This Is Your Brain On Drugs. This Is Your Brain On Anti-Drug Hysteria. Any Questions?
I had originally planned a full-blown meta-fisking of JRM’s uncommonly silly fisking of Radley Balko’s recent Reason/Culture11 article on the war on drugs, but I see Radley himself has beat me to the punch and made most of the points I would have made (and some that I did make, namely that the mere fact of overall police shootings being down since 1996 is congruent with the overall drop in crime being down for the same period, not evidence for or against Radley’s premise). And Radley doesn’t need me to defend him; after all, he’s got the traffic while I’m just some dim-witted, quick-tempered, angry douchebag that nobody reads.
So rather than defending Radley (though he’s clearly got the better argument here) I’ll just say this: drugs have become a religion on both sides. On the one hand, drug prohibitionists have an annoying tendency to ignore the fact that prohibiting a substance causes the price to skyrocket, thereby creating the motive underlying most “drug-related” crime. On the other, legalization and decriminalization advocates have an equally annoying tendency to ignore the fact that repealing the prohibition (or reducing enforcement efforts) on that same substance would cause the price to plummet, thereby causing recreational use (and, inevitably, abuse) to increase. It seems as though one side of the debate can’t wrap its head around the law of supply and demand, while the other fails to grasp the law of … errrr … supply and demand. For those who do understand that raising the price of anything is bound to deter someone from doing it, it seems to me there are only three defensible positions on the legalization or prohibition of any particular drug, to wit:
- Drug X [a variable, not a nickname for Ecstasy or any other particular drug] is so bad that it is worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting more violent crime in return for fewer people using it.
- Drug X is bad, sure, but most people who don’t use X now have the good sense to stay away from it even if it were legal and as cheap as aspirin, so saving 3 addicts a year is NOT worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting all that crime associated with the black market.
- Drug X is very bad, and banning it almost certainly benefits society on balance by any objective measure, but dammit, this is still supposed to be a free country, and if people want to muck up their own lives without hurting others, that’s nobody’s business but their own. [See this comment for a mirror image of this argument.]
Note that I deliberately set this up on a drug-by-drug basis, to reflect that some drugs are far worse than others. A rational person could, for example, take the view that all currently illicit drugs are bad for you, but marijuana isn’t bad enough to be worth the costs of prohibition, while cocaine probably is and PCP almost certainly is. But I don’t think there are any other rational options as to any particular drug. Do you?
February 9th, 2009 at 9:00 am
[...] Wrlqy says: drugs have become a religion on both sides. On the one hand, drug prohibitionists have an [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Funny thing is, our experience with alcohol prohibition says that the increase in recreational use is more than offset by the decrease in chronic (no pun intended) and binge abuse.
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February 9th, 2009 at 11:23 am
BTW, I’m mainly #2, with any gaps being filled in by #3.
And I would add #4, “people don’t have enough easily avoidable threats to their person. Stupidity is being subsidized by the government, and we are therefore getting loads of it. Legalizing some obviously insanely bad and deadly drugs would do a lot towards making the mortally stupid readily identifiable.”
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February 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Disclaimer: The only drugs that I partake of are caffeine, assorted over the counter pain medications (I’m partial to BC Powders for headaches and Ibuprofen for everything else), and the occasional prescription medication.
No…I don’t even drink.
But that’s because I CHOOSE not to, not because of the legality (or illegality) of it.
I think that is true of most people. It isn’t price, it isn’t whether it’s legal or illegal, they either choose to partake or not. You can’t very well say that recreational drugs are hard to get…or prohibitively expensive either.
I do not believe that legalization would necessarily increase use. It might…I’m not saying it’s impossible…but I doubt it would significantly. I believe that, because the people who don’t use drugs don’t because they choose not to, the vast majority would continue to choose not to were they legalized.
Besides, price point could easily be artificially maintained through taxation…the proceeds of which (and some of the money saved in NOT prosecuting the “war on some drugs” could be used for addiction treatment and counseling.
There are plenty of treatment programs out there, but the best ones are VERY expensive and few can afford to utilize them. Many of the people in most need of help, simply can’t get it for financial reasons or end up having to settle for less effective programs with lower success rates.
With that said: even were I to believe that drug use would increase with legalization, so what?
Isn’t that a personal choice?
Does freedom only mean that we are free to make the “right” decisions? Or does it mean that we’re free to do stupid things as well.
I will never use recreational drugs (well…other than caffeine, and I’ve cut back on that) but I simply do not understand the penchant of some to tell others how they may live their lives.
If you’re not bothering me, It is simply none of my business if you are stoned on crack every minute of the day.
If your crack habit leads to other crimes that DO affect others, then you should pay for those crimes, not for the decision to be a crack-head.
In my humble opinion.
“If people are free to do as they wish, they are almost certain not to do as we wish. That is why Utopian planners end up as despots…”
–Thomas Sowell
“There’s only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
— P.J. O’Rourke
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February 12th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Do you think it would be proper to argue that society as a whole benefits somewhat from prohibiting drugs that AREN’T horrendously, immediately harmful to the individual user? Prohibition of pot means we get to keep some pot users in prison (the ones so far gone they manage to get caught somehow), so we get an electorate with fewer hippies in it?
If pot is ever legalized, that’s the end of Libertarianism.