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Title: The War on Some Drugs
Source: Lew Rockwell
URL Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09 ... casey/the-war-on-some-drugs-3/
Published: Sep 9, 2017
Author: Doug Casey
Post Date: 2017-09-09 11:55:31 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 9058
Comments: 29

Drugs are a charged subject everywhere. They’re a “hot button” topic. Everyone has a strong opinion, often irrational, that seems to come from deep in the most reactive recesses of their collective minds.

Longtime readers know that although I personally abstain from drugs and generally eschew the company of abusive users, I think they should be 100% legal. Not just cannabis. All drugs.

The most important reason is moral and ethical. Your primary possession is your own body. If you don’t own it, and don’t have a right to do whatever you want with it, then you in fact have no rights at all. That’s the main reason why the drug war itself is criminal, and morally insane. The economic, medical, practical, and many other reasons to repeal prohibition are important, but strictly secondary.

Few people consider how arbitrary, and historically recent, the current prohibition is; until the Harrison Act was passed in 1914, heroin and cocaine were both perfectly legal and easily obtainable over the counter.

Before that, very few people were addicted to narcotics, even though narcotics were available to anybody at the local corner drugstore. Addicts were just looked down on as suffering from a moral failure, and a lack of self-discipline. But since there was no more profit in heroin than in aspirin, there was no incentive to get people to use it. So there were no cartels or drug gangs.

Drugs are no more of a problem than anything else in life; life is full of problems. In fact, life isn’t just full of problems; life is problems. What is a problem? It’s simply the situation of having to choose between two or more alternatives. Personally, I believe in people being free to choose, and I rigorously shun the company of people who don’t believe that. Drug addicts have a problem; drug “warriors” have a much more serious problem.

What we’re dealing with isn’t a medical problem, it’s a psychological, even a spiritual, problem. And a legal problem, because self-righteous busybodies keep passing laws—with very severe penalties—regulating what people can or can’t do with their own bodies. It’s part of the general degradation of civilization that I’ve been putting my finger on over the last few years.

Hysteria and propaganda aside, the fact is that most recreational drugs pose less of a health problem than alcohol, nicotine, sugar, or a simple lack of exercise.

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (of whom I’m a great fan) was an aficionado of cocaine products. So was Sigmund Freud. Churchill is supposed to have drank a quart of whiskey daily. Dr. William Halsted, father of modern surgery and cofounder of Johns Hopkins University, was a regular user throughout his long and illustrious career, which included inventing local anesthesia after injecting cocaine into his skin. Thomas Edison, Charles Dickens, Philip K. Dick, Richard Feynman, Francis Crick, John Lilly, Kary Mullis, Carl Sagan… the list of famous and successful people who used various substances to enhance or alter their consciousness is very, very long. Just the ones we know of. But, in today’s world, they could all be doing serious time in a federal pen.

Let me re-emphasize that I’m not encouraging drug use. Some cloud the mind, others clear it. It’s up to you (or should be) to decide what you need or want, what’s good or bad. There are many hundreds of recreational drugs, with widely differing effects. Insofar as recreational drugs present a problem, it arises from overuse, which is hard to define and arbitrary. And can be true of absolutely anything.

People can become addicted to most anything—food, sugar, alcohol, gambling, sleep, sex—you name it. It’s not good when you do too much of absolutely anything. One thing is for sure: You take personal responsibility away from people, they become more, not less, irresponsible.

The so-called “drug problem” is solely due to the fact that recreational drugs are illegal.

Alcohol provides the classic example. Alcohol has been, by far, the most abused substance in the US throughout its history. But the enactment of Prohibition in 1920 not only made abuse worse (for a number of reasons), but created a crime wave, and essentially created the Cosa Nostra. Making a product illegal turns both users and suppliers into criminals, and only makes bluenoses and busybodies happy.

Because illegality makes any product vastly more expensive than it would be in a free market, some users resort to crime to finance their habits. Because of the risks and artificially reduced supply, the profits to the suppliers are necessarily huge—not the simple businessman’s returns to be had from legal products.

Just as Prohibition of the ’20s turned the Mafia from a small underground group of thugs into big business, the War on Drugs has done precisely the same thing for drug dealers. And is, by far, the major cause of corruption in law enforcement. It’s completely insane and totally counterproductive.

The government learned absolutely nothing from the failure of alcohol prohibition. What they’re doing with drugs makes an occasional, trivial problem into a national catastrophe.

