August 11, 2005

The Libertarian Case for Drug Control

Bet that headline got your attention. All right, my last long, long word on this for a while and we can go back to posting on GWOT stuff. Rusty, thanks for your indulgence.

You can't be a libertarian and support tyranny, nor can you support slavery. If all men are created equal before God, then slavery is an abomination and no man is naturally the subject of any other. A slave, or a subject, may have his own will, but he is not free to exercise it except insofar as it comports with his master's.

Likewise an addict may have a reason most of the time, and a complex inner life, but he is in the end a slave to those who will provide him with the means to satisfy his addiction. The worst cases--and you can spare me the accounts of the white collar friends of yours who appear to sail through life without a care snorting and shooting up everything in the Harrison Act--I said the worst cases, and there are far too many of them--will kill and rob and mortgage their house and blow the baby's college fund and sell their bodies to satisfy their masters. An addict, or for that matter someone tripping or stoned, is not a free man. In many cases, you can't even commit murder when you're high--under the law your "mental defect" can prevent you from reaching the mental state required to form the mens rea for intentional homicide.

(As an aside, some people in the trackbacks or comments to this discussion have argued that we should nationalize the distribution of narcotics, so addicts would no longer be enslaved to criminals. But then they are still enslaved to and utterly dependent on the government, and that, my friends, is still tyranny.)

That's not just me talking. That idea was the impetus for the anti-opium movement back in the 19th century, before the progressive-era doctrines of government improving human nature controlled the discourse. When you free someone from a monkey on his back, you liberate him just as surely as if you'd shattered his chains with a chisel.

Liberty is the province of reasonable men. Someone who is insane or severely mentally handicapped is not afforded the same degree of liberty as everyone else. Their reason isn't sufficiently unencumbered. Children, likewise, can't buy guns and drive cars. They're not up to it. The self control, the planning and maturity, just aren't there. We do this not just out of compassion for the children who might wreck their cars or shoot someone accidentally. We do it because a world where all the children are armed and the mental defectives run the government just isn't livable for anyone. And likewise for drug addicts. Our government is designed to be run by reasonable men, not by a cadre of stoners and tweakers and junkies. Everyone's liberty is at risk in such a regime.

Now I expect you'll begin to pick apart what I said by pointing to alcohol. You'll say alcohol is worse than pot, therefore we should legalize the weed. I don't concede that point at all, but let's say for a second you're right. Let's say legalized alcohol creates much more of a societal problem than does legalized cheeba. In fact we'll quantify it: Legalized alcohol costs us X units of societal headache, and legalized hoochie weed costs us only X-1. If we're rational and our preferences are transitive, shouldn't we free the herb if we're willing to accept the consequences of legal booze?

Let me answer that distinction by telling you a story about my car, below.

When we bought our car we had a choice to make. We could get a sun roof or a CD player. The sun roof was more expensive than the CD player. I wanted the CD player, my wife wanted the sun roof. So we, um, compromised, and got the sun roof.

You could argue that, geez, See-Dubya, if y'all were willing to spring for the more expensive sun roof (X), you should also have been willing to pay the lesser amount for the CD player (X-1).

But no; then we would have needed to pay 2X-1 instead of just X. And that's almost twice as much! We could maybe have swung that, but it would have been tight. In other words, we made a prudential calculation, based on our finite resources. It's not just a matter of transitive preferences, it's a matter of compounding costs.

Back to the dope. It's not a good argument to say "booze is worse than dope, therefore we should legalize dope." That way we bear the costs of both. Unless you're saying that we should prohibit booze and legalize dope, trading x for x-1, (assuming it's just that simple) and I don't think anyone is really saying that again.

Oh, but I'm not done yet. I'm being logically inconsistent here. If I were consistent I really ought to prefer incurring a cost of X-1 to X. Therefore our drug priorities, just like my wife wanting that sunroof, are logically inconsistent.

To which I say, so the f--- what?

We live in a Republic, homey. We do not live in a tyranny of logic, where egghead sophisters, calculators, and oeconomists decide how we will allocate every resource. The whole French Revolution--and other totalitarian ideologies since then-- centered around subverting life to reason in every aspect, ironing out any inconsistencies and making everything intellectually elegant. (Substitute "The Quran" for "Reason" and you have Islamofascism as well.)Instead, questions of policy are put up to a vote and we work out a messy, often illogical, always imperfect, series of compromises and prudential agreements. Our laws and standards are organic and grow out of traditions, suspicions, instincts, religions, aesthetics, and all kinds of weird things, and the good ones stick around. That's popular government. We're free to take the X instead of X-1.

You can't ban it all, of coursse, nor do we really want to. We can pick and choose among addictive substances--coffee and tobacco and liquor we'll allow, ritalin and percodan we'll allow for medical use but regulate pretty tightly, pot and heroin and meth, nope. Wouldn't-be-prudent. Not worth it. We'll tolerate a little drunkenness and alcoholism, a little edginess from caffeine, lung cancer and stained teeth from tobacco, but not the burned-out stoner or the psychotic meth nut. Just like the sun roof, that's the package of costs we're willing to incur and enforce. But just because we're willing to tolerate that much addiction, hallucination, and drug-induced unreasonableness , doesn't mean that we ought to tolerate more.

UPDATE: Don't forget to read the earlier discussion which inspired this post.

See-Dub's Legalize Crank, says NYT columnist

And Rusty's post which argues the libertarian position against for the legalization of drugs Why Everybody is Wrong About The Drug War.