Why Do Conservatives Still Love the Drug War?

Campaign for Liberty ^ | 2010-04-02 | Jacob Hornberger

[rabscuttle385]

An article by a conservative named Cliff Kincaid, who serves as editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report, provides a perfect example of how different libertarians are from conservatives and, well, for that matter, how there ain't a dime's worth of difference, when it comes to individual freedom, between conservatives and liberals.

The article concerns the drug war and is entitled, "Dopey Conservatives for Dope." Ardently defending the continuation of the drug war, despite some 35 years of manifest failure, Kincaid takes fellow conservatives to task who are finally joining libertarians in calling for an end to the drug war. He specifically mentions columnist Steve Chapman, whose article "In the Drug War, Drugs are Winning," which was posted on the website of the conservative website Townhall.com, was apparently what set Kincaid off.

Chapman made the point that it is the illegality of drugs that has produced the drug gangs and cartels, along with all the violence that has come with them. The reason that such gangs and cartels fear legalization is that they know that legalization would put them out of business immediately.

Consider alcohol. Today, there are thousands of liquor suppliers selling alcohol to consumers notwithstanding the fact that liquor might be considered harmful to people. They have aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns and are doing their best to maximize profits by providing a product that consumers wish to buy. Their competitive efforts to expand market share are entirely peaceful.

Now, suppose liquor production or distribution was made a federal felony offense, just like drug production or distribution. At that point, all the established liquor businesses would go out of business.

However, prohibition wouldn't mean that liquor would cease being produced or distributed. It would simply mean that a new type of supplier would immediately enter the black (i.e., illegal) market to fill the void. Those suppliers would be similar in nature to the current suppliers in the drug business or, say, Al Capone -- that is, unsavory people who have no reservations about resorting to violence, such as murdering competitors and killing law-enforcement officers, to expand market share.

At that point, the only way to put these Al Capone-type of people out of business would be by legalizing booze. Once prohibition of alcohol was ended, the violent liquor gangs would immediately go out of business and legitimate businesses would return to the liquor market. The same holds true for drug prohibition.

The big objection to the drug war, however, is not its manifest failure and destructiveness but rather its fundamental assault on individual freedom. If a person isn't free to ingest any substance he wants, then how can he possibly be considered free?

Yet, for decades Kincaid and most other conservatives and most liberals have taken the audacious position that the state should wield the power to punish a person for doing bad things to himself. In fact, the drug war reflects perfectly the nanny-state mindset that has long afflicted both conservatives and liberals. They feel that the state should be a nanny for American adults, treating them like little children, sending them to their jail cell when they put bad things in their mouths.

Kincaid justifies his statism by saying that drugs are bad for people. Even if that's true -- and people should be free to decide that for themselves, as they do with liquor -- so what? Why should that be any business of the state? If I wish to do bad things to myself, why should the likes of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, and John McCain wield the power to put me into jail for that?

Quite simply, Kincaid: It ain't any of your business or anyone else's business what I ingest, whether it's booze, drugs, candy, or anything else. I am not a drone in your collective bee hive. I am an individual with the natural, God-given right to live my life any way I choose, so long as my conduct doesn't involve the initiation of force against others.

For decades, conservatives and liberals have been using the drug war as an excuse to assault freedom, free enterprise, privacy, private property, civil liberties, and the Constitution. They have brought nothing but death, violence, destruction, and misery with their 35-year old failed war on drugs. There would be no better place to start dismantling the statism that afflicts our land than by ending the drug war.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

[Nate505]

Drug users started the drug war? It would seem to me that they would be the ones who object to it the most.

[MrEdd]

I have looked at maps.
I have traveled extensively throughout the world as part of the US military, and fought real wars.

Borders can be closed - However “Implausible” that seems to your civilian ass.

There are these things that may not have ever penetrated your drug hazed mind called Fences, Mines, Cameras, and Aircraft. Sonar does a pretty good job at sea. Radar is useful too.

