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The article is a good one, in that it rounds up the more common practical arguments against the War on Drugs, and then complements them with the moral or rights-based argument of individual self-ownership. But I have begun to believe that nearly all of these arguments will forever fall on deaf ears --- because support for drug prohibition is based on a pre-rational revulsion for them, and not on reasoning about rights or social utility.

"You cannot reason a man out of something he did not reason himself into," quoth the sage, and I find that to be quite the case. But I'm not knocking the role of revulsions in the process that produces social policy. In the past few years, I've come to appreciate them somewhat. However, they must be tempered by a respect for the bounds of practicality and a respect for the results they produce, or fail to produce.

John Stuart Mill wrote that the only justifiable restraints on liberty were those that protected the individual from walking into bad situations that, had he had full information and a working rational faculty, he himself would have chosen to avoid. This is actually a premise on which one can construct an argument for banning certain drugs, as follows:

Postulate that some drugs induce predictable addiction and physiological damage that's effectively unavoidable and irreversible.
A sane person -- Mill's fully informed and rational man -- who respects his own body would not expose himself knowingly to destructive agents like these.
Constructively presume that therefore, a man who elects to expose himself to these drugs must either not understand the risks, or not be rational enough to assess them accurately.
Therefore, just as we would restrain him from stepping out onto a bridge about to collapse, we may restrain him from ingesting these drugs. If he were as smart and as well-informed as we are, he'd have refrained of his own choice.

Is it a perfect argument? No. It's got a lot of overt and covert premises that are open to challenge. But it's an argument a lot of men of good will have used to justify the continuation of the War on Drugs.

When responding to an argument such as this, that one claims is faulty, the best tool is the evidence of how it's all worked out. Evidence in this case should include, at the minimum, the costs of drug prohibition, the effectiveness of drug prohibition, and the side effects on other institutions, particularly legal principles -- e.g., individual privacy and the presumption of innocence -- and the forces of darkness -- the criminal underworld.

I won't bore you with a detailed counter-presentation. The evidence is copious and weighs heavily against the drug war. But the key is getting the pro-drug-war portion of America -- about 85% by some surveys -- to consider the evidence as worthy of respect as they consider their revulsions against drugs, intoxication, and the specially seedy "drug culture" that's all too visible in America today.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

Thomas Jefferson" has (by indirection) asked us "drug warriors" to address the points made in Mr. Gee's article. Unfortunately, there are so many logic flaws, errors in critical thinking, glittering generalities and pure sophistry that a point-by-point discussion (and refutation) of the article would take more time and effort than the subject warrants. Therefore I will present a representative sample of Mr. Gee's flawed logic and self-delusional rationalizations:

1. The introductory paragraphs advance the familiar (to those of us who witnessed the Clinton impeachment follies) "hypocrisy" argument: "Famous (or Notorious) Person X allegedly used illegal drugs, how dare they condemn anyone else." This argument implies an ability to read the mind of the purported hypocrite, i.e. to know to within a moral certainty that they do not now believe that drug use and possession are wrong and should be punished. Moreover, by carrying this argument to an illogical conclusion, one could accuse a reformed cat burglar of "hypocrisy" for supporting laws against theft, or for teaching his children not to steal. I also strenuously object to the statement "...self-medication has been a hallmark of human civilization..." A dictionary definition of "hallmark" is " ...an indication of quality or excellence", Mr. Gee's statement may alternately be read as: "drug use and possession are an indication of quality or excellence in human civilization".

Paragraph 5 also presents the "if booze and tobacco are legal, what's wrong with my drugs of choice, you flaming hypocrite" argument. If Mr. Gee's intent were to demand that alcohol and tobacco should be prohibited on the grounds that they are just as dangerous (or more so) than currently illegal drugs, then he has made his case. He is absolutely correct: we are all hypocrites for banning some dangerous drugs while permitting the possession and use of other dangerous drugs. That does not, however, mean that we need to compound the "crime" of hypocrisy with the crime (and immorality) associated with the possession and use of habit forming, health endangering, crime inducing and/or mind-altering drugs.

2. The next section of Mr. Gee's article, "the Unreason of Drug Laws", mixes some valid points with some unproven assertions, and some good old-fashioned left-wing "conventional wisdom". Just because "drug legalization proponents" choose to believe that "drug dependence is more of a health issue rather than a crime issue", doesn't necessarily make that assertion the God's eternal and immutable truth. I don't think that the people who've been mugged, robbed, beaten and shot by addicts out to get money to support their habit would necessarily endorse this "health rather than law enforcement issue" concept. There are, in my opinion (which is just as valuable, as Mr. Gee's), some serious Constitutional issues with current asset forfeiture laws, and with the "cruel and unusual" severity of some of the penalties under existing drug laws. On the other hand, I thought that Mr. Gee's basic Thesis is that drugs should be legalized, not that the penalties for drug possession and use should be reduced. And throwing down the race card, as Mr. Gee does in this section, is so much useless demagoguery and sophistry. The incarceration rate of blacks for drug offenses may indicate that drug abuse truly is more of a problem in African-American community than in the general population, it might also be the result of a lot of factors other than raw racism, but whatever the incarceration rates or causes of them are, they hardly constitute an excuse to legalize drugs. As to the argument that we're losing the War on Drugs simply because we haven't eliminated the problem, I would point out (as have better people before me) that we also have not eliminated crime, poverty, or Terrorism, but we still spend billions and trillions to solve (or at least to ameliorate) those age-old problems.

3. This is as far as I want to take this critique at this time (maybe too far to suit most of you, particularly the Liberals, libertarians and drug addicts). I once had a college roommate who smoked a lot of ganja, but who was opposed to drug legalization on the grounds that he didn't want his (future) kids to think it was OK (or a "hallmark of human civilization") to use drugs. At the time I thought he was the biggest hypocrite on the face of the earth. Now I have a teen-aged stepson, and now I know that there are a lot worse things than a little hypocrisy if it keeps people from messing up their lives, and endangering others, with drugs.