During his State of the State
speech yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
promised to “end the failed war on drugs.” Wait a minute.
Didn’t the Obama administration end
the war on drugs way back in 2009? Drug czar Gil Kerlikowske
says
it did.
It turns out that Christie, who first
called the war on a drugs a “failure” in 2012 (eight years
after Barack Obama did),
has something similar in mind. He does not want to stop responding
to drug use with violence; he just wants to make “drug treatment”
more “available,” which entails forcing
nonviolent drug offenders into treatment by threatening to lock
them in cages. Sadly, that does count as an improvement. Most
people arrested on drug charges no doubt would prefer treatment to
jail. But what is the moral justification for compelling that
choice? If the state does not take that approach with alcoholics
(except when they have broken the law in ways that endanger or harm
others), why should it treat users of arbitrarily proscribed drugs
this way?
“We will end the failed war on drugs that believes that
incarceration is the cure of every ill caused by drug abuse,”
Christie said. “We will make drug treatment available to as many of
our non-violent offenders as we can, and we will partner with our
citizens to create a society that understands this simple truth:
every life has value and no life is disposable.” Yet Christie’s
plan depends on the continued use of incarceration, as a punishment
for people who supply arbitrarily proscribed substances and as a
threat against people who consume them but do not want treatment.
Their desires and choices do not matter, because the government has
decreed that they do not have a right to control their own bodies
and their own destinies, that they should instead be treated like
children, who cannot be trusted to judge their own interests. That
is a strange way of showing respect for each person’s humanity.
Some critics of the war on drugs praised Christie’s comments. “I
was delighted to be present for the governor’s swearing in and to
hear him make such promising remarks surrounding drug policy reform
in our state,”
said Roseanne Scotti, New Jersey state director for the Drug
Policy Alliance. “The Drug Policy Alliance and advocates throughout
New Jersey look forward to working with the Christie administration
to address the unacceptable and unjust consequences of the drug
war.” National Review‘s Kevin Williamson calls Christie’s
talk of “ending” the war on drugs “revolutionary stuff.”
It is hard for me to muster the same enthusiasm. Although
Christie’s version of the drug war may prove to be less bad than
the ones waged by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (whose drug czars
made similar noises), it should not be confused with drug peace,
which requires renouncing the use of force against people whose
only crime consists of consuming politically disfavored intoxicants
or helping others do so.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1jnPHko
via IFTTT