You seem to think it would require a whole lot of people locking arms and playing “Red Rover” on a grand scale.

That isn’t how China (Ever see China on a map?) secures her borders.

[Badray]

Eva,

It is sad that you lost some friends because of their involvement with drugs, but all of these incidents occurred even though drugs were illegal and that demonstrates that the ‘war’ doesn’t work. There are people who will do drugs whether they are legal or not. There are others who will not.

I am opposed to the war because of the expansion of federal power at the expense of liberty. I agree that drugs are bad but the so called war is worse.

[Nate505]

Extremely implausible, and honestly impossible. How are you going to close thousands of miles of uninhabited terrain? And that's not just the Mexican border, it's also the Canadian border. How are you going to stop drugs from coming in any one of the 11.6 million cargo containers that come into the US on a yearly basis? Just a handful of those containers could supply the US with heroin or cocaine for a year. A busy port in the US deals with over 100k cargo containers a day. How are you going to stop drug dealers from them just putting drugs on a boat and bringing them over here? Heck, some of these guys are making their own submarines.

And most importantly, how are you going to stop drugs from being produced domestically?

If you really think that shutting down the borders would make even a small dent into the drug trade you're more delusional than I thought. Even with sonar and mines and radar and anything else you can think of. It's physically impossible with the amount of border the US has. Think of the amount of Coast Guard that would be required to deal with the Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula coastline of Washington alone.

[Nate505]

A correction, 100k a week. Same point though.

[Eva]

In the county, where I live, we have a whole town full of druggies,from the top down. Tax paying citizens have a right to be able to send their kids to a school where drugs are not the norm, where they are not pressured at every turn to do drugs and are not facing athletic competition against drugged out kids. My son got hit 5 times in one game by a drugged out pitcher. It’s the same in college, only there the kids are just taking the drugs, ritalin, adderal and other amphetamines to study and then partying all night, then doing the whole thing over again. We are creating a generation of losers. We can’t afford to waste this many kids. It’s not just the bottom kids, either. My son’s two roommates gradated #1 and #2 in the school of economics at college. These are kids that had real potential. The oxy contin addict was in advanced classes until he got caught bringing marijuana across the border in a hockey bag, an extremely bright kid and athlete.

Kids need role models and if all the see are druggies, there is no hope for the future generation.

[nathanbedford]

Please see #164 written before your reply.

Rather than attack the people who consume drugs, rather than attack the people who are looking for another way, why not question if your way, after decades and decades of failure, is worse than a failure, whether criminalization is actually contributing to the problem? The American People came to the conclusion that prohibition failed so they turned turned a different way and repealed Prohibition.

We are not chained to a bad policy. Reciting the ravages of alcohol did not make prohibition a good policy. When we were killing 50,000 people a year on the roads, about half from alcohol consumption, we did not mitigate that problem by returning to prohibition, we criminalized the behavior but not the consumption of alcohol itself.

Rather than preaching banalities that education is the ultimate answer, when you mean nothing of the kind, when you mean that criminalization is the ultimate answer, why not say so? For example, you say:

"libertine behaviors happen to affect many others; so don’t get upset when you harm another and the big ugly dude with a sharp stick adds the punctuation marks to the story"

You will see in my post #164 that I too am concerned about excessive drug use causing harm to others, indeed, I even use the example you use of harm caused to innocents from driving under the influence . I explicitly advocate punishing that behavior rather than the consumption. Evidently, you want to punish both. That is what we are doing now with drugs. That is not working. We are, vastly more proactive in enforcing drunk driving laws and policing that behavior rather than the consumption itself (the crime consists of mixing the driving and the consumption, not the consumption itself) and that criminalization has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Instead of advocating education in your response to me as you did in your first reply, you presume that I tolerate operating vehicles under the influence of drugs as a way of shutting down debate by resort to the ad hominem:

"hey, it is his right to do so under your mistaken reality, right?"

My reply # 164, written before your last, indicates that I do not.

