Sometime ago I wrote a reply which I confess is excessively long (for which I apologize) but it anticipates your comments concerning the unknown if prohibition of drugs is lifted. Here is that reply:
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You're quite right to point out that we cannot measure the good that the laws prohibiting the use and possession of drugs have done. This is another way of stating my argument from my last post in which I say that if we remove these legal constraints it is conceivable that the use of drugs will go viral leading to the disintegration of society. But that is not the end of the discussion.
One of the arguments made by those who oppose the death penalty is that the death penalty does not deter murder. In effect, they throw the proponents of the death penalty into the position of proving the negative. I do not ask you to prove the negative to show what good the drug laws have done by deterring abuse and consequent societal damage but I do ask you to acknowledge the harm these laws have caused. Even opponents of the death penalty make a swipe at arguing that the death penalty itself causes harm, e.g. you cheapen society by bringing society down to the level of the murderer by taking a life.
But your arguments go further than those who would abolish capital punishment for murder, you say that one who opposes the drug laws by logic must also surrender faith in laws against murder and other such crimes with victims or commit the sin of inconsistency. If one cannot prove or disprove the efficacy of laws against murder or drug use, the laws must be retained or repealed together.
Murder is malum in se That is, it's is inherently wrong whether or not the law puts a label on it or prohibits it. But is the use of drugs inherently wrong?
I have no doubt that in a moral and spiritual sense the use of drugs is profoundly wrong and evil. That is the attitude we once took about liquor. They concluded that the use of this substance is so inherently dangerous that it must be outlawed. Part of the argument for outlawing alcohol was the argument that its use, even without harm extended to others, was nevertheless something society should be concerned about to the degree that it should be outlawed. Of course, examples of wife beating, job loss, broken homes, orphan children, degradation, and misery, and, yes, murder were cited to show harm caused to others. But let's confine our thinking for a moment to the justification for the prohibition of alcohol which relates to the harm to the individual without harm to others. Much of the motivation here was the spiritual disintegration of the individual. This was a profoundly Protestant ethic which was not shared by Irish Catholic immigrant groups who populated north eastern cities. Alcohol to them was a cultural boon. So my Irish Catholic forebears opposed government interference with their culture to please the spiritual predilections of my my other set of ancestors in the South.
My southern and Protestant forebears believed that alcohol ingestion was malum in se and the state actually had a duty as well as every right to prohibit it. My Irish Catholic forebears earnestly believed that a wee dram was good for the soul and an imperishable human right.
The experiment was tried and the experiment failed. Prohibition was repealed. In repealing Prohibition society tacitly admitted that it was going to tolerate the deterioration of the individual and the undeniable harm caused to others by the inevitable examples of the abuse of alcohol because the prohibition itself was worse than the disease. Curiously, although murder had been cited as a reason justifying Prohibition, no one suggested that laws against murder be repealed along with Prohibition.
Perhaps that is because when we repealed prohibition we were not in ignorance of what we would be getting contrasted to what we know about what we would be getting if we repealed laws prohibiting drugs. We had the experience of thousands of years of alcohol usage to instruct us. It is even probable that many believed that repealing Prohibition would actually reduce the rate of consumption. (I think history has proved them right). They could compare the level of consumption before and during Prohibition. Society no doubt made that calculation.
Clearly, society had a chance to compare the unintended consequences of Prohibition with the level of corruption and crime prior to Prohibition so they knew what to expect. Undoubtedly society factored in these knowns in making the decision to repeal.
Finally, for some at least, the idea of the nature of man and how he stands with respect to his government must have entered into the decision by society to repeal. Somehow, my southern ancestors lost the day as my Irish ancestors prevailed in the argument that says that society may not deny a man the use of alcohol but must content itself with regulating his behavior while he uses it.
This finally brings us back to my initial proposition in my initial reply to the effect that the government does not have, or should not have, and interest in what I put into my body. It has an interest in controlling my behavior when it affects others. To control my behavior by controlling what I ingest is a very blunt instrument in the hands of the criminal law to shape societal behavior. It causes blowback, it encourages corruption, it fails in its initial purpose, it brings the law into disrepute. It justifies the government to intrude elsewhere into my freedom and control not dangerous drugs but the salt and trans fats in my diet. It is the wrong instrument, in the wrong hands, wielded for the wrong purpose.
Our grandfathers knew when they repealed Prohibition that the cure was worse than the disease because they knew both sides of the equation. They had seen the world with and without Prohibition and they made their judgment. We have seen the world with the prohibition of drugs and we know at least half the equation. We know it's failure. It has put a third of our prisoners in jail. It has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in incarceration costs. It provides an incentive to induce others to become addicted and so spreads rather than constricts the use of the drug. It forces users either to deal or to steal.
The very Prohibition creates the incentives which drive the criminality. If one cannot afford to relieve his withdrawal symptoms because he does not have the money to buy an expensive drug, he commits crimes to get it. For a time until he is apprehended, we push the cost of drug addiction away from the individual user, who will suffer personal deterioration in any event, onto the innocent victim of his crime and the innocent taxpayer must pay for his incarceration, and onto the innocent health insurance payer, who must bear the cost of his his attempted rehabilitation. In attempting to spare the user the wages of sin, we project them onto the innocent. We have murders on the Mexican border and wholesale kidnappings in our own country in Phoenix, all spawned by laws prohibiting drugs. One cannot believe that these guerrilla wars for turf would be waged without the profits created by the prohibitions.
Prohibition, ironically, acts to proliferate to the use of drugs. An addict must choose between street crime or pushing to feed his addiction because illegality makes the price high. Demand is therefore inelastic in one sense because physiological addiction makes it so. Supply, on the other hand, will directly affect price in an inelastic market. So the more the war on drugs is successful, the more it fails because if it succeeds in making supplies scarce it drives up the price and makes the risk more attractive. The higher the price, the greater the incentive to import or manufacture and on the level of consumption by the addict, the greater the need to push drugs. The evidence is becoming clearer and clearer, the prohibition of drugs actually guarantees their ubiquity.
So while I do not ask you to prove the negative, that is, to prove that laws have restrained use of drugs, I did ask you to acknowledge the manifold harm the drug laws have done. I think intellectual honesty compels you to admit that whatever we don't know about the value of drug laws discouraging use, what we do know about the collateral harm is massive.
Laws prohibiting murder, whatever their failings of deterrence, do not themselves create a context which encourages more murder. They do not cause the government to intrude into what is even arguably a private matter without a victim. Laws prohibiting murder can fail every time all day long without the laws themselves doing society active harm.
So clearly, our drug laws have not extinguished the use of drugs but we do not say that the failure of the drug laws to extinguish the use means that we must repeal laws against murder because we have not been 100% successful there. We do say that when we have created a massive count of collateral damage with our laws regulating what many regard to be matter of individual choice, as we did in Prohibition, the burden shifts to those who would restrict individual liberty, who have had their way for decades, and who have produced results that are now actually threatening sovereignty on the southern border as well as the rule of law throughout the land. Our drug laws are leading us to a moral, legal, and fiscal catastrophe and final judgment on them cannot be long delayed.
The burden has shifted and demands proof that all the harm we are doing is worth the supposed, unproven, and unprovable benefits.
The burden has shifted to those who have for decades forced the status quo to demonstrate that another way will not work, because what we are doing is leading the country deeper and deeper into a nightmare.
