The War on Drugs
The place to start as often as possible when evaluating an issue is to look at humans in a state of nature and compare this to what a given law or issue is attempting to impose on them. In a primitive state of nature humans are estimated to have consumed between 100 and 300 different kinds of plants in a given year. A lot of plants contain various substances which act on humans like drugs. It follows that humans did not evolve in a drug free environment. Attempts to impose a drug-free environment on humans may be like trying to force a fish to fly and a bird to breathe water. Animals in the wild ingest and otherwise use a wide variety of naturally occurring drugs. Some of this behavior is documented in “Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn From Them” by Dr. Cindy Engels of the UK Open University. She has an article online at http://www.organic.aber.ac.uk/library/Role%20of%20animal%20self-medication.pdf
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=296&category=89 is an online paper describing how Chimpanzees and other animals use naturally occurring drugs also by Cindy Engel. http://jinrui.zool.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CHIMPP/CHIMPP.html is an article on the medical use of plants by Chimpanzees, written by Michael A. Huffman, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto. There are similar articles on the diet of Mountain Gorillas published at Cornell. The newly developing field is sometimes called zoopharmacology. Do a web search and read up on it. The idea that drug use is unnatural is false. Suggesting that people can only use drugs if advised by an expert is suggesting that they are stupider than gorillas and chimpanzees. This surprising new scientific discovery is nothing new. It was an old principle of woodsmen to observe the animals when they were sick and do what they did.There is a large body of professional scientific literature from an anthropological perspective suggesting that the war on drugs has little scientific basis. A web search will turn up many articles like, “Between Zero-Tolerance and a Free Market: The Anthropological Case for Liberalization of Drugs," in: Ovide Pomerleau (ed.), Formal and Informal Control of Drugs: Using Scientific Evidence to Reduce Social Consequences, University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center. Anyone who believes in evolution and is aware of the wide variety of plants devoured by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and of the wide variety of plants which contain drugs will naturally suspect that humans are adapted to a regular presence of mood changing elements or drugs in their diet. The view that humans are actually adapted to need or regularly use mood altering plants has been advanced as a scientific hypothesis http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992095 by Roger Sullivan of the University of Auckland and Edward Hagen of the University of California at Santa Barbara in the April 2002 issue of “Addiction”.
Early humanity developed many religious uses of drugs in their societies. The issues of freedom to use drugs and free practice of religion cannot be separated in a meaningful way. In early times a shaman, witch-doctor or medicine man would supervise the administration of drugs. Today shaman dressed in ceremonial white lab smocks and wearing ceremonial necklaces (stethoscopes or mirrors) supervise the administration of drugs. Everything changes and everything remains the same. Today a huge percentage of people use anti-depressants and other mood altering chemicals on a daily basis.
The huge market for legal drugs in the US today shows quite clearly that humans are not adapted to live without drugs. The War on Drugs, though it is sold as a war for a drug free society is to a large degree a war to see who will control the lucrative drug market. Will the state approved priesthood of the AMA have the sole power to legally dispense drugs or will Citizens have freedom of choice in the matter?
The implicit purpose of the Social Contract is to increase the power of Citizens to live good lives. It cannot deny Citizens a right they would have possessed in a state of nature. They could have, and anthropology shows quite clearly, that they did use drug containing plants regularly. This establishes a Natural Right to use those drugs which are the natural product of plants by the Citizens. On general principles this right cannot be legitimately violated by the Social Contract. It is true that to some degree this usage was governed by experts as our medical doctors govern it today. Does the state have the right to make it illegal to use drugs without consulting an expert? The answer is no. Such laws place an abusive power in the hands of experts who can charge so much for their services that regular Citizens are effectively denied the right to use drugs. This then requires government subsidies to the Citizens and increasing levels of government involvement. It also violates freedom of speech and religion in various subtle manners by introducing a government based system of certifying experts.
“There is another question to which an answer must be found, consistent with the principles which have been laid down. In cases of personal conduct supposed to be blameable, but which respect for liberty precludes society from preventing or punishing, because the evil directly resulting falls wholly on the agent; what the agent is free to do, ought other persons to be equally free to counsel or instigate? This question is not free from difficulty. The case of a person who solicits another to do an act, is not strictly a case of self-regarding conduct. To give advice or offer inducements to any one, is a social act, and may therefore, like actions in general which affect others, be supposed amenable to social control. But a little reflection corrects the first impression, by showing that if the case is not strictly within the definition of individual liberty, yet the reasons on which the principle of individual liberty is grounded, are applicable to it. If people must be allowed, in whatever concerns only themselves, to act as seems best to themselves at their own peril, they must equally be free to consult with one another about what is fit to be so done; to exchange opinions, and give and receive suggestions. Whatever it is permitted to do, it must be permitted to advise to do.” J. S. Mill, “On Liberty”.
The choice to consult an expert is a personal one and the expert might well be religious or philosophical instead of medical.