By Attacking and imputing false motives to those who have come to the conclusion that your way is not working, that it is worse because it is counterproductive, you avoid dealing with the problems caused by doing it your way. You lament the innocent people killed by driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, so do I. But I also deplore the corruption of our legal system, the criminality, the waste of tax expenditures, the frustration of our foreign policy, all of which you inflict on me and other innocent Americans with your policy while failing every reasonable test of effective social policy.

Have you considered that those lifeless innocent bodies by the side of the road which you lament are (only in a public policy sense) your fault?

[taxcontrol]

See my post #78

[taxcontrol]

See my post #78

[cripplecreek]

So you’re trying to feed me some brain dead crap that if you morons weren’t desperate to do drugs, the drug cartels would still exist?

You’re a prime example of why I grew up and quit. The complete lack of critical thinking skills.

[Hank Kerchief]

“Do you believe that the government has the right to prevent fraud? Do you believe the government has the right to force people to disclose to their buyers the harm that may come from the use of their products? I do.”

I don’t. I believe grown-ups can determine for themselves what to buy and use, and you can’t cheat (defraud) an honest man.

Hank

[gogogodzilla]

The founding fathers of our nation, more moral men than you or I, found it perfectly reasonable to prosecute fraud... and *NOT* prohibit what any man, or woman, could ingest.

So what’s your point?

I take it that you find our founding fathers to be disgusting, depraved criminals stoned to the gills?

[wita]

Seems to me up until 1913, a truly bad year for freedom and liberty, the drug war wasn’t and there was a cornucopia of patent medicine containing what is now completely regulated by the medical community.

[stuartcr]

You make it sound like if drugs were legalized, everyone would start using drugs. Alcohol is legal, do you abuse it? I’m not an alcoholic, are you? If murder or rape were legal, do you think people would all of a sudden start murdering and raping, just because it’s legal? If someone has the proclivity to abuse a substance, they will, whether legal or not, we see that all the time.

[Daveinyork]

If it does not change your point, then you are far too enamoured of big government to have any right to call yourself a conservative.

[Rockingham]

I agree with Scalia's reasoning. It contains a basis for limiting the more extreme assertions of the commerce clause power.

The medical marijuana provisions are so loose in formulation and enforcement as to be a ruse for recreational marijuana. In addition, the grow industry cannot be separated as to marijuana intended for instate medical purposes and commerce to other states.

These points and more are made in the briefs and opinions in Raich.

[Eva]

You still don't get it. If you drink alcohol, you can be pretty well assured that your kids are going to drink alcohol. If the parents and other role models use drugs and think that drugs are ok, the kids are pretty much assured to be drug users as well. The risk is that the young people will not know where to draw the line with drugs or that they will be much more easily addicted than the parent. My one friend has used drugs her whole life, well since she was 19, and never became addicted to anything. Her son is a junkie that almost died from pneumonia that resulted from smoking oxy.

Watch that Vanguard special on the Oxy Express. It is pretty much legal if Florida, you can go to any pain clinic and get a prescription for a month's supply. People are going there from all over the country, making monthly trips. Then come back and tell me that legalization of drugs is a good thing.

[hoosierham]

I still believe the problems would be less severe with legalization;certainly would put a crimp in the gang violence.

[Eva]

Also, are you familiar with Vancouver, Canada? They made a huge effort to clean up their waterfront district, turned it into a tourist attraction and took it back from the street walkers and druggies. It was beautiful, great restaurants, designer shops, hotels and cruise liners. Then the legalized drugs and put in drug clinics where the junkies could get free drugs. Not the gas light district is not much better than what it was thirty years ago because it’s not safe for the tourists to walk around.

[Rockingham]

I have read the comments of Madison, Story, and others on the commerce clause on other occasions — and I have also read the Supreme Court’s commerce clause cases. The fundamental problem is that the reach of modern commerce far exceeds the slender guidance and limited conceptual framework offered by the Framers’ 18th Century understanding of commerce.