Firstly, I do not advocate the use of drugs in any way. Many of the drugs that are illegal are bad in many ways. I
think that all substances, whether prescribed, over the counter, legal, or illegal, should be used only with responsibility
and a full understanding of their potential for harm.
For example, though alcohol is legal almost everywhere, I can easily say that its use can often lead to some form of harm. Alcohol is, after all, poisonous. And, I do not deny that many drugs have the potential to be abused and
become addictive. My argument is based upon the government's role in prohibiting drug
commerce and use only.
No matter how harmful a drug is to society, a war on drugs will always make the situation more violent and unjust for society. An addiction is bad enough for an individual without also having to face imprisonment.
As with alcohol, all prohibition of narcotic substances, including alcohol, leads to the formation of a black market and a corresponding buildup of law enforcement. This buildup becomes an endless war where there is no end to the soldiers on the side of the drug market or the side of law enforcement.
The large sums of money involved influence law enforcement and the risks dealers and smugglers are willing to take. Political influence can be had by the black market money in places where such influence can occur. With tolerance and legalization, the stakes become lessened and the demand met in a peaceful market environment where laws apply to the trading of money for substances, such as in the current case with alcohol in the United States.
If someone steals your cocaine, the only remedy is violent retribution. If someone steals a case of whiskey from you, you have every right to involve law enforcement and take civil legal action to recover damages. Making a psychotropic substance illegal increases the chance that violence will replace civil justice.
No substance (beyond certain possible chemicals/weapons of mass destruction) should
be illegal to own, posses, sell, or buy. As persons, we should have the freedom to
make rational choices about what we buy and sell, and what we ingest.
If this rational
choice, namely, ingesting X, leads to the harm of another, then we are still fully
responsible for this harm because it derived from our initial rational choice to
ingest X. If we harm ourselves, then this is our right to do so.
It is not the
government's place to protect the individual from the decisions of the individual when the
individual is of 'sound mind'- such as in suicide (perhaps to relieve intense suffering at the end of life), intentional self-harm, and other
actions of the self such as prostitution.
Persons should be allowed
to do anything with their person or property so long as it does not harm the person or property of another.
This does not make such actions good or right, but merely keeps them within the scope of things we should be legally free to do with our person and property.
An understanding of harm is where things get
complicated. Can I own a nuclear weapon and not harm anyone? Yes, but this is where we
must consider utilitarianism as very important.
Even if ingesting X will certainly lead to the death of another, X should not
be illegal. Why?
Because we still will have to make the rational choice to ingest X, which
is a rational choice to kill another. Therefore, we are responsible for the injury we do
to another.
If we were forced or unknowing of our ingestion of X, then
that person who forced or gave us X would be responsible for the our killing of another
individual.
I am inclined to see a utilitarian argument against this substance X but none exists and the closest analog in reality would probably be PCP.
A Closer Look at Drugs: Drugs are chemical substances that alter the chemistry of the body in some way. This
encompasses just about everything in the world from water to cocaine, from vitamins to
aspirin.
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Some drugs are harmful to the body, as is obvious. Some drugs are pleasurable and
harmful, some are neither, and some are a combination of the two.
[1] The primary function of government is to protect its citizens.
[2] Protection includes domestic and foreign.
[3] Protection does not include my actions on myself (suicide, ingestion of X, or
harm to myself).
[4] Protection does include what I choose to do to others.
(3) and (4) are where drug laws come into existence, for both the reasons of protecting
the self (seat-belt laws) and protecting others from potential harm (drug laws,
no chemical weapons, no bazookas...etc.)
I protest (3) because I think we should be free to act on ourselves or make personally
harmful or bad decisions. It should not be illegal to be stupid, or risk
one's life. Should it be illegal to skydive or climb rocks? Such is the reasoning behind
seat-belt laws.
I protest (4) in relation to drug laws because this assumes harm, and also removes responsibility of the individual, and the individual's freedom of choice. We are, in a
sense, free to harm others (in the sense that there is not a 'chip' in our heads that
physically prevents us from doing so). We must also pay the consequences in a society for
harming another person.
Thoughts from March 8, 2011:
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People who have problems with addiction, be it addiction to alcohol, illegal substances, prescriptions, video games, sex, or power all suffer from an inability to willfully control their problem.
Making such addictions a crime rather than something for which their is help and treatment creates an atmosphere of further suffering and does not alleviate the problem but, in most cases, makes the problem worse for society.
Why should someone be allowed to take as much alcohol or tobacco as they please without it being illegal while other substances, most less harmful than alcohol, be designated illegal and cause a situation in which black market violence and trafficking will arise?
A recent study in Britain suggests that alcohol, above all other substances, is by far the most harmful to society and to the individual. I have known people who have died or who have had brain damage from alcohol and I have known of a few people who have overdosed on opiates.
Other than these two substances, most create psychiatric problems or have little harmful side effects when used in smaller doses. The fact that cannabis is illegal in many countries while alcohol is legal is nothing short of absurd given the variance in addiction, damage, and the general effect.
Addiction is a disease or an illness and definitions to the contrary make those who suffer from such problems criminals and degenerates while they are simply human beings who have encountered a challenge in their willpower over the effects of some particular substance or environmental pleasure that negatively affects their lives.
One could say that many addictions are only problematic given certain circumstances. If a billionaire wants to play video games for eighteen hours a day for years on end, is this a problem? Or, is it only a problem for someone who has other responsibilities?
Humans are designed to be addicted to comfort, pleasure, food, serotonin and dopamine enhancement. Exercise can be addicting, relationships can be addicting, cleaning, disinfecting, hand washing, counting, violence, sex... almost anything can be psychologically addiction but, as far as I am aware, only alcohol withdrawl can cause physical harm and even death at high levels of consumption.
Although opiate and stimulant withdrawl is psychologically difficult, it generally will not cause physical harm in a healthy individual.
Societies should not be the parents of adults and, as such, should remain tolerant of what people wish to do with their bodies. Most societies that have tolerated drugs or prostitution or abortion have found that it is highly beneficial to do so for myriad reasons- one of which is not having to incarcerate a significant portion of the population, as in America, for consensual crimes.
America has more people, per capita, in prison, that any other nation on Earth because of the prison-law enforcement-industrial complex in which hundreds of thousands of people are employed in or are invested in.
This is immoral and unethical behavior for a nation as it is a war that can never be won- because it is a war against the very nature of humans as they are built and programmed for addiction. Addiction is part of what we are. We must eat and we look for the best tasting foods.
We are addicted to water, to air, and to procreation as all of these things allow us to thrive. When individuals become addicted to harmful things it should be seen as a health problem at worst and no one else's buisiness in most cases.
Drug testing where no warrant for such testing has been given, such as innebriation on the job, is an invasion of privacy and I see it as directly unconstitutional as unreasonable search of an individual's biological privacy.
