The Drug War

Part One: A Few Unpleasant Facts

According to sources I trust, between 82% and 88% of the electorate believes strongly that the War on Drugs, as it is currently being waged, is right and necessary. This close an approach to unanimity is virtually unknown in the world of public policy. There are more people who believe the U.S. ought to criminalize certain forms of speech than believe that the current effort against drugs should be modified in any substantive way -- except, perhaps, to intensify it.

I'm no fan of recreational drugs. I know a few people who ruined themselves by their involvement with drugs, as young folks. Myself, I lost a brother to them. If I could wave a magic wand and make them all go away, I'd happily do so. But I can't, and neither can anyone else. The great pity of this is that the War on Drugs has so completely failed its nominal mission.

I say it's failed its nominal mission -- the reduction and hopefully the eradication of recreational drug use in the U.S. -- because:

• Recreational drugs have never been more available to anyone who wants them, even inside totalitarian micro-societies, such as military bases and prisons;

• There's a possibility that the actual mission of the War on Drugs has nothing to do with the reduction of drug use.

The original Harrison Narcotics Control Act, passed in 1918, was aimed principally at opiates. Recreational opiate use had come to America with Far Eastern immigration: the large numbers of Chinese laborers that came here to build much of the infrastructure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those laborers were regarded ambivalently by the very people who summoned them here. Public sentiment kept them confined to Chinatowns and laborer camps that are seldom discussed in histories of the period. Opium was one of their ways of passing their idle hours, since they were disinclined toward alcohol, and inhibited from pursuing Caucasian women. Even so, opium was not a large factor in their lives, just a moderate hallucinogenic narcotic that made them tranquil and induced sleep, which could sometimes be elusive after a long day of rough physical labor.

Contemporaneous with the Harrison Act was a swelling of sentiment among white Americans that these yellow folk should be sent back whence they came. One possible explanation for the Harrison Act is that it was an effort to make the Chinese feel unwelcome, by attacking a pastime that set them apart from others in the U.S. Inasmuch as there were nearly no discernible social ills from Chinese-Americans' use of opium, I find the theory attractive.

It's been more than eighty years since then. Few people would assert with conviction that the prohibition of drugs has made them less accessible, or has dissuaded any great number of people from trying them. Persuasive estimates of the size of the drug-using populace range as high as 30 million Americans: 10% of the population of the country.

I refuse to say to those who abhor drugs that their desire to see these things vanish from American life is somehow wrong. It isn't. I suggest only that the exertions of legal force have not had the desired effects, but have had all manner of unintended effects that have reduced the liberty and prosperity of ordinary, non-drug-using Americans. It's even possible that the laws against recreational drug use have increased the number of people who've tried various drugs. We can all cite many cases in which prohibition has paradoxically made the banned thing appear more attractive.

Along with the above, there is this: A law that more than one percent of the populace feels it is desirable to violate stands no chance of being effectively enforced -- not even by turning the country into a giant prison camp.

Part Two: The Rationales

Every pair of eyes, every mind that looks at "the problem" sees something different, and I think I have come to understand why.

Some think "the problem" is that some people take drugs. Unless the consumption of any psychotropic substance, including alcohol, is also included in "the problem," I cannot see how this position can be defended.

Some think "the problem" is that some people commit crimes in order to get the funds they need to buy the drugs they take. Unless these crimes are somehow more heinous than identical crimes committed for other reasons, I cannot see how this position can be defended.

Some think "the problem" is that drug dealers frequently pander to the underage and immature, preying on their lack of information about what is being offered to them. Unless this variety of child abuse differs in some fundamental way from all the other equally heinous and as-frequently-lethal varieties of child abuse we know of (cf. Joel Steinberg and the many "baby boilings" 1987 and 1988 brought us), I cannot see how this position can be defended.

Some think "the problem" is that taking drugs reduces a person's economic output. Unless the nation is ready and willing to ban all vacations and ration us all to three hours' sleep per night, I cannot see how this position can be defended.

