John P. Walters, George W. Bush’s drug czar,
provides further evidence of prohibitionists’
intellectual
bankruptcy: an essay in Politico that
supposedly explains “Why
Libertarians Are Wrong About Drugs.” His argument is persuasive
as long as you accept two false premises:
1. Drug use is drug abuse.
“There is ample experience that a drug user harms not only
himself, but also many others,” Walters writes. “The association
between drug use and social and economic failure, domestic
violence, pernicious parenting and criminal acts while under the
influence is grounds for prohibition even if we accept no
responsibility for what the drug user does to himself. The drug
user’s freedom to consume costs his community not only their
safety, but also their liberty.”
According to Walters, all illegal drug use, regardless of dose,
administration method, or context, harms both the user and other
people. As I show in my book
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, that absolutist
position flies in the face of everyday experience as well as
research on patterns of drug consumption. The vast majority of
illegal drug users, like the vast majority of drinkers, do not
inflict any serious harm on themselves or others.
2. Drugs cause addiction, and addiction is
slavery.
“Libertarians have yet to grasp just how much drug abuse
undermines individual freedom and erodes the very core of the
libertarian ideal,” Walters writes. “If an essential predicate of
libertarian society is the willing, rational actor, capable of
weighing and understanding consequences, what’s left when this
condition is absent?”
As I argue in Saying Yes, addiction is not a chemical
compulsion; it is a pattern of behavior affected by many factors
other than the drug itself, including the user’s personality,
tastes, preferences, intentions, and environment. This much is
obvious to most people (and maybe even to Walters) when it comes to
alcohol; it is equally true of the intoxicants that are currently
illegal.
Contrary to Walters’ description, addicts do not lose all
volition. They respond to incentives, as demonstrated in Carl
Hart’s
research with heavy crack cocaine and methamphetamine users;
they modify their behavior as circumstances change, as demonstrated
by Vietnam
veterans who gave up heroin when they returned to the United
States; and they quit or cut back when they have a strong enough
reason to do so, as demonstrated by every former smoker and every
reckless drunk who learned to consume alcohol responsibly. Even if
the possibility of addiction were a good enough reason to ban a
psychoactive substance, the laws Walters is defending, which allow
alcohol while prohibiting many substances that are less commonly
used to excess, still would make no sense.
These myths have been familiar themes of prohibitionist
propaganda in the United States for at least a century. Walters
also employs a slightly newer rhetorical
trick, posing a series of supposedly baffling questions about
how the currently illegal drugs would be distributed if prohibition
were repealed, as if Americans have no experience with legal
intoxicant markets. “Management of production and distribution,
some envision, could be commercial,” he writes. “What could go
wrong? Think Afghan warlord with a lobbying arm and a marketing
department.”
I am currently visiting Denver, where I have met a bunch of very
nice people who make a living in Colorado’s newly legal marijuana
industry. Except for an occasional beard, not one of them resembled
an Afghan warlord. Even if the current crop of mom-and-pop
operations eventually gives way to much bigger businesses, the
appropriate analogy will be Anheuser-Busch, or maybe Walmart, not
the Taliban.
Walters is so confused about what is going on in Colorado that
he presents it as an alternative to commercial production and
distribution. “Perhaps, as with marijuana in Colorado,” he says,
“the state itself will run the show.” The state is “run[ning] the
show” in Colorado only in the sense that it is laying down rules
for private businesses to follow, just as it does with every other
industry. Some of those rules are unreasonably restrictive, if not
downright silly, but regulation is not the same as a government-run
monopoly.
Speaking of silly, Walters claims “there is evidence that, in
some places, suicide bombers, youth warriors, child sex slaves and
even manual laborers are given drugs to keep them captive.” What
does that have to do with the question of whether the government
should use force to prevent free adults from consuming drugs that
John Walters does not like?
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