Frankly, if you want to worry about drugs, it would be more appropriate to be concerned about the scores of potent psychiatric drugs from Ritalin to Prozac that are actively pushed in the US, often turning users into anything from zombies, to space cadets, to walking time bombs.

The whole drill impresses me as being so perversely stupid as to border on the surreal. Insofar as the Drug War diminishes supply of product, it raises prices. The higher the prices, the higher the profits. And the higher the profits, the greater the inducement to youngsters anxious to get into the game. The more successful it is in imprisoning people, the more new people it draws into the business to replace them.

The only answer to the War on Drugs is the same as that to the equally stupid and destructive War on Demon Rum fought during the ’20s—a complete repeal of prohibition, and unregulated legalization.

Will it happen? Not likely. The DEA, FBI, CIA, and numerous state and local agencies, and the drug dealers themselves, have way too big an interest in keeping drugs illegal. But the impending decriminalization and legalization of pot everywhere is a step in the right direction.

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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 7.

#1. To: Deckard (#0)

Your primary possession is your own body. If you don’t own it, and don’t have a right to do whatever you want with it,

There can be no unlimited rights, or society will collapse on that one right. You do not absolutely own your body and you cannot do anything your want with it.

Specifically, you do not have the right to infect it with terrible communicable diseases and walk around Times Square.

You do not have the right to refuse to take your body into combat if you've been drafted into military service, and you don't have the right to not have your body drafted.

You do not have the right to walk your body into somebody else's house.

You don't have the right to play with your own sexual organs in public.

You don't have the right to not cover your private parts in clothes and walk down the streets naked.

You don't have the right to squat and take a dump on the sidewalk.

You don't have the right to sell your organs to the highest bidder.

In short, you don't own your body absolutely. You possess it and have vast, but nevertheless limited, rights in its use and possession.

This is true under the human law because it has to be, lest civilization fall to pieces.

It's true a fortiori under the law of God.

Vicomte13  posted on  2017-09-09   12:19:50 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: Vicomte13 (#1)

You do have a right not to fight in combat. For someone who claims to be ... You sure are a statist.

A K A Stone  posted on  2017-09-10   8:19:48 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


Replies to Comment # 7.

#8. To: A K A Stone (#7)

Yes, I am a statist. It is a self-evident truth that, without the state, we would be living much shorter, nastier, violent and ignorant lives. Most of us would be enslaved by some stronger invader - name me a European people that was not enslaved or reduced to serfdom by another. They all were, in their turn. The state is the vehicle by which people are successfully organized for war, to be able to maintain greater liberty than in a tribal state (which is the state of nature - not independent individualism - that doesn't exist in a state of nature: the pack lives, but the lone wolf dies).

So yes, I am a statist, and have always said so.

I want my state to be well organized, not ramshackle and wasteful. I want the sewers to work and the garbage collection to be on time, and the dumps where the garbage goes to be regulated. That makes all of our lives longer and better.

I want the army and the navy and the air force to be strong and effective, well organized, well trained and well commanded. That keeps the state independent of other states.

I want the laws to be reasonable and egalitarians. There is always a "Law of the Elite" above the Common Law, and a "Law of the Low" for those at the bottom, but I want those laws to at least in principle merely be the differences in application of the law thanks to police and prosecutorial discretion, as opposed to rigid separate systems of law.

I want the state to ensure universal public education, health care, and retirement stipends, unemployment benefits and disability insurance - and to provide subsistence-level welfare for those who need it.

I want the state regulating the financial markets, lest bankers repeatedly blow up the world and render masses of people in poverty, as happened cyclically every 30 years or so before the state regulated the financial industry. Yes, we still have booms and busts, but with a social welfare state and regulation of the industry, the busts are not as bad as they used to be, and nobody starves when they happen. That was not true before. A strong, intelligent state makes things better.

I want the state to regulate the environment, lest the unregulated free market turn us into what we had before: mercury in the lakes, toxic waste poured into the canals and houses built on them, motor oil poured down the public drains, filthy air, dying Great Lakes - all of it.

The state has been successful at prolonging and improving human life. The absence of a functional state plunges everybody into the African darkness of mob rule and tribalism. The absence of a democratic, egalitarian state turns us all into pawns into the "game of thrones" that was old Europe, or turns many of us into chattel slaves, as was old America.

I want my state to be respectable enough and held in high enough esteem by the people who have to live in it that they feel attached to it and become angry when its symbols are treated with disrespect - for example by sports figures refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Your hatred of the state is unreasoning and unreasonable.

Vicomte13  posted on  2017-09-10 08:39:57 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


End Trace Mode for Comment # 7.

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