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Legalizing Drugs

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it.

Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Humans, say today’s politicians, both right and left, aren’t capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; so these bureaucrats must help us live our lives for us.

Nowhere is this (unquestioned) conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with a good example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion has been so thoroughly inculcated into the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

That principle is the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then using drugs is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of custom.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question.

Yet if you believe in freedom, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

It is frequently argued, for example, by the religious contingent, that if you legalize drugs, the usage of drugs will increase.

“Common sense and common experience tell us this,” says lawyer and radio talk-show host Dan Caplis, incessantly.

Next, we’re offered as evidence that the number of drinkers did increase after prohibition — a statement which is, at best, misleading, and here’s why:

Prior to prohibition, when drinking was still legal, the number of drinkers in this country was on a significant downward trend. For a decade leading up to prohibition, fewer and fewer people were drinking.

This fact is clear and not in dispute. But when, in 1920, the moralizers and busybodies got their way and legislated that the rest of the country must live as they deemed appropriate, and prohibition was then made into law, drinking still continued its downward trend. This went on for about three years.

It is very important to reiterate that the downward trend in drinking began long before drinking had been made illegal.

In the middle of prohibition — when drinking was still illegal — the number of drinkers began gradually to rise.

It continued to do so throughout the rest of prohibition, so that when, in December of 1933, prohibition was finally repealed, that upward trend continued for about a decade. But it was only the continuation of a trend that had already begun while drinking was illegal. This is a critical fact, but one you’ll never hear mention of when you hear people talking about “the number of drinkers increasing after prohibition.”

The next time someone says that “repealing prohibition increased the number of drinkers in this country,” be clear what that means: it means the number of drinkers was already increasing throughout the latter two-thirds of prohibition, and that the upward trend plateaued and then declined a decade after drinking was legalized anew.

Ask yourself also these questions: if, as the religious propound, making substances illegal prevents their usage, how is it that the number of drinkers began rising when alcohol was still illegal?

How is it that in Holland, where many drugs are legal and even subsidized(!), how is it that usage has decreased?

What does this tell us about “common sense and common experience”?

How is it that in Switzerland, marijuana usage has decreased even though it’s been made legal? And Spain?

There are those, of course, who argue that if drugs are legal, crime will increase. This is the biggest canard of them all.

Rest assured, if crime is your concern, illegalization should be what you want done away with.

There exists right now a multi-trillion-dollar underworld built up around illegal drugs, which legalizing would instantaneously crush, and which, as it stands, no amount of law, legislation, or litigation can come close to stopping. Why? The law of supply and demand is unstoppable: if there is a demand for something, supply will meet it, no matter what. All the conservative legislation imaginable cannot negate this fact. One might just as well try legislating against the tide.

When cigarettes and alcohol became so staggeringly taxed, do you know what happened? A gigantic blackmarket swept into the country. That meant more crime. People were smuggling in alcohol and cigarettes because these things could be sold for much cheaper on the blackmarket. They still are to this day.

Decriminalizing brings less crime.

For those who believe that if drugs are legalized, your kids are then more likely to use drugs, I urge you to remember that children have brains. Human beings have brains. We can learn, and we can be educated. We can be taught why not to use drugs. If you doubt the effectiveness of this, observe that cigarettes were legal for any age group until fairly recently, and the number of young smokers was sharply decreasing, and had been since the dangers of smoking were made known. Now that’s it’s illegal, teen smoking is on the rise again, and criminalizing doesn’t help.

Ask any honest school kid if he or she would have trouble getting drugs. Every honest school kid will tell you no. This despite the fact that drugs are illegal.

The inescapable law of supply and demand is why: if there’s a demand, supply will meet it. And no government bureaucracy and no middle-class morality can successfully fight it.

Making something illegal won’t decrease the supply of anything. It will only increase the underworld that provides the supply. This is a economic axiom.

Here’s another:

The only way to decrease supply is to curb demand.

The only way to curb demand is to inform, to educate, to decriminalize.

Each person must choose if he or she wants to use drugs or not, and whether those drugs are legal or illegal has little to do with the choice. There are many things that are legal and that every person has instant access to, but not everyone chooses to partake of. Why so?

The so-called war on drugs is a monumental waste of resources and money; it will continue to be so until the end of time. When something is made illegal, it develops a mystique. It entices. When something is legal, it becomes commonplace and mundane. It becomes no big deal. It is demystified.

Take, for instance, a person who’s grown up in an ultra-sheltered society and compare him or her to a person who’s grown up in the inner-city. Now drop them both off in downtown New York where there’s legal XXX shops on every street corner. Whom do you think will be more curious? And for whom do you think this will be more of a novelty?

And finally, for all the tax-happy liberals out there, think about this: if you legalize drugs, you can tax the living hell out of them. You can then use that tax money to educate with all your half-assed liberal programs, which benefit the “common good.” What more motivation do you need?

