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What’s Your General Rule on Drug Prohibition?
Let me be very upfront here: I’m one of those radicals who thinks we should legalize all drugs. I’m not just in favor of marijuana legalization, but also the “hard stuff”: heroin, cocaine, LSD, and just about anything else you can think of. If you’re one of those weirdos who wants to put mescaline in your eggnog, I don’t think there should be a law against it.
We’ve had several awesome discussions recently here on drug prohibition. However, one thing that seems to be lacking, among prohibition advocates is a general principle. So to any of you prohibitionists, I’m issuing a challenge. I’m willing to listen to any prohibition standard you’re willing to propose. What I’d like to hear is a general rule on what the government should and shouldn’t prohibit, but I’m going to add a sticking point: you must apply it across the board to drugs, prescription medications, tobacco, and alcohol.
There it is. Prohibitionists are able to come up with all kinds of arguments, but I’ve yet to hear one that couldn’t also reasonably be applied to alcohol. But, I could be wrong (it happens… occasionally), so let’s hear it: What’s your general rule?
Published in Culture, Domestic Policy, Law
Fred Cole, you have very neatly delineated the divide between conservatives and libertarians.
The libertarian seeks general rules which can be applied always, in every specific circumstance. The libertarian wants a playbook that, if applied with enough vigor, will guide society to Eden. Libertarians make no distinction between governing principles and actual governing.
A conservative, in the American context, understands, or at least intuits, that some practices or habits should be unlawful or discouraged because they will make the populace ungovernable.
If state legislators are writing new laws but are high on LSD, meth or heroin when they’re doing so, is this is a problem? Are police, fireman and emergency medical workers allowed to use these same drugs on their off time? How about school teachers? Crossing guards? Surgeons? Airline pilots?
Oh, what the hell…make them all legal. What’s the worst that could happen?
I disagree. The difficulty with drugs is that there are no hard-and-fast lines.
For instance, Spin says there are certain drugs which incapacitate any user at any dose. But that is not true: from the pharmaceutical perspective, every substance has a dose at which it is harmless. Granted, those are often doses which have little psychoactive effect, but it is nonetheless not an objective criterion.
And complicating matters even more is variance in reaction to drugs among individuals. There are people for whom one glass of alcohol over their lifetimes will condemn them to eventually becoming addicts and losing control, while there are others who have used heroin several times without becoming addicted or losing control.
Drawing an objective line on drugs is next to impossible, unless one draws that line to include all of them.
None of these people are allowed to be drunk while they’re on the clock. I would assume the same standards would apply with other vices.
I’d like you to come up with a good reason why we should have laws against murder – but I want you to apply them across the board, murder, manslaughter, accidental homicide…
Fred, I’m not sure why you are trying to kill the conversation before it even starts, but if you want to have one law to govern all of these vastly different things, I’d encourage you to have a glass of wine with your dinner, and a shot of heroin with your dessert. When they are drugs that can be placed in the same category, then I’ll buy your premise that we should treat them the same.
Yeah…like that’s worked. Two words, Ted Kennedy.
Make all drugs (alcohol is a drug) legal to anyone over 18 y.o. At 18 you are an adult and can make your own choices.
HOWEVER:
This sounds harsh but I believe in personal responsibility. If you can’t take the punishment, you should really consider whether you want to do drugs.
Mendel,
You criticized Fred for using high school debate tactics, but you are doing exactly the same thing here. One’s position can be internally consistent without it applying perfectly to 100% of situations. You are straw manning the concept of internal logical consistency by claiming that if it can’t achieve a perfect line, there is either no line, or no internal consistency.
Anything difficult is not “next to impossible”. Most people are doomed to a lifetime of addiction after the first use of heroin. Most people can imbibe alcohol with no trouble. The line is very clear, though not perfect.
No one is arguing that your standard must be perfect (not even Fred). He is asking that you take the time to consider a standard across a variety of interconnected issues (such as prescription drugs), and not in a vacuum.
It is hardly an unreasonable request.
I’m not sure why this question is causing so much consternation.
Fred is not saying your standard can’t treat these things differently: He is asking WHY you are treating them differently. How did you decide to treat them differently?
Can the President of the United States partake of heroin, meth or LSD in his or her off time? How about when they’re vacation on a private Caribbean island? Okay sure, he or she has to be prepared to launch nuclear weapons at a moment’s notice but it just seems so unfair that everyday Americans would get to use these drugs recreationally but he or she wouldn’t.
Can college chemistry professors teach students over 21 how to make meth labs?
I find the request reasonable, and necessary, but I found the presentation of the request in poor style. Had the post been worded similar to your comment I would have had a much different reaction.
