. . . .or Try Wild Liberty

“I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a self control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views: but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. . . . For, any laws but those which men make for themselves are laughable.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote these words in his essay “Politics” a century and a half ago, but they are as true today as they were then.

When applied to the war on drugs and the raft of legislation that has accompanied it, they attain a bitter poignancy. For amid all the anti-drug rhetoric and endless preaching of the “Just Say No!” campaign, the tragedy of drug addiction continues unabated, as though the logic of drug avoidance, so apparent to convinced non-users, were totally lost on those who are addicted. It is as if they were so disturbed by the cacophony of contradictory commands, as Emerson said, that their own inward reasoning processes are paralyzed.

But again, as Emerson said, the “command” to abstain from drugs and the prohibition against selling them is absurd. Wherever there is pain, stress or discomfort, humankind will seek some quick means of alleviating that suffering. And all the prohibitions in the world cannot prevent the quest for that release and the market that it creates.

The market that prohibition produces is the problem here, not merely the need of drug abusers for pain relief. The drugs that are illegal today were not classified as such 75 years ago, and their use, while not without certain undesirable consequences, did not foster the property crime, violence and corruption of the body politic that manifests itself in America today.

Consider that no one goes onto school grounds to sell alcohol or cigarettes to young children. The simple market reason for that fact is that the profit to be made from such a transaction would not justify the penalties an “alcohol dealer” might suffer by attempting to develop a market among children.

However, the profit in illegal drugs is so great--precisely because they are illegal--that it outweighs legal risks to drug dealers, risks that exist whether the buyer is an impressionable youth or a mature adult. The impressionable youth, however, represents an easier market. All of us as children have been lured by that which was forbidden and found it interesting for that very reason. In short order, the decriminalization of drugs would end the enormous profit in drugs and quickly unemploy the pimps of the drug trade.

Legalization may not solve all the problems connected with drug use, but then, as Libertarian David Bergland has said, “Utopia is not an option.” Yet considering what has befallen us through a progressively more heated drug war, the legalization of drugs will surely produce nothing worse.

For those Americans who may not be persuaded by the reasoning just presented, there are other facets of the war on drugs that may give them pause. The constitutional violations of the war must be considered by conservative and liberal alike. Protections against unreasonable search and seizure are already being routinely violated, and proposals in the mill would expand these violations. Mandatory drug testing and random alcohol roadblocks herald a police state that may one day conduct drug testing, house to house, without warrant or reasonable cause.

Indeterminate sentencing is already commonplace. Add to this the proposed “drug re-education centers” (read concentration camps) and we have the specter of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute enables the state to seize the assets of such accused criminals and drug dealers on the presumption that the assets are ill-gotten, a process clearly dangerous to the traditions of justice inherited from the Magna Carta and incorporated in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a tradition that we call the presumption of innocence.

The corruption of the grand jury system also poses a threat to its integrity and the liberties it was designed to protect. It is a system in which indictments are regularly handed up at the recommendation of prosecutors, with a reported average of five minutes’ deliberation by grand juries.

It is notable that with the plethora of laws has come a progressive deterioration of conscience in America, as well as a fading of the awareness that one is, finally, the master of his or her own being and must bear the consequences of all his thoughts, attitudes and actions. The words of Emerson speak to drug use as a matter of personal conscience, not by an appeal to law, but by his knowledge of human nature: “Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.”