It is often said:

“Legalizing pot might be okay, but legalizing cocaine and methadrine, no way. I’ve known wealthy, white-collar, healthy, normal, successful businesspeople who’ve gotten so caught up in amphetamines that they’ve never been able to get off. They died. Suicide. OD. They’ve ruined their lives and the lives of their families. No way you should make these drugs legal.”

This is a repackaged version of the legalizing-creates-more-usage argument. It’s the same argument that drugs shouldn’t be legal because look at all the children born severely retarded and deformed because the mothers used crack throughout the pregnancy.

The first thing we must obviously note here is that all this happened (and still happens) even though drugs are illegal. Observe that making them illegal did not prevent these things from happening. Now ask yourself why.

Remember also that cigarettes and alcohol have ruined more lives and more families by far than every amphetamine combined. Should we therefore make alcohol and cigarettes illegal? And if not, why not? If it’s within the proper jurisdiction of government to run our lives, why shouldn’t we illegalize them?

And why, if that is government’s legitimate jurisdiction, draw the line at amphetamines, alcohol, and cigarettes? Why not let government run everything we consume — be it bacon, beer, or brats?

When gin made it into mainstream London, should it have been illegalized because it created such staggering addiction rates and ruined so many thousands of families?

We often hear: since alcohol can be and often is used in moderation, it should therefore be legal, whereas drugs cannot be used in moderation, and so should be illegal.

Leaving aside the questionable verity of such statements, since when did moderation become the standard for legalization versus illegalizing? That means, then, among other things, that for all those who can’t use alcohol or tobacco in moderation — for all, in other words, who are addicted (roughly half of all drinkers and more than ninety-five percent of all tobacco users) — these substances should be illegal? But for the rest, fine?

Freedom means you are left alone. It means you are neither helped nor hindered.

In this country, as in any just country, government’s proper role is not to be proscriptive or preventative.

In the words of Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850):

The nature of law is to maintain justice. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so (Frederic Bastiat, The Law).

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Do Animals Possess Rights?

A reader writes:

Dear Ray: I recently read a synopsis of a book about the question of animal rights, and I’m curious to know your take. Do animals possess rights? If so, where do these rights reside?

Thanks,

Pig Bodine

Dear Pig Bodine: Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights, as Herbert Spencer said, are “politico-ethical precepts” that define and delimit human freedom in large groups.

This last thing is emphasized because rights would not be necessary if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society. Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice, which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions. One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission? Answering that question is where you’ll first begin to glimpse the true nature of rights. Indeed, rights are not only not invented: they are an outgrowth of a crucial human need: morality.

Those who would deny rights consistently must, in order to remain consistent, espouse amoralism. Amoralism means no good and no bad. Amoralism does not mean a different standard of good and bad. It means that there is no such thing as good or bad. In the same way, and for the same reason, that you can’t describe a lizard’s behavior as right or wrong because the lizard is amoral, so it is, according to the amoralist, with human beings. Chronic lying, rape, genocide, coprophilia — these, to the amoralist, are all neither bad nor good; they just are. Conversely, self-control, courage, honesty, happiness — these also are neither good nor bad; they just are. To an amoralist, all human actions are exactly equal because from her or his viewpoint morality simply does not exist: morality is an arbitrary human invention without any referent in reality.

Amoralism is the end result of denying the existence of rights.

If humans do not exist by right, humans exist by permission. Whose permission? Whoever holds control. Force therefore becomes the standard.

Rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light, and yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason rights have remained resilient is that in some sense they are self-evident: we each own ourselves.

No freedom and no justice can exist if rights don’t exist — or, in other words, if rights are invented. Indeed, one of the definitions that Oxford gives for rights is the following: “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.” Another definition that Oxford gives is this: “Righteousness, truth, or justice; esp. the cause of truth or justice.”

The very word rights in this context has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, “jus is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.” The Roman juris Ulpian considered a person’s right “that which is due him [or her] given his [or her] status as a human being.” (Cambridge Ancient History: The Primitive Institutions of Rome, H. Stuart Jackson.)

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms — specifically, the freedom to move and act in a certain way. Notice that phrase “freedom to act.” It is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

But what is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made?

To begin with, rights are not primaries. They are precipitated by something. This means that rights derive from something more fundamental. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition: the faculty of choice.

Choice is a prerequisite of morality: there can be no good or bad if there is no freedom to choose a certain course of action. Rights, in turn, are an elaboration upon morality — specifically, morality within a societal framework. That is the link between ethics and politics, which rights supply us with. It is for this reason that rights have been described by Herbert Spencer as “politico-ethical precepts.”

Rights, then, are ultimately grounded in the human capacity of choice — which is to say, free will — because human action is not automatic; and so, therefore, human survival is not automatic but entails choice. As Samual Adams expressed it:

Among the natural rights … are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are necessary for the full exercise of morality, because coercion is the opposite of choice. Some humans may flourish best under coercion, and some humans may even prefer coercion to freedom, but that’s not the point. In any case, it is no argument against rights. The point here is that if you believe humans possess moral agency, you believe, perforce, that rights are inherently part of each (healthy) human: without rights, we would not each have the authority in which to choose moral (or immoral) action. And if you don’t believe that humans possess moral agency, then you don’t believe that humans possess the faculty of choice, in which case you don’t believe that humans can think, but live and act amorally.

