Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jul 2000
Source: Amarillo Globe-News (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Amarillo Globe-News
Contact:  P.O. Box 2091, Amarillo, TX 79166
Fax: (806) 373-0810
Website: http://amarillonet.com/
Forum: http://208.138.68.214:90/eshare/server?action4
Author: Greg Sagan,  Greg Sagan of Amarillo is a consultant to corporations on 
organizational performance and an Amarillo Voices columnist for the 
Globe-Times.
Related: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n987/a04.html

ANTI-LEGALIZATION ARGUMENT 'DANGEROUS, IRRELEVANT'

"He that complies against his will Is of his own opinion still."

- - Samuel Butler

In a recent column John Kanelis stated his support for this country's "war 
on drugs" because the benefits of waging it outweigh the costs. This 
strikes me as both a dangerous and an irrelevant justification, and I 
believe we owe it to ourselves to examine this path.

The first and most obvious flaw is to subject any freedom to a cost-benefit 
analysis. There isn't a single freedom we possess that can survive such a test.

The cost of free speech can be enormous when you consider all the schlock 
on the market, what it costs to produce it, what it costs to be rid of it.

For every Gettysburg Address or "I Have a Dream" speech there are thousands 
of wicked, inflammatory, denigrating or just plain boring streams of 
rhetoric on radio, on television, in print, in the air around us. Martin 
Luther King, Jr., was a bodacious orator, but if you added up just what it 
cost to clean up after his march on Washington, you would have to conclude 
free speech was too expensive to be borne.

The second flaw in the argument is to compare tangible costs and intangible 
benefits. People use illegal drugs to produce or to reduce feelings - that 
is, to gain what are known as "psychic rewards." But the costs of drug 
abuse are measured in dollars. When we look at the dollar tab on the left 
and the psychic reward on the right, it's easy to say the benefits aren't 
worth the cost, especially when it's our money and someone else's benefit.

But it is also an error, since by doing so we are not making a legitimate 
comparison. It's worse than apples and oranges, both of which are at least 
fruit. It's like comparing the price of our apples to the taste of someone 
else's oranges, then deciding oranges should be illegal.

The last problem I see in Mr. Kanelis' argument is that it rests on an 
inadequate understanding of people. The official reason we have this "war 
on drugs" is to reduce, even eliminate, drug abuse in this country.

It won't. It can't. But that's the argument. It's a fiction, like two 
lawyers agreeing to stipulate that the Earth is flat so they can 
productively argue more salient points, but their little stipulation does 
nothing to change the planet's shape.

I advocate ending the war on drugs and taking the problem away from law 
enforcement, and my motivation is identical: to reduce or even eliminate 
drug abuse.

How can we be so out of step?

Well, it is seductive to think that "government" can solve this problem if 
we only give it enough money, enough power, enough prisons, enough targets. 
What we are really after when we refer problems of personal habit to the 
government is to wash our hands of a problem while still asserting that we 
are doing something about it. It's like asking the fox to make sure the 
chickens don't eat too much. Even if it works, we will certainly come to 
regret it because the fox has only one means of persuasion.

I used to smoke cigarettes. I knew the dangers, but I did it anyway. And I 
didn't stop doing it because the government warned me or because the cost 
of a carton went from $10 to $30 to cover a punitive tax. I did it because 
I decided I'd had enough. What nudged me over the top was a friend of mine 
betting me a dollar I couldn't quit for a month. I collected. This was not 
the coercive power of the state at work, this was "enlightened 
self-interest," a la Adam Smith, right down the middle of the lane.

This is the real nature of human motivation. Habits we abandon out of 
choice are broken; habits we surrender under threat are merely interrupted.

The enlightened thinkers who produced the keel philosophy of this country 
saw freedom as something that needed no justification. Freedom, they said, 
was the state in which God made us. What required justification in their 
eyes was any government action limiting freedom; and they saw, as we do 
not, that the best person to limit a freedom is the person exercising it.

I understand the frustration of those who see drug abuse as a serious 
national issue. But once we invite the government into the domain of 
personal freedom, it's damned difficult to get it out again. There are no 
constitutional safeguards for freedoms we surrender voluntarily, and when 
government officials squat on what is ours, it becomes theirs.

So if we must distract ourselves with questions of costs and benefits, 
let's do ourselves and our progeny a real favor. Let's look at the lifetime 
cost of a freedom we forfeit.

Greg Sagan of Amarillo is a consultant to corporations on organizational 
performance and an Amarillo Voices columnist for the Globe-Times. Readers 
may contact him at P.O. Box 2091, Amarillo, Texas, or via e-mail at  ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D