There is a big difference between starting a debate with the acknowledgment that the issue is complex and thorny but wondering whether there are any common threads to be found, or starting one off saying “I’ve got one answer for everything – do you?”
There’s a lot of truth to that first statement — I’m a big proponent of the idea that laws should be generally applied — but I don’t think doing so will yield Utopia. My thinking, instead, is that rules that can’t be generally applied are ill-suited to law. Justice is supposed to be blind; that’s one of her virtues.
Libertarians can intuit this as well, though we tend to draw the lines in different places than SoCons.
As a general rule, I don’t believe it is a function of the government to protect you from yourself. I’d be all for removing illegality from all drugs (and many other thing) as long as there are defined consequences when your use of them harms others.
Er, no. It’s insidious, but it’s not quite that bad.
No, Fred is belittling. You’re asking politely.
And to keep this from going too far in the meta-direction, here is my response:
Because each drug has different pharmaceutical properties, including how strongly it intoxicates, the nature of that intoxication, and the addiction for potential, I think there is justification for treating each one differently.
The truth is that none of us – prohibitionist or legalizationistists – know what would actually happen if currently illegal drugs were made legal. Given the complexity mentioned above, I think it makes sense to treat “known” drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, different from those for which society has less experience of widespread use.
Well, I think legal home meth labs will have to be inspected for safety by OSHA or some other governmental agency. It’s best to minimize the number of homes that blow up at any given time. Then we’ll need to make sure that the inspectors were never bribed. So, we’ll need inspectors to inspect the inspectors. Hmmm…
All rules have exceptions…ALL of them. Perhaps I just consider this a given in life that we don’t always have to announce in discussions of rules.
Let’s clarify that your standard may come with caveats, though you should explain why they are there.
I believe Fred is only issuing this challenge to bring out the lines of debate so they are consistent. I find many comments on these legalize weed or drugs threads to be amazingly inconsistent and amazingly illogical coming from such an otherwise smart commentariat.
In comment after comment the standards expected of ‘drugs’ is higher and different than what is already legal and rampant, namely, alcohol, alcoholism (which IS an addiction) underage drinking, etc.
The demonization of drugs, exacerbated by prohibition making drug users into outlawshas convinced many so thouroughly that they actually are unable to see the absolute moral scourge that alcohol is.
We live with the consequenses of cheap, legal and available alcohol everyday, I suppose to the point where we can’t see the societal effects so imbued it is in our culture, and then get all huffy about other, mostly less harmful drugs.
To those who employ the welfare argument, then alcohol should be made illegal, or at least welfare recipients should be banned (somehow?) from drinking and smoking tobacco, playing the lottery and buying porn, among other things.
The only reason alcohol was made legal again is because they could not effectively enforce the prohibition. I would argue that the same is true for other drugs.
There is damage already being done to our society by the similtaneous availability of illegal drugs and the so-called enforcement of the laws, which do little to prevent mass importation and use, the selective and political enforcement of such laws, the invasion of privacy foisted upon law abiding citizens in the name of drug enforcement. the ability to sieze cash and valuables on the suspicion of drug-dealing alone, the ruination of young peoples lives by prison or otherwise branding them as felons and miscreants because they were doing what all their friends were doing and had the misfortune of getting caught, and the growing loss of respect for police and the rule of law which seems to be inordinately focused on a problem they obviously can’t solve or even curtail, along with the corruption thereof.
Frank, perhaps I am simply reading bad faith into Fred’s formulation of the argument, as I’ve been involved in those other discussions and it is par for the course. Fred, who has zero experience either in the use of or observation of any of these things, boldly claims that they should all be treated the same … based on what, exactly? Some odd statistics and fanciful notions but most fundamentally an adherence to an unwavering devotion to the hardline libertarian position that everything should always be legal. When he comes at it from that angle, there is literally nothing that I can say to make even the slightest amount of headway. Trust me, I’ve tried. When I point out something as obvious as the difference between a glass of wine and a shot of heroin, Fred ignores that comment and latches onto someone else who adds a bit of hyperbole (straw-man bait, unfortunately) in saying that pot causes deaths, etc… He then attacks the anti-pot arguments and claims them as proof for pro-heroin arguments. This isn’t just high-school debate tactics, it is bad high-school debate tactics, presented in bad faith.
As someone who also considers themselves to be a libertarian, I think this is a principle which should be generally applied.
However, there is a counterargument to be made with regard to drugs. In order for a system of “freedom of actions but accountable for the consequences” to work, people need to be able to respond to incentives. The reason people enjoy recreational drugs is because they alter the parts of the brain which run those processes.
If someone is not able to respond to incentives as we would predict, there is an argument for preemptively preventing that person from reaching that condition. It’s not an open-and-shut argument, but in my opinion it’s one which libertarians must account for.