Some think "the problem" is that the drug user becomes a burden to the rest of us in an unfair manner. Unless someone can present a coherent explanation of how allowing drug abusers to poison themselves burdens the rest of us beyond the manner in which allowing alcohol abusers to poison themselves does so, I cannot see how this position can be defended.

Some think "the problem" is that recourse to drugs shows a lack of respect for authority. Unless someone can present a sound case for jailing me -- I have no respect for authority and will admit it freely to anyone who asks -- I cannot see how this position can be defended.

What all this parallel structure demonstrates, other than that I remember what I learned in 11th grade English, is that each person's view of "the problem" is really a reflection of something else, not intrinsic to drug abuse, that he dislikes. Sometimes it's just a matter of not being comfortable with the divergent preferences of others. Sometimes it's a fear of the violence that drug illegality has spawned. The act of taking drugs is not intrinsic to any of these things.

Part Three: Tangents and Alternatives

There are many approaches to the analysis of a social phenomenon, but all come up against a basic limitation of social life: experimenting is expensive and difficult, and controlling for specific factors is well nigh impossible.

I've often used the phrase "a connectedness problem" in trying to talk about certain features of our time that are tangled up with others in a way that complicates analysis. Many areas of life are thus connected, perhaps all of them. "No action is without side effects," wrote Barry Commoner, and for a change, he was right.

Pundit Ann Coulter, whom I respect greatly, is unwilling to contemplate the legalization of drugs because she doesn't want to pay for the burden on society that self-crippled drug users would become. This is an excellent example of a connectedness problem. It has more than one ironic aspect. The correlation between the swelling of the welfare state and the swelling of the drug-using sector of society is very strong. Miss Coulter and I and all the rest of America are already paying for the upkeep of a legion of indolent druggies -- and I maintain that a good case can be made that the idleness encouraged by State welfare is one of the reasons those folks became drug users in the first place. An idle mind is the most powerful of all vacuums. Something will inevitably fill it, and if the process is not guided by intelligent purpose, the "something" is far more likely to be malign.

If you have a problem with the idea of legalizing drugs, but are persuaded that the Drug War hasn't helped and has torn large holes in traditional American guarantees of privacy and property, you might want to approach the topic from another direction. Here's one: Instead of conceiving of the problem to be solved as other people's use of drugs, try focusing on what you and those you love would like to have out of the situation, for your own benefit. Safer streets? Schools that don't endanger your kids? A better chance that your kids will avoid becoming drug users themselves? Other things?

Now that you've composed that list, imagine what you would do to get all of those things, if, instead of the force of the law, you had essentially unlimited money to work with. How would you go about getting what you wanted? Would you purchase a home in a safer area? Send your kids to private schools with high standards? Spend more of your time with your kids, setting an example for them and shepherding them away from temptation?

Here's the kicker: How many of these things would you be able to do today, despite the ineffectiveness of the Drug War, if taxation were to drop to zero?

I'm not suggesting that that's about to happen, mind you. This is a mental exercise, designed to reorient your thinking toward what you can accomplish acting as an individual, on your own initiative, and away from the innate collectivism of the legal-prohibition approach. Perhaps some of the things you came up with are within your means even now. Why not try them?

Let's explore another tangent that moves in the opposite direction. We've been using the term "drugs" to cover a wide range of psychoactive substances, which have little in common except that they all alter human mental functioning for a period of time. Can you imagine a theoretical drug which alters mental function, but that you would be willing to see made legal, even if all the currently illegal ones were to remain that way? How would its properties have to differ from those drugs that you would insist remain banned?

This, too, is a mental exercise. It tests our understanding of the wherefores of prohibition: the reasons we think are good enough to deny rational adults the free choice of what to put into their bodies. It tempts us to think about the nature of the mind, and the nature of risk, and who holds the moral responsibility for each mind's proper care and functioning.

One final tangent: Imagine a drug which would reliably double your intelligence, your ability to focus, and your personal energy. Imagine further that it was 100% predictable in all its effects, including this one: for every hour you spend in its grip, your life will be shortened by ten minutes. Would you be willing for presumedly competent adult Americans to have over-the-counter access to this drug? If not, why not? If so, how much worse would the drug's negative effects have to be before you'd advocate banning it?