Drugs are killing our children, ruining lives, devastating neighborhoods and whole cities, generating crime, despoiling our culture, dehumanizing our spirit and threatening to undue the great American experiment. Drugs are corrupting our police, our judges, our politicians, and whole generations of ordinary citizens.
Yet, the war on drugs is a spectacular failure. The more law enforcement is able to reduce the supply of drugs, the higher that drives the price because demand is essentially inelastic. The higher the price, the greater the incentive to supply drugs.
Fentanyl is the greatest killer of our young males who were born long after Richard Nixon commenced making war on drugs and long after Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs. Their children will be dying at increased rates from the next generation of drugs if we persist in waging war on drugs.
As the war on drugs fails on its own terms, it compounds the very evils that animate us to wage this hopeless war because the war against drugs ensures the profit in purveying drugs. Indeed, the more we succeed the more we guarantee failure. The more we strive, the more we finance our own corruption. The more we profess to enforce the law, the more we undermine the rule of law. The more we make hypocrites of ourselves in promising the impossible, the more we demoralize our culture and respect for law.
As the gap widens between the aspirations for a drug free society and the reality of unrestrained drug abuse, the more aggressive become the exertions of politicians to deliver the impossible. Impossible, that is, short of blatant abandonment of every principle that animates the Bill of Rights. Either we retain respect for the integrity of the individual that makes America what is, or we sacrifice the sacred safeguards that have become part of our corpus juris as the price to create a drug-free society.
We simply cannot win the war on drugs and still have our Bill of Rights.
Law enforcement does not become a war by calling it a war. The law of war is an entirely different matter with entirely different rules. We separate powers and charge the judiciary to protect individual rights against overreach by law enforcement. We consolidate power in the executive to wage wars that necessarily involve death and destruction with very little regard for individuals involved.
The Bill of Rights must not be nullified by the cynical misapplication of a label.
The issue in this particular case is not whether the boat in question was illegally running drugs, I have no doubt it was. Neither, I suspect, does Sen. Rand Paul. The issue for both of us is not this boat, but the next boat, and the next. The issue is to protect the Constitution, from vigilantism, fascism, or just plain frustration at our inability to save America from cultural decay.
In 1934 with the advent of a new administration in power, the nation faced a similar dilemma over its failed effort to render America free of alcohol. We chose to legalize that drug and regulate it. The new approach was not universally successful nor was it perfect, but it was certainly better than prohibition.
