveal an inherent contradiction. Many who argue powerfully in favor of a constitutionally limited government recoil in horror at the notion that the state might be limited in its war powers — especially as they relate to the war on drugs. They brand Ron Paul as an outlandish, extremist character for daring to suggest that the government should mind its own business every now and then. And many conservatives who generally argue for the limitation of the power and scope of government could not more heartily endorse the drug war — lending tacit approval to the virtually limitless power it grants law enforcement.

It is not legalization but prohibition that should be considered outlandish and offensive. This should be apparent to the constitutionalists among us, who define the primary purpose of government as the protection of individual rights. They see, whether accurately or not, the US Constitution as written for the purpose of permanently enshrining the Jeffersonian ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence. “Federalist Number 5,” ironically, cites an argument by British Queen Anne to contend that the union established by the Constitution would preserve our liberties:

An entire and perfect union will be the solid foundation of lasting peace: It will secure your religion, liberty, and property; remove the animosities amongst yourselves.… It must increase your strength, riches, and trade.… We most earnestly recommend to you calmness and unanimity in this great and weighty affair, that the union may be brought to a happy conclusion, being the only effectual way to secure our present and future happiness.

To the minarchist, the protection of these rights is the only legitimate function and purpose of government. Consider Bastiat’s argument:

It is not because men have made laws that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand that men make laws.… [Law] is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.… So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. (pp. 47–48)

In the Rothbardian tradition, government is the primary force undermining these rights.

When we look at the State, naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes.… Regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. (For A New Liberty, p. 31)

My purpose for writing is not to discuss, at any length, the differences between these approaches nor to argue for the superiority of one over another. Rather, consider the main thing these approaches have in common: the notion that individual, natural rights are of supreme importance. The goal of agorists and proponents of republican, constitutionally limited government have in common, at least, a nominal acceptance of the protection of liberty and property. Hopefully, they also share a recognition of the truth of that famous statement on the danger of government attributed to George Washington: “it is not reason … it is force.”

In light of this, what contribution does the war on drugs make to the perpetuation of liberty and the protection of property? And at what costs?

The White House’s drug-policy website reports a requested budget of $15.5 billion for 2011. For our trouble, we have seen drug-usage rates rise, even while prisons are filled with nonviolent offenders. In 2008, four of five arrests were for possession, not distribution. Two of five are for marijuana. Americans pay to support one-fourth of the world’s prison population, largely because of the drug war. And yet violence flourishes, in part because the war on drugs causes drug prices to skyrocket. That the drug war is a colossal failure is scarcely debatable, especially in light of the UN’s recent pronouncement to that effect. If the United Nations is calling a multiple-government power grab a disaster, then it is probably a train wreck of unprecedented proportions.

More significant, however, is the damage that this farcical war does to our life, liberty, and property.

The war on drugs, like any war, serves to continually expand the power of the state. Recently, we have seen virtually limitless expansions of the power of police. They are granted the authority to obviously violate the Fourth Amendment whenever “‘the exigencies of the situation’ make the needs of law enforcement so compelling that [a] warrantless search is objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

In Kentucky vs. King, the exigencies involved were the smell of marijuana and the sound of a flushing toilet. Woe to the man who has a stomach virus on a day when he burns yard trash!

Recent news reports about the abuse of civil-forfeiture laws have further diminished the credibility of the notion that the drug war is about the public good; it seems to be more about lining the public coffers.

Above all of this hovers the tragic story of Jose Guerena, murdered by police in a fruitless drug raid on his Arizona home and allowed to bleed to death, unaided. The police did find guns and body armor; probably rather common for a marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq. His murderers were recently cleared of any wrongdoing. Guerena is just another casualty in another senseless, immoral war; not on drugs, nor on some foreign enemy, but on liberty itself.

The war on drugs consistently leads to the violation of rights. It feeds the growth of government power, at a tremendous cost to the public, based on the spurious notion that government has the right or responsibility to dictate to private citizens their choice of recreational activities. It’s time to legalize freedom.

Regards,

Stephano R. Mugnaini

Stefano R. Mugnaini is the minister of the Essex Village Church of Christ in Charleston, South Carolina, and a graduate student working toward a master of divinity, expecting to graduate this year.