Individuation is the crux of rights.

What individuation refers to is the fact that we each have the potential to decide (or not) whether to engage the brain. As the philosophical psychologist Rollo May said:

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will.” (Emphases added). “The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

That is the fundamental act of will — or, if you prefer, the fundamental choice — that determines individuation. It is an act of will which the individual alone can perform, and which the individual alone is responsible for. It is the locus of human sovereignty. (It is also, incidentally, the reason a fetus does not possess rights, but the woman carrying the fetus does: she is individuated; the fetus is not.)

The stuff of rights, then, is the faculty of choice, which gives rise to right and wrong courses of action. But choice comes first. Without choice, there is no morality, and thus there are no rights.

I’m sometimes asked: where do rights reside? Do they dwell as ghosts inside us? The answer is, no, they do not dwell as ghosts inside us. Rights are principles. They reside within the human condition — specifically, the human brain, which operates by means of reason, the activation of which is chosen: it must be willed by each individual. If human action were not chosen but automatic, as it is with the beasts of our animal kingdom, then there would be no such thing as rights, because our actions would be automatic. We would live as those beasts — neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. But human action is chosen. And that is what necessitates the freedom to choose.

The evolution of the human brain is the thing that created rights. How so? Because this evolution created a rational animal called a human being — which is to say, it created the freedom of the will. In slightly more religious terms than I’m comfortable with, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) otherwise put it well:

The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed (“Paradiso,” Canto V, lines 19-24).

Animals do not possess rights because animals are not moral agents — i.e. they are not rational agents. Animals act by genetic predilection or genetic proclivity. The action of animals is not chosen in the full sense of the word. For this reason, the action of animals is amoral.

The grizzly that mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

So it is here the question inevitably arises that if animals do not possess rights, neither, therefore, do babies — or, at least, those babies who only have a few months to live — and nor, for the same reason, do severely brain-damaged people, who are unable to exercise a rational faculty. This flimsy peg (the so-called “argument from marginal cases”) is the postmodern peg that animal rights activists are now hanging their entire case upon.

The first thing to be said about it is that it’s a non sequitur.

The second thing to be said is that severely brain-damaged people do not possess actual rights, for the very reason that we outlined above: they are not able to think and reason. The unalienable right to life, liberty, and property hinges upon the capacity to think, which implies choice, and also upon one’s knowledge. In the same way that healthy children develop the moral faculty gradually, over a span of years, (healthy) children develop rights gradually as they mature into independent beings. Brain-damaged humans who cannot exercise the power of rationality — which is to say, morality — cannot, obviously, exercise their rights, because those rights reside in the very thing these people lack. Thus she (or he) does not possess actual rights. The protection of these people is something granted them for being a part of the human species (and, of course, the chance of medical breakthroughs).

In any case, the attempt to grant animals rights on the basis of so-called marginal human cases does not follow. In fact, it is to negate the very term rights by assuming that marginal cases are the norm and therefore the standard. To grant, for instance, an animal “the right to be left alone” (as it’s often phrased these days) means, among many other things, that there can be no such thing as meat-eating (even under dire conditions), but more than that: there can be no such thing as the domestication of animals, and no such thing as pet ownership: obviously, rights preclude any sort of humans-eating-or-owning-other-humans. If, moreover, it were proven that plants also feel pain and also possess sentience, as many people believe, then plants too possess the “right to be left alone,” and human beings starve because we possess moral agency, while the rest of the animal (and plant) kingdom does not starve, because they are held to no such standards — for the very reason that humans are held to such standards: the rational mind.

(If you think plant rights is a far-fetched idea, don’t read this.)

What this positions amounts to is a stupendous contradiction: animals have the right to be left alone, even though they don’t possess the very thing that necessitates rights: moral agency and the power of reason. And because they don’t possess this, they are incapable of respecting the rights of other animals (including humans); and yet their “rights” must still be respected — by humans alone, because we alone possess the very thing that gives rise to rights. This is a grave and dangerous misunderstanding of the word rights — most specifically of the human need that gives rise to rights, which need is not, incidentally, marginal case at all. If this philosophy were adopted, it would obliterate the idea of rights entirely. To say nothing of the vast legal apparatus that would be required in order to codify, systematize, and institute every animal’s “right to be left alone,” as well as the absurd spectacle of humans presuming to speak for the “wronged” animals, which does have historical precedent, and which, in fact, someone once made a movie about.

There would also, of course, be the not insignificant necessity of human punishment meted out (by humans), for that wronged beast, which beast, however, does not survive by reason but must have justice (i.e.the respect for rights) delivered unto it, even though that beast has absolutely no conception of justice, and never will. This is wrong, all wrong. The distinguishing characteristic of rights is compossibility. Thus there is a very simple, and entirely foolproof, method for determining if something is a right or not: Your rights, my rights, every person’s rights, stop where another’s begin. If you follow that maxim, you’ll never confuse the issue.