-By Ann “Babe” Huggett
On Sunday, June 27 on the BlogTalk Radio show, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism, my co-host, Warner Todd Huston and I interviewed James Gierach, representing the organization known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Now James is a Democrat so he was far better at repeating talking points than answering probing questions. His mantra was that our current War on Drugs is a failure, leads to political corruption, ruined lives for casual users, arbitrarily enforced laws, greater demand by deliberately keeping supplies restricted, gang turf warfare, penitentiaries awash in drugs, entire minority communities blighted and families destroyed all because the Al Capone style of prohibition, which didn’t work for alcohol, was switched over to drugs mid 20th Century.
Although all true, these observations are not new and were actually formulated after our modern War on Drugs had been in effect for a few disastrous decades. It was none other than that Father of American Conservatism, William F. Buckley, who wrote Reefer Madness in 2002 pointing out the trivializing and totally uneven enforcement of drug sentencing and who gave in his 1995 seminal speech, The War On Drugs Is Lost before the New York Bar Association, the following points:
- More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.
- Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.
- The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.
- Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.
- It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.
Please notice that Buckley pointed out that people, who abuse drugs, have no one to blame but themselves. The key question that I asked James Gierach, who failed to answer it was, “Okay, conservatives will immediately ‘get’ this question but we’re not so sure liberals understand the implications so I am going to ask you, as a Democrat, what is the difference between actual freedom and licentiousness? Does anyone out there besides conservatives understand what ‘personal responsibility’ means?”
James fumbled that question as I figured he would because, as a Democrat, I believe he equates freedom with licentiousness and does not place faith in the value of the individual or individual responsibility. He is more of a “the government will come up with a whole new infrastructure of agencies to take care of addicts” type of guy. The salient point here is that it is the moral obligation of people in particular and society in general, whether through personal conviction, religious belief or health issues, to bring down their full disapproval on drug usage today just as they did when the pain-killing pre-aspirin, addictive opiate, laudanum, was in use in the 19th Century by 90%(!) of the American population.
Lest you are thinking, “That was then, this is now,” the same type of moral weight currently is being brought to bear against two other legal items and their usage is dramatically falling off. I am talking about cigarettes and abortion. Basically, just because something is legal does not make it moral. You only have to look at fetus stem cell research, Nevada prostitution and the Democratic Party to catch my drift. It is social disapproval towards smoking that is killing it off. (The smell! The second hand smoke! The nasty nicotine film on walls and paintings!) Couple those with governmental taxation and restrictions on public use and you get a rapidly dwindling user population even though nicotine may be as, or even more addictive than, cocaine.
Abortions are legal but are rapidly falling out of favor thanks to ultrasound pictures of the baby gestating in the womb. With ultrasound, that “mass of cells” now suddenly has a face and fingers and toes. One can see that that’s a tiny fellow human, who deserves to live and society is responding to its own humanity when it rallies to nurture and bring forth rather than destroy our littlest ones while still in the womb.
And so it should be with recreational drugs. Am I advocating their usage? NO! Drugs are one of the traps of Earth and in their way can lay madness. Am I advocating breaking existing laws for instant and possibly addictive gratification? NO! NO! NO! That type of disregard for inconvenient laws is a specialty of the leftist mindset. What I am saying is that the laws underlying the War on Drugs are bad, utterly counter-productive and must be removed to allow people and society to adjust recreational drugs right into nonexistence like they did with laudanum and are currently doing with abortion, cigarettes and, hopefully, the Democratic Party if recent polls showing political affiliation are anything to go by. For when a people cedes its moral authority to the State like we have done in the War on Drugs, the people themselves become amoral, that is, without morals.
Immoral means a people have control of their morals but refuse to honor them. Amoral means a people is without them and hence the utter ubiquity of drug usage in our current, toxic culture. That is the primary reason why this country is awash in drugs. If legalized, recreational drugs will lose their cache of coolness and rebellion to descend into just another tawdry consumer item targeted by taxation, restrictions and societal disapproval. In other words, their usage will fall off dramatically and the law enforcement community could then turn its energies into going after actual criminals out there rather than penalize some young punk thinking that he’s living la vida loca by sparking a weekend doobie.
__________
Ann “Babe” Huggett is a San Francisco Bay Area freelance writer and the Associate Editor and Publisher of TheRealityCheck.org. She is the co-owner and moderator of Free Britannia.org, a conservative British-American site dedicated to events affecting the Anglosphere. Ann is currently appearing as an on air radio talent as “Babe” Huggett, with co-host Warner Todd Huston, on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Blog Talk Radio every Thursday at 8 pm Pacific / 10 pm Central / 11 pm Eastern.
You can reach Ann “Babe” Huggett at aerostarfb2001@yahoo.com.