Legalize It was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Making drugs illegal causes the price to increase, which motivates suppliers to enter the black market to make money. The state gets angry over this economic phenomenon, imposing harsher penalties and more brutally enforcing the laws. That causes prices to go up even more, which motivates more people to enter into the market as suppliers. Ultimately, the black market price gets so high that ordinary citizens are lured into the market in the hopes of scoring big financially.

All the bad consequences of the drug war, however, are not the primary reason for why we should legalize drugs. Freedom is the primary reason to legalize drugs. When the state has the power to put people into jail for ingesting a non-approved substance, there is no way that people in that society can be considered free.

A person is sitting in the privacy of his own living room. He decides to smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, or inject himself with heroin. The state — e.g., the members of Congress, the president, the DEA, the Justice Department — claim the authority to punish the person for doing that.

But it’s that person’s mouth, it’s his body, it’s his health.

Alas, not under terms of the drug war. The state says: We own you, we control you, we regulate you. You do as we say with respect to what you put into your mouth, or else.

How can that possibly be reconciled with fundamental principles of freedom? A society in which freedom is genuine is one in which people are free to engage in any activity, so long as it is peaceful and non-fraudulent. That includes, at a minimum, conduct that could be considered self-destructive.

You want to smoke? That’s your decision. You want to drink? That’s your decision. You want to ingest other drugs, no matter how harmful? That’s your decision. That’s what freedom is all about — the right to live your life the way you want, so long as you don’t initiate force or fraud against others.

Unfortunately, statists take an opposite approach. They say that every person ultimately belongs to society and, therefore, can be controlled and regulated by the state for the benefit of society. Since a person taking drugs is harming society, the collectivist argument goes, the state can send him to his room when he is caught violating drug laws, as much as a parent can do so to a child who violates rules on what he should and shouldn’t put into his mouth.

Most everyone now realizes that government officials benefit tremendously from the drug war, just as drug lords and drug gangs do. There is the ever-burgeoning business of asset forfeiture, including against innocent people, which is a way that the state helps fills its coffers without going through the legislative process of raising taxes. There are the bribes of public officials. And there are simply the jobs that the drug war produces — drug war agents, prosecutors, judges, clerks, and so forth. Thus, it isn’t surprising that among the people who still favor the drug war, government officials and drug lords are at the top of the list. Both groups would be put out of work immediately with drug legalization.

We live in a universe in which bad means beget bad ends. It is not surprising that the drug war produces nothing but bad consequences. Violating a fundamental principle of freedom — what a person chooses to ingest — brings about death, destruction, crisis, chaos, violence, corruption, and other bad consequences. Legalizing drugs would be a major step toward restoring the freedoms of the American people, while also bringing an immediate end to the bad consequences that the drug war produces.

Regards,
Jacob G. Hornberger
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 21, 2011

The Evils of the Drug War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

What I’ve gathered reflects not so much a change of mind as it does a change of heart. We still consider drugs to be harmful, but have come to view our drug laws as worse–and many of us no longer consider legalization a four-letter word. But when Richard Nixon first convened his drug war council, escalating the conflict, hardly anyone outside of what was derisively labeled the “lunatic fringe” favored legalization. How dare we, they scolded, when marijuana tuned innocents into murderers and LSD would sufficiently scramble our DNA to produce three-headed babies. None of that was true of course, but it is what our government wanted citizens to believe. And many did.

But that was then. This is now. We have come to see the responsible use theory, the one so close to the alcohol lobby heart, parallel itself in the illicit drug environment: as not every drinker is a drunkard, so too is not every drug user an abuser.

The Naked Truth About Drugs…

All drugs were legal and cheap and readily available in America prior to 1914, and we were even encouraged to use them. Heroin was available from the Sears mail order catalog, as was morphine, opium and cocaine. But if you couldn’t wait for the mailman, all those same drugs were sold at the corner grocery or drugstore. Our addiction rate then was very low, near identical to now. And we had no drug crime [emphasis mine].

What changed it all, what disrupted our peaceful co-existence, was the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, a confluence of religious arrogance and racial bigotry, spread by a surprisingly small number of men and all tinged with political opportunism. All of which metastasized over the years and morphed into Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs.