The use of drugs is closely allied with religious practice in history, and many of the legitimate cultural uses of drugs are religious in nature. The War on Drugs has attempted to suppress the legitimate religious use of drugs by various Native American peoples, and attempted to limit such use only to Native American peoples. This destroys the right of Citizens in general to pursue spiritual truth in their own way. This has also been done in oppressing religions of African origin which use marijuana. The War on Drugs is a moral crusade which attempts to impose the moral standards of one set of religious/moral beliefs on all Citizens against their will.
The history of the War on Drugs is closely tied to the history of racism. Almost all the early laws attempting to outlaw drugs focused on drug use by non-whites. Fear of Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, etc. drove a racist frenzy to protect pure white youth from the degrading habits of the “inferior” cultures. The War on Drugs began when racist hysteria was at possibly its worst in the history of this country. 1880 to 1930 is known as the lynching era. Lynching of blacks reached its heights in the bloody nineties. The first law against drugs was passed in 1875. Newspaper reports advocating drug control laws against cocaine referred to ’cocaine crazed niggers’. 1914 saw the passage of THE HARRISON NARCOTIC ACT requiring prescriptions for products exceeding the allowable limit of narcotics and mandates increased record-keeping for physicians and pharmacists who dispense narcotics. Much of this is documented at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs The FDA has a timeline of major food and drug laws posted at http://www.fda.gov/opacom/backgrounders/miles.html.
The list of drugs which is outlawed today remains essentially racist in nature. Drug containing plants from outside Europe are generally banned. Those which are part of the traditional European culture of herbal medicines are generally legal. The drug laws in the US are a monument to its inheritance of racism and paranoia about race. Drug laws in the US today are still being used to legally lynch blacks. Approximately 13% of black men are forever denied the right to vote because of felony drug convictions. The War on Drugs is one of the last edifices of the Jim Crow laws still on the books and should be cast into the dustbin of history along with its brethren.
It was shown that the violation of the Libertarian principle of personal sovereignty is the real measure of whether or not a law violated separation of church and state. Drug laws violate this principle and attempt to enforce a religious belief system on Citizens who do not share it.
Drugs can be hidden anywhere. This means that warrants to search for illegal drugs allow the most thorough violation of a persons privacy of any kind of warrant. They act to condition the citizens to expect the violation of their personal sovereignty by the State. This violates the penumbra against behavioral conditioning of the Citizens into Subjects developed in the section on the Third Amendment. Drug laws are in practice equivalent psychologically to the quartering of troops in the homes of the citizens. They habituate the Citizens to accept the daily violation of their Sovereign Dignity by the State.
The War on Drugs every day violates separation of church and state, free practice of religion, the right to privacy, and the natural right to use naturally occurring drugs to ease the strains of daily life. It also forces the Citizens to accept these daily violations of their Sovereign rights and habituates them to think and feel like Subjects not Citizens.
On general principles the War on Drugs is as un-American as violation of free speech or assembly. Many persons will point to the Volstead Act (Prohibition) which required a Constitutional Amendment to enact and say that really the War on Drugs is Unconstitutional. It’s legality is very tenuously maintained on a highly questionable interpretation of the commerce clause. The problem is that the rights involved cluster around religion and not politics. Religion as a motive for various behaviors is less reputable today than in the past. By pretending that the essentially religious prohibition of drugs is scientific, religious fanatics have managed to hoodwink the American people into accepting an ever growing body of tyrannical measures.
There are many arguments about the social costs of drug use. Virtually all the social costs of drug use have their origin in the fact that it is illegal. Legalizing drug use would eliminate almost all of them. When you balance the negative effects of the War on Drugs on the rights and dignities of Citizens against the negative effects of legalizing the use of drugs by adults it is clear that the War on Drugs is the greater evil. Society should legalize the recreational use of drugs but educate Citizens on the risks involved. Setting limits on such sales and rules on how they may be promoted is consistent with the principle of liberty.
“Still less ought the common operations of buying and selling to be interfered with on analogous grounds. Almost every article which is bought and sold may be used in excess, and the sellers have a pecuniary interest in encouraging that excess; but no argument can be founded on this, in favor, for instance, of the Maine Law; because the class of dealers in strong drinks, though interested in their abuse, are indispensably required for the sake of their legitimate use. The interest, however, of these dealers in promoting intemperance is a real evil, and justifies the State in imposing restrictions and requiring guarantees, which but for that justification would be infringements of legitimate liberty.” J. S. Mill, “On Liberty”
This is an important point. Legal requirements on packaging, counseling, and other similar matters may be made by the state. Such laws protect the seller as well as they buyer. A merchant who obey existing laws has greater legal recourse from liability than one who is held liable without any laws stating the measures which he should take.
Citizens should exercise the right of the Jury to try the Law as well as the facts when judging drug offenses. This right and its history is explained in the section on Trial by Jury. Juries should simply refuse to convict non-violent drug offenders. Violent drug offenders should go to jail because of the violence of their actions. Through the Jury Trial Citizens have the ability to legally reject laws which are unjust or impose sentence which is to harsh for the offense. It is not just the right but the duty of Citizens to act in this manner according to their conscience.