The consternation arises from what is implicit in Fred’s post – That he is holding a pure line of total legality and that if one disagrees then one must hold some other pure line. But the only other pure line is total illegality for everything. And neither one of those positions is a real position.
Landing anywhere between is going to be somewhat arbitrary. But that’s where real life happens.
When our society is prepared to let people die in the street because they’ve incapacitated themselves, I’ll be willing to legalize all drugs for all people. Until then, if “we” are going to have to take care of you after you screw yourself up, we get to make some rules.
Frankly, the people who came up with Alcohol prohibition had the right idea, even if it didn’t work out so well in practice.
An anecdote: Many years ago I did a ride-along with a police officer in a mid-size American city (population approx 250k) on a Friday night shift. Every call we went on that night was in some way alcohol-related. Every. Single. One. From the stolen car that a drunk kid jumped into on his way home from a party, to the 12-year-old girl that had run away from a rehab center, to the domestic abuse case, and others too. In a 12-hour shift, there was not one single call that wasn’t in some way related to alcohol.
I am not sure everyone on Ricochet agrees with this proposition.
And I don’t mean (just) Fred. I have read numerous comments on Ricochet that there should be absolutely no, zero, nada restrictions on gun control. I have also read a number of Fred’s posts which imply that he would like to have certain rules applied universally. Based on these experiences, I am skeptical that we are all on the same page, and found it worthwhile to clarify the point.
It might be worth a post in it’s own right: does everyone really accept that all rules have exceptions, and that all rights have limits somewhere?
I’d be okay with that. Can we throw in tattoos too?
Secondly, Fred’s entire, and only, position in this whole debate is to attack any justification at regulation/prohibition of major drugs by saying “but ALCOHOL.” I’m sorry, but if you’re too dense to understand the differences between alcohol and heroin, you’re not worth talking to. Fred is not too dense, he’s acting in bad faith.
Apart from the obvious and undeniable differences in dosing (that nobody uses heroin casually or responsibly, while millions upon millions do use alcohol casually), there are the equally obvious differences in production. Alcohol would be virtually impossible to prohibit because it is a naturally occurring substance that is easily produced by virtually anyone. It is such an ingrained part of our culture – e.g. that glass of wine with dinner – that it cannot be removed. It is most frequently used responsibly, but because it is so widely used, there are plenty of examples of abuse. Heroin/Meth/etc… are drugs that require a complicated process to produce, which can be easily traced, and controlled. Prohibition is both realistic and desirable. Weed falls closer to alcohol on the spectrum.
There are my obvious answers for Fred to ignore, as he always does.
If it poses only long-term danger or poses immediate danger only to yourself, it should be legal.
If there are any age restrictions (not sure those are defensible), those restrictions must be regularly enforceable without doing harm (prison, felony record, etc) to the kids that exceeds the harm the drug would have caused.
If only excessive use poses immediate danger to others, then responsible use should be legal, but penalties for misbehavior should be increased for the reckless abandonment that made the misbehavior probable.
If normal use significantly undermines the user’s free will (such as through hallucination, delusion, crime-compelling addiction, or severely impaired judgment), it should be illegal.
Under this system, penalties would be increased for misbehavior while drunk. Weed would be legal. But many other currently illegal drugs would remain illegal. If a drug’s normal use impairs free will in a manner which could threaten other people, then it is better to address that problem while it is only reckless endangerment than when it manifests in violent action or theft.
Also, because we’re talking ideals and not probable legislation, the punishment for drug possession and drug-related crimes needn’t always be prison. Our modern justice system employs that punishment much too often while neglecting alternatives.
I see a lot of parallels in gun control and drug control.
Whenever my husband and I watch a movie these days, we always laugh at the things that need to be subjected to gun control legislation: Kitchen knives. Ammonia (in bombs). Ropes. :)
All we had was alcohol, and it killed people or ruined lives on one hand. On other hand, other people drank one glass wine with dinner only for flavor. One bottle of whiskey is drug because it makes you staggering high. One glass wine is not drug because one glass wine won’t intoxicate you.
Alcohol is place to find dividing line. Is used sometimes as drug, sometimes as just good tasting drink with food.
Must confess, we had more than alcohol. Is mushroom in woods all kids ate when teenagers. Hallucinations. Sometimes bad. Also plant that is not marijuana but gives some intoxication if smoked. Old people liked it, weird enough! Me, I take cue from Clinton and not inhale, believe me?
But these things? Never big enough problem to pass law and arrest people, but teenagers get punished by father if caught with mushroom, that’s for sure. My butt still hurts.
This would seem to imply people who are not neurotypical should be forced to take drugs in order for them to respond to incentives predictably.