In a free society, even people who recklessly risk self-destruction should be free to do so. (Of course, taxpayers owe such abusers neither aid nor comfort.) Not only is freedom meaningless if the government assumes the paternalistic power to protect us from ourselves, but a wise people will never trust government with that power.
This wisdom motivated Ludwig von Mises to write that “A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.” Without this tolerance for the freedom of others, no one’s freedoms are secure. As the government’s increasingly belligerent “war” against tobacco demonstrates, powers ceded to the state so that it can behave paternalistically on one front will inevitably be abused and extended to other fronts. The reason is that no sound principle is available to constrain these powers. If the state presumes to protect me from destroying my life with heroin or marijuana, why should it refrain from protecting me from tobacco, alcohol, animal fat, or a sedentary lifestyle? Each can ruin lives and upset friends and loved ones.
Emphasis mine. I don't know if Mises ever attacked drug prohibition, but, if a principle is valid, it extends to hard cases. More Boudreaux:
Drug traffickers don’t tell government authorities about their illegal activities. And there are no victims to complain. Seldom is there a participant in a drug deal who has an interest in reporting it. This fact distinguishes drug selling (and other victimless “crimes”) from true crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, and robbery.
Because drug dealing involves only willing participants, drug warriors inevitably must guess whether or not an offense is occurring and who is committing it. Such guessing, of course, involves choosing targets according to their racial, sex, and age profiles.
The article explains what's wrong with that, in case you don't get it, and answers a couple more objections beyond what I'm showing. Here's one,
“Drug war” proponents often retort that without this social-engineering effort our society would descend into a grim incivility. They insist that with drug legalization our streets would teem with disgusting junkies and our storefronts would crassly advertise the sale of deadly narcotics.
For various reasons, I dispute these predictions. But let me assume here that these are valid. So what? Would a world with more wasted junkies and crass drug merchants be as vile as what we have now? Today, our prisons are chock-full of non-violent offenders. Our inner-city streets are battle zones. Young blacks and Hispanics are suspected criminals simply because they are young blacks and Hispanics. Our courts permit government to seize and keep properties that are merely suspected of having been associated with drug offenses. Many ill citizens cannot get the drugs they need to cure their illnesses or to relieve their suffering. And U.S. Customs agents kidnap innocent young women and men, chain them to beds, pump laxatives down their throats, and inspect the contents of their stomachs.
These and countless other consequences of the “war on drugs” are vastly more uncivil, grim, vile, degrading, unsightly, dangerous, costly, and immoral than even the worst-case scenario of widespread drug abuse.
The drug war is not like the abolition of slavery, which I have been cheering so much lately, because "drug dealing involves only willing participants." I believe that all harmful actions committed under the influence of drugs must be punished harshly (or, preferably, recompensed justly), but simple possession, use, trafficking, trading and producing intoxicants should not be illegal.
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