John Hawkins makes a weak, emotional argument for continuing the War on Drugs. It is weak for a few reasons. First, it gets its facts wrong. Every stat that drug warriors cite from alcohol prohibition is, in essence, a lie. As the Cato Institute shows, murder rates went up greatly during prohibition and the argument that alcohol consumption went meaningfully down is an urban legend if the whole period, rather than the initial years, is looked at.
As I have observed before, there is no public safety argument with drug legalization. Intoxicated driving is already a separate issue that must be dealt with, regardless of how and why the driver is impaired. The crime associated with drug distribution would naturally go away as did the crime associated with alcohol distribution once prohibition was repealed. In addition, cheaper, legal drugs would be easier for addicts to afford, which would make it easier for them to support their habit. This is always the rut that drug warriors get into. They have never explained how it is that if drug legalization cuts the cost of drugs significantly, why it would actually increase drug-related crime. Perhaps it is because they have never been around functional drug users, and cannot conceive of people who can get high at night and go into work the next day.
National security concerns with drug crime, however, are real. If you drive out all of the casual drug dealers, you will leave only the hardened ones. The profit margins will be so ridiculously high that terrorist groups can and will exploit them to fund their operations. The opium trade in Afghanistan is the best known example of the direct involvement between terrorists and drug dealing. Will it finally take a nuclear bomb going off in America to make drug warriors realize that drug prohibition empowers terrorists and organized criminals? Not likely, since they won't admit that there are down sides to their efforts already.
But, some people may say, "so what if drug usage does explode? They're not hurting anyone but themselves." That might be true in a purely capitalistic society, but in the sort of welfare state that we have in this country, the rest of us would end up paying a significant share of the bills of people who don't hold jobs or end up strung out in the hospital without jobs -- and that's even if you forget about the thugs who'd end up robbing our houses to get things to pawn to buy more drugs. Even setting that aside, we make laws that prevent people from harming themselves all the time in our society. In many states there are helmet laws, laws that require us to wear seatbelts, laws against prostitution, and it's even illegal to commit suicide. So banning harmful drugs is just par for the course.
It is ironic that a conservative would cite mandatory seatbelt and helmet laws, laws which treat adults like children, as support of positive evidence for supporting any other policy. One might begin to think that John actually has a distinctly left-wing streak in him. Another area where this particularly odious serious of arguments falls down is that if you want to get rid of the welfare state, which is what any real conservative or libertarian would want (if you don't, your sympathies lay with Socialism lite), then this theoretical stress on the welfare state would be a boon! Nothing would make the system collapse under its own weight than having all of those drug users on there. The only catch is, John hasn't actually explained why it is that Wall Street businessmen can use cocaine recreationally, but mere common folk cannot without becoming welfare parasites.
And let's not even get into the costs that the public has to pay in terms of militarized police forces, bad raids at 2AM and the asset forfeiture laws that have all but annihilated private property rights.
Leave a comment