Pubdate: Sun, 27 May 2001
Source: Yuma Daily Sun, The (AZ)
Copyright: 2001 The Yuma Daily Sun
Contact:  http://www.yumasun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1258
Author: Tibor R. Machan
Note: Tibor Machan is a professor at Chapman University in Orange, 
Calif., and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford 
University. He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of The 
Yuma Daily Sun.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/bush.htm (Bush, George)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?170 (Downey, Robert Jr.)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/gardner.htm (Losing the War on Drugs)

THE FREEDOM WAY - DRUG WAR BLUES

There are many issues about which it is important to do a lot of 
thinking - the distinctions are murky and the policies ambiguous, so 
it takes a lot of figuring to get it right. Just how far should the 
military go in its efforts to defend the country? Should 14-year-old 
kids be prosecuted as adults for grave crimes? Is abortion a rights 
violation or would its prohibition be? Does the Second Amendment's 
reference to "people" mean individuals or groups?

Yet there are issues over which I have stopped debating and now just 
feel sad and angry. George W. Bush's re-ignition of the miserable and 
shameful war on drugs is such an issue.

I have written my heart out arguing against this policy over the 
years. I have debated state attorneys general and professors of 
chemistry, and by now I am just angry with anyone who thinks the 
government or anyone else is authorized, morally and politically, to 
force people to go to jail for engaging even in the most "abusive" 
drug consumption and trade. How can anyone with the slightest sense 
of justice tolerate this damnable approach to trying to deal with 
drug abuse?

First, it is mostly self-abuse - drug abusers do not force anyone to 
take drugs. Second, even the sale and distribution to adults of the 
harmful drugs cannot be anyone else's business aside from family and 
friends - certainly, clearly, not to the extant that others somehow 
gain moral rights to physically, forcibly interfere!

Who on earth are these folks who take it upon themselves to bully 
their way into other people's lives to rescue them from themselves in 
the most uncivilized way that people can interact, by means of the 
gun! Yes, they are drug czars -- and doesn't that clue folks into 
just how evil they are? For at the end of every legal edict there has 
to be guns, and when the edict is unjust, these guns will have to be 
used unjustly whenever compliance isn't forthcoming.

Over the years, ever since I lived through the wild '60s, I have 
witnessed this vain effort to force people into sane behavior, at 
first mainly by conservatives but later by too many in the 
mainstream, even as some conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. 
have come to their senses about the matter. The only consistently 
wise prominent voice on the topic has come from the Nobel 
Prize-winning economist - go figure - Milton Friedman, who has been 
calling for decriminalization for decades.

Nothing justifies this horror to which millions of Americans are put 
and which confronts, most visibly, the likes of actor Robert Downey 
Jr. who are in the public eye. Perhaps because of the resentment many 
feel toward celebrities who risk their careers and talent so 
flagrantly by indulging in drug abuse, the general public seems to 
have no sense of the gross injustice of whisking these people off to 
court over and over again.

Yet it is the millions of unknown "criminals" who are forced to 
linger lengthy stretches of time in jail who are shown the most 
severe neglect and abuse with the injustice perpetrated against them 
when the soldiers of the war on drugs carry out their vile mission. 
Folks should be in an uproar over this.

Instead of commentators and political leaders fretting about 
PC-related injustices - using the wrong words for blacks or Indian 
terms for baseball teams - it would be so gratifying to see all those 
who speak out in columns and other places in the media to mount a 
serious assault on the insanity that is the war on drugs.

But somehow the spirit of justice seems to have left the bulk of the 
people of this country. Not even the shameful fact that America - 
"the leader of the free world" it used to be called - is now reputed 
to be a Western nation with the highest number of its citizens in 
jail (mostly because of the insane war on drugs) seems to move folks 
to quit this war.

One thing is for sure: On this score there is no difference between 
the liberal and conservative political leadership. George W. is not a 
bit compassionate when it comes to those who engage in drug abuse and 
the distribution and sale of the substances - never mind that alcohol 
kills far more people than even the hardest of drugs and never mind 
that ... . Well, I am just too nauseated by this feature of our 
society to go through all the arguments again. Not that I have any 
sympathy for drug abusers, anymore than I would for those who peddle 
yellow journalism or sell sex or ruin their lives - I had to walk out 
of "Leaving Las Vegas" because I couldn't stand how the Nicholas Cage 
character drank himself to death!

But none of this is the state's business, not when it is clear enough 
that those running the state have no moral authority to impose upon 
others their will, no matter how much support they have!

A free society puts up with sleaze, as it does with trash and 
pornography and other undesirable stuff, because in such a society 
all men and women are supposed to be equal under the law! And the law 
must be confined to the securing of our rights instead of being 
perverted into an instrument of morally obscene paternalism.
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe