What a Waste

Harry Browne (Libertarian candidate for president in 1996 and 2000) called it “the insane war on drugs”, and it was... and still is. The social, political, economic, and even international consequences of the government's treatment of drugs as a criminal issue rather than a public health issue are enormous and beyond reckoning. And yet the madness persists, and earlier this week the Pittsburgh area was witness to the consequences for two families. As a result of an early-morning raid on a suburban home, an FBI agent – a husband and the father of a pre-schooler – is dead, and the wife of the drug “perp” is in jail on murder charges. She is a housewife and the mother of two children. This incident alone should be enough to bring people to their senses concerning the “War on Drugs”, which is perhaps the most prominent of our many holdovers from Puritanism. It is widely acknowledged that this so-called war is fraught with authoritarianism, hysteria, and bad law. Its consequences are often cruel and unjust... wildly disproportionate to the alleged “offenses”... and clearly discriminatory in terms of race. (And where is the “black leadership” on this issue? Doing the usual, which is shuffling and nodding in agreement with the white establishment.) Other countries – most other countries, in fact – have found much more reasonable, humane, and economical solutions to their drug problems; but, oh no, not us! Somewhere along the line we decided that drug use (well, certain drugs by certain people, that is) is “wrong”, and that the users, and their suppliers, have to be punished rather than educated, counseled, or rehabilitated (or – heaven forbid – simply allowed to pursue their habit unmolested, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else). One result is that we have the most “jailed” population on earth, proportion-wise... worse than “oppressive” regimes like China, for instance. And a huge chunk of it is based on the “War on Drugs”. Plus, the effects spill overseas without any trouble. Our drug crusades raise the prices many fold above the actual costs of production and distribution, with the result that entire countries wind up with the illegal drug trade being a primary component of their economic base... and with drug lords basically running the country, and wars among drug gangs endangering their own citizens and impacting their economies. And on the domestic side, the anti-drug hysteria has given rise to a situation similar to that during Prohibition, namely that we are raising generations of young people with no respect for the law, since they can plainly see that, in this case, the law is an ass, and they are not hesitant to extrapolate this idea to other elements of the law as well. How many millions of Americans could claim never to have broken a single law... “except” one or more drug laws? And yet we expect people to respect the “rule of law”. But the societal need – also part of our Puritan heritage – to have a permanent imprisoned underclass... and the thousands of jobs provided by the anti-drug bureaucracy... both insure that none of this is going to change in the near future, if ever... not under Obama, and not under anyone else. It is, perhaps, our most deeply-rooted “meme”, or cultural thought habit. You can question almost anything else about American society, but the “War on Drugs” is sacrosanct. And so we can expect to see more tragedies like the one described above... and more steadfast refusal to see the situation for what it is, and do something about it.