There are a variety of sound arguments for the repeal of drug prohibition. One is the Declaration of Independence, which guarantees our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, arguing the sovereignty of our bodies. Another is the Constitution, which defines treason against our United States as “levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” We are not fighting drugs per se; we are levying war against those who use them. Meanwhile drug prohibition has enriched our enemies with hundreds of billions of dollars and will guarantee hundreds of billions more, giving more than enough aid to any comfort.

The best argument, where I believe we share the greatest commonality and the least polarity, is the one for law and order. The hugely inflated prices addicts pay for illegal drugs force many into a life of crime, committing nearly all our larceny-thefts, crimes the FBI report as non-violent. And though some addicts would just as soon shoot you as look at you, most drug violence occurs at the higher echelons of the black market, stemming from territorial and distribution conflicts. Repealing drug prohibition will bankrupt the black market and reduce the overall Crime Index by at least 50%, an argument central to the debate and hard to counter.

History is replete with drug stories and tales both good and bad, but all provide empirical data, unequivocal in its conclusion, that drugs are here to stay. So we are going to live with them one way or another. We lived in peace for over a century and have been at war nearly as long, ninety years. And rumor has it drug warriors, no longer intent on maintaining the status quo, have plans on paper just itching to be implemented that will end the drug war once and for all. It will not be pretty, making today’s methods seem almost quaint.

We drink, we smoke, we ingest and inject. It is part of who we are that no policy can change, no law. So we change our law and policy. But the biggest canard of the drug debate portrays those favoring repeal as being “soft on drugs.” Not at all true. We’re just being hard on stupidity. Whish is why ending drug prohibition is society’s smartest step toward jackhammering all those good intentions paving the way to hell.

By Daniel E. Williams
Whiskey & Gunpowder

December 15, 2010

Introduction to the Naked Truth About Drugs was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

We have fought the war on drugs for decades and it is only getting worse.  Billions of dollars are shipped out of the USA to fuel the gangsters.  These gangsters would otherwise be productive citizens.  I was talking in the Circus Circus Las Vegas bar with a Mexican/American last week.  I learned that a friend of his in Mexico used to be a welder but now makes much more working for the cartels.

The police depend upon the drug industry for their jobs.  The gangsters depend upon the police in order to keep the competition down and the prices up.

There is a simple solution that needs to be sold to the public because no politician would be in power very long if he expressed support for it before the public was sold on it.

Take the profit out of trafficking.  Keep these drugs illegal but provide them free of charge to the users along with education, treatment and training.  These free drugs would be provided by health care professionals and be of high quality.  Some addicts would kill themselves as they would anyway, but they would do so in a controlled environment without harming others. Most addicts would choose proper treatment and become productive citizens again.

Pushers would have no reason to encourage others to get hooked on their “free” drugs and pimps would no longer be able to force our most vulnerable to hook for their vile product, because they can now get it for free.

The taxpayer cost of these drugs would be nothing because they would be offset many fold by the reduced cost of auto insurance alone.  The majority of all crime in the USA is associated with desperate addicts doing whatever necessary to get the next fix.  They will smash a car window if they see a few coins in a car.  They will steal the entire car for a few dollars more or just for the rush.  They have nothing to loose.  Everyone pays for this.  One car theft can destroy many lives and cause severe harm to even more.

Our society is fragile and chaos is not far away.  The balance between productive citizens who obey and enforce the law is being tilted toward those who destroy our society and drugs greatly exacerbate this.

We can do what we have been doing and get killed by the drug industry or we can turn it around and kill the drug industry by killing the profit.  Doing the same or nothing different is certain death for us all.  It is late in the game.  It is time to send in quarterback Obama and many other players to change what is not a game at all.  First step is to sell this plan to others.  We are trying here.  Do your part to pass this along.  We all depend upon it.

Name withheld because this message is death to the drug Cartels.

I would say Good Luck…but it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with taking action.  Get to work.

Regards,
David Kenyan

March 17, 2009

When not sending in thoughtful submissions to the Whiskey Room, David Kenyan is making sure that airplanes don’t collide…in Canada of all places.

Drugs Are Killing the USA was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.