Drugs, human weakness and society

A quote from Lee Harris on freedom, self-control and the War on Drugs (read the whole thing):

The policy of harm-reduction, which Dalrymple assails, may do little good for the addicts, but at least it preserves the humanity of the society that adopts it; the same cannot be said for a policy of letting people die unnecessarily from HIV and hepatitis.

Harris makes many good points about weakness and lack of self-control. Many of us have experienced this in some fashion, as there are very few of us who are so strong willed by nature that we can resist every vice that is thrown at us. Be it as it may, this logic displayed here, while noble in principle, is problematic in practice. It assumes several things about society, none of which can be taken for granted. First, it assumes that society is motivated by a genuine desire to gently help addicts, rather than a combination of fear, loathing and pity. Second, it assumes that society is wise enough to safeguard the powerful institutions put in place to engage in harm-reduction from those who would expand them and abuse them for their own interests. Finally, it assumes that society cannot appeal to other, more indirect means to curb the excesses of immoral activity.

Much of the rhetoric put forward to defend the War on Drugs is based on fear of what addicts would do without drug agents prowling the streets looking for users and dealers to bust. As an opponent of the War on Drugs, I am often asked by social conservatives how I would feel about having potentially more intoxicated users on the road, drugs in school (as if they aren't already there in spades), and how I feel about drug users committing crimes to fuel their habits. However, none of these public safety concerns are tied to the drug themselves. A badly sleep-deprived driver or one using a cell phone can be as much a public menace as one who is high or drunk. The War on Drugs has taken away most of the controls that we put in place to control alcohol sales to minors, thus making it easier for them to get crack than beer. Finally, the issue about violent crime committed by drug users falls into several areas that exacerbate it ranging from bleeding heart sympathy for violent offenders, to laws that ridiculously and tyrannically limit the right of self-defense, to the basic fact that black market premiums will make drug habits far more financially crippling than they should be. In many cases, the pity aspect is a thin sugar coating to hide the fact that many, perhaps most, of the supporters of the War on Drugs are far more concerned with their own safety, than they are with the well being of drug users.

It is also worth mentioning that many of the problems with our criminal justice system we face today are due to the fact that we have a large population of drug users and dealers in prison. Social conservatives frequently will lament the fact that judges and prosecutors will give violent offenders less time in prison citing overcrowded prisons and jails as the excuse. Now, if the prisons were only filled with people who committed violent crimes or economic crimes, there would be plenty of room for robbers, murderers, rapists, etc. In fact, there would be so much room that we could even "go soft" by abolishing the death penalty because of the surplus room we would have for giving every single last convicted murderer life in prison without the possibility of parole, without facing any conceivable difficulties.

One of the things that social conservatives frequently forget is the fact that the War on Drugs has spawned many laws which are profoundly unethical, not the least of which are the very weak protections that property enjoys now under asset forfeiture laws. We have reached a point now where merely possessing a large volume of cash on you is probable cause to suspect a drug crime is being, or has been, committed and to seize the assets. There is also the issue of the militarization of local police forces, the dramatic increase in the role that SWAT units play in basic law enforcement, and the general evolution of local and state police forces to something that more closely resembles a gendarme than an American peace officer. The potential for abuse is very real in these changes to our system of government. Ranging from the obvious damage to basic property and constitution rights, to the ability of the government to bring even more lethal firepower to bear on the American people, in many cases in areas where the public has been legally disarmed. In many well-documented cases, this is not even a theoretical or academic issue; there is an appalling number of citizens who have suffered grievous and even violent injustice by their ostensible "saviors" who often render far more life-altering effects than the substances themselves.

One of the things that Lee did not seem to take into consideration when he was discussing the issue of self-mastery was the ability of society to create indirect controls on behaviors such as drug use. There will always be drug users, just as there will always be poor people. This is an immutable fact about living in a civilized society in a fallen world. However, society has means at its disposal that are not only liberty-enhancing, but effective at discouraging bad behavior. The problem is, it just chooses to not use them. A far more pitiless policy toward violent offenders would be a good start, as would severe penalties for even a first time offense of driving under the influence of a controlled substance of any sort. Eliminating gun controls on law-abiding citizens, and at least toning down excessive force laws would enable law-abiding citizens to exercise a rather sweeping right of self-defense that would have a deterrent factor on crime in general. Finally, stripping the addicts themselves of the legal excuse of intoxication would do wonders to create an environment where many people would find it absolutely necessary to gain that self-mastery they lack.

The War on Drugs illustrates the contradictions of social conservative thought. On the one hand, most social conservatives are not content to allow people to be foolish, and then hold them responsible for the consequences. Yet on the other hand they will turn around and bemoan the lack of accountability and responsibility in society. This is epitomized by the social conservative who simultaneously cannot allow someone to use even marijuana in their own home, after work, but who insists that society has some sort of duty to protect people from behavior that they knew in advance would seriously mess up their lives. In this sense, social conservatism often bears a more than passing resemblance to socialist nannystatism, and the disasters that result from that still echo loudly from the 20th century. It is not like they even have the excuse of saying "we didn't know." The impulse of saving people from themselves has many terrible implications, and it is an open-ended mindset which cannot be limited based on personal prejudices. The future of a society that believes in saving those who are neither dysfunctionally insane nor severally retarded from themselves is a dark one because it is one where the public has opened pandora's box as far as government intervention into civil society is concerned.