1. Wm F. Buckley Jr. 2. Ethan A. Nadelmann 3. Kurt Schmoke 4. Joseph D. McNamara 5. Robert W. Sweet 6. Thomas Szasz 7. Steven B. Duke
6. Thomas Szasz
Dr. Szasz, of the Department of Psychiatry at Syracuse University, has for many years argued the medical case that proscribed drugs, while catastrophic in their effect on some people, are, when used by most, taken without permanent damage. He has also, in his numerous books, pleaded the libertarian point, namely that drug-taking is the individual's business and responsibility.
T HE war on drugs is a mass movement characterized by the demonizing, as Chief McNamara suggests, of certain objects and persons ("drugs," "addicts," "traffickers") as the incarnations of evil. Hence, it is foolish to dwell on the drug prohibitionist's failure to attain his avowed aims. Since he wages war on evil, his very effort is synonymous with success. It is a fatal weak ness of prudential critiques of drug policy that they ignore the "religious" character of the war on drugs.
The Crusaders' war on the Infidel dramatized their unwavering devotion to the True Faith. The Communists' war on private property dramatized their unwavering devotion to the ideal of a society free of economic exploitation. America's war on drugs dramatizes our unwavering devotion to the ideal of a "drug-free" society. The right analogy for America's war on drugs is not the Vietnam War, but Communism.
The Soviet Union was the embodiment of the principle that private property is evil. To protect people from dangerous capitalists, the USSR criminalized leaving the country without permission. The Russians are now paying the price of their anti-capitalist mentality.
Today, the United States is the embodiment of the principle that self-medication is evil. To protect people from rejecting protection from dangerous drugs, the U.S. criminalizes self-medication without a prescription. We are now paying the price of our anti-drug mentality.
William Bennett is right: Drug use and drug controls are primarily moral issues. But whereas Bennett sees selfmedication as wicked and drug criminalization as virtuous, I see self-medication as a basic human right (with unqualified responsibility for its consequences) and drug criminalization as sinful (hypocritical and unenforceable). Among the sins of the drug warriors, I view the following as especially important: 1) destroying Americans' attachment to, indeed their very understanding of, limited government; 2) converting tort law into an instrument of economic redistribution and the principle of caveat emptor into that of caveat vendor; 3) turning doctors into drug monopolists (by making the purchase of most drugs, especially "pleasure-producing" drugs, illegal without a physician's prescription), and perverting the medical criteria of disease and treatment (by defining certain "bad" choices as diseases, and certain "good" coercions as treatments); 4) obscuring the obvious fact that all biologically active substances are potentially dangerous (in certain doses, to some persons, under certain circumstances); 5) converting the relationship between doctor and patient from a contract between two responsible adults into a domination-dependence relationship; and 6) redefining the relationship between drug seller and drug buyer from a contract between two responsible adults into a victimization relationship.
In his great work Ancient Law, Sir Henry Maine articulated his famous general proposition: "The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract." The war on drugs is but one manifestation, albeit a very important one, of a radical reversal of this movement. Gradually, the American polity has become transformed from a limited government (the Rule of Law) into an unlimited Therapeutic State (relations based on status).
I reject my fellow panelists' sympathetic stance toward medical drug controls. To treat people in great pain effectively, we do not need more "compassion"; we simply need a social setting where individuals have legal access to narcotics and where doctors can administer such drugs in conformity with their patients' wants, without fear of criminal penalties for overprescribing, or civil penalties for malpractice, or both. Prescribing heroin and methadone for addicts is not the solution, but the very epitome of the problem. Enough said.
In a secular society committed to individual liberty and personal responsibility, the legislator's task is to enact laws to govern the behavior of adults, not children (whose management is primarily the responsibility of their parents). Once a person loses sight of this fact, it is easy to convince him that protecting children from drugs justifies making drugs difficult to obtain for adults.
Drugs are, of course, not the only dangerous artifacts in our environment. Electricity, household appliances and cleansers, and countless other products of human inventiveness endanger, injure, and kill children. We accept these inventions that, in the long run, make our lives healthier and safer, and adapt to them by teaching children to cope realistically 'with the risks they pose. Harassing adults and depriving them of rights will not work as a substitute for disciplining children.
Our obsession with the necessity of drug controls is closely intertwined with our attitudes„ toward self-harm and health care on the one hand, and, on, the other hand, with our attitudes toward, the manufacturer's and provider's tort liability for substances and interventions classified as "medical." In contemporary medical-political discourse, the issue of free will is raised only to assert its absence, and hence the unsuitability of market relations in connection with drugs and health care. To be sure, it makes no sense to let people make important choices if we believe that they are unable to choose, because they are the victims of addiction or mental illness.
We try to prevent our children from putting foreign bodies into their nostrils or other body cavities. Why? Partly because we love them and partly because their selfinjury causes us a lot of trouble. In proportion as we treat adults like children-lifting the economic burden of medical care from their shoulders and placing it on everyone else's shoulders-we create a set of monstrous incentives whose reality we refuse to acknowledge. Protecting everyone from having to pay for his own health care and at the same time making everyone pay for everyone else's health care not only infantilizes everyone, but encourages everyone to meddle in everyone else's life (in order to reduce the medical services others require).
If Jones manufactures cigarettes which Smith buys and which give him lung cancer, the government forces Jones to defend himself in court against the accusation of having harmed Smith, and forces Taylor (as taxpayer) to pay Smith's medical treatment. So long as we use this formula for managing risks everyone in Taylor's position has an incentive to limit Jones's right to sell cigarettes and Smith's right to smoke them.
Suppose, then, that selling and buying cocaine were as legal in January 1996 as in January 1896. Jones sells cocaine, accurately labeled as to composition, side effects, lethal dose, and so forth. Smith buys some and dies as a result of using it. Mrs. Smith sues Jones for causing her husband's "wrongful death." Given our mindset, the judge refuses to dismiss the complaint and orders- the matter to go to trial; the plaintiff's lawyers retain the most prestigious experts to testify that the "victim" was no-responsible - for his behavior; the jury imposes a judgment for ruinous compensatory and punitive damages on Jones. In such a legal atmosphere, only the black marketeer enjoys the caveat emptor protections of traditional contract:
Not surprisingly, bringing a free market in goods and services into being in Russia has turned but to require more than abolishing the Gulag. Respect for private property and private profit supported by a well functioning commercial/legal system; is needed as well.
Mutatis mutandis, bringing a free market in drugs; into being in America would require more than repealing criminal sanctions against selling and buying drugs: Re specs for autonomy and responsibility, supported by a rational tort system, would be needed as well.
I fear that we shall not be able or willing to re-embrace a free market in drugs (whose benefits we enjoyed from 1776 until 1914) until the drug war has caused us a great deal more suffering and until we become willing to attribute that suffering to drug laws (and their consequences) rather than to drugs (and their abuse).
1. Wm F. Buckley Jr. 2. Ethan A. Nadelmann 3. Kurt Schmoke 4. Joseph D. McNamara 5. Robert W. Sweet 6. Thomas Szasz 7. Steven B. Duke
National Review, February 12, 1996 Vol XLVIII no. 2