Freedom and Reason: The Case For Drugs
Today, as per MSNBC one out of every 31 adult residents in The United States of America are in some stage of the prison system (Associated Press. 1 in 31). The U.S. population is approximately five percent of the global population, yet a survey done by the British government shows that we house one in four prisoners worldwide (Walmsley, World Population List). For a nation that thinks of itself as "the land of the free", we sure do use our prisons a lot. What has happened to our once "free" land? Why do some Americans see prison sentences as a cure for social differences? Our legal statutes are filled to the brim with pointless laws, that when analyzed, actually hurt us rather than help us. Do we really care if a person that we will never see uses illegal substances? Laws such as the ones restricting narcotics use are the reason we have become a prison society. Recreational drug use should be legal.If we still want to call this country "the land of the free" then we need to realize what it means to be free. The freedom for which our nation's founders fought refers to freedom of choice. How can we say that we are free if there are laws needlessly restricting the choices we make? The only reasonable excuse for restricting a person's freedoms in an otherwise free society is if by not restricting that one person's freedom more freedoms are restricted. For instance, if one person's drug habit were to restrict another's freedom of choice, then drug laws would be somewhat founded. The only "freedoms" that are restricted by the use of narcotics are either not relieved by drug laws or are actually not freedoms at all. Nearly every president since Reagan has used "freedom from drugs" to advance the war-on-drugs. They sold the illusion of narcotics robbing us of our "freedom from drugs," but even if that were achievable, do we really have that right? A person suffering from arachnophobia clearly does not have the "freedom from spiders," so why do we assume that people have the right to freedom from drugs?
We must realize that research into the effects of narcotics are one sided before we can analyze the freedoms that drug use supposedly restricts. The problem with this research is that only criminals were used as test subjects. Productive, responsible drug users tend to disguise their drug use rather than flaunt it for a survey or some other form of research. The only willing research participants are usually criminals in some stage of the prison system seeking the benefits of cooperation. It stands to reason that any research derived solely from criminals would show a link to crime.
Furthermore, what incentive do these researchers have to discredit the link between drugs and crime? If there is no link, drug research ceases to be a hot topic and would inevitably lose funding. Downsizing would be the eventual precursor to the elimination of the drug research program. Every drug researcher has a motive to keep drugs interesting and dangerous.
Even though the available research is biased, some research suggests that illicit substances do not make a person more violent. After studying the criminal records of over one thousand addicts in the Chicago area, Bingham Dai (a drug/crime researcher), found that the vast majority of crimes committed by drug users, other than narcotics law offenses, were peaceful property crimes (Goldstein, Drug Crime Nexus 5). More purposeless violent crimes would be committed by drug users if drugs made people violent. The fact that most drug using criminals and nearly all non-criminal drug users tend to avoid violence means that violence is not directly related to drug use.
There is sociological proof that drug laws actually create violence rather than deter violence. Because drugs are illegal if a drug dealer gets robbed, he cannot follow the same procedure a store clerk would follow after being robbed. The store clerk can call the police, file a report and wait for the insurance company to compensate the loss monetarily. A drug dealer does not have these resources. When a person gets into the drug dealing business, that person does so realizing violence is the only effective theft deterrent. Gangs excel in drug sales because they have more muscle and violence behind their salesmen. Competition and thieves alike find themselves up against a large number of violent criminals willing to kill for anything as small as reputation. When a gang grows and begins to intrude into another gang's territory, those two gangs usually begin a bloody turf war with many non-partisan casualties. Violence infects every area of the drug world because the drug world is forcefully incorporated into the world of crime.
Adding to the systemic violence of the black market, we let violent criminals out of prison early to make room for non-violent narcotics law offenders. According to About.com there are currently federal prisons operating at 31 percent over capacity (Longley, U.S. Prison Population). To counter the gross overpopulation of our prisons, the Department of Corrections (DOC) has two choices. The first choice is to build a new prison facility, which according to DOC construction cost estimates, would cost approximately 90,000 dollars per cell for a metro single facility with 376 cells (Prison Construction cost). The alternative is to prematurely release prisoners who are nearing their release date. To counter this problem, Florida has recently adopted a policy that requires all prisoners to serve at least 80% of their respective sentences. Even with that limitation, violent criminals are still released prior to their release date to make room for non-violent criminals.
Releasing violent criminals early is bad enough, but creating a violent criminal out of an ordinarily experimental child is far worse. Aside from the child abuse that we are responsible for, imprisoning youth creates adult criminals. The adolescent years are when most people learn to be adults. Most teenagers are deciding what career field to go into and generally issuing themselves into adulthood. A prisoner is far too preoccupied with his or her own safety to concentrate on career objectives. Everyday people get raped, murdered, beaten or abused in some other way in prison. The guards are far too outnumbered to do anything when a prisoner is attacked. Prisoners often resort to preemptively inflicting violence upon others as a defensive tactic. Even the toughest prisoners need gang protection because there is no hope for a prisoner who gets ambushed without a few allies. Then there is the matter of abuse from the guards. A guard can abuse an inmate without having to worry about the repercussions of his or her actions because if a prisoner tells somebody about his or her abuse, it comes down to the prisoner's credibility versus the guard's. Being figures of authority, abusive guards portray authority as abusive by nature. By the end of a two-year sentence, a child learns to hate authority for being cruel and learns to be preemptively violent. Aside from the valuable information picked up from the thieves in prison this child has not learned anything that could turn a once confused child into a productive adult member of society. To top it off, that child is now in a gang and is intimately familiar with the prison system. By sentencing children to prison for drugs we are creating violent criminals where there did not have to be any.
Ultimately, we are trading a supposed danger for an all too real one. The supposed danger behind legalizing narcotics use could be easily avoided the same way we all avoid the angry drunk standing outside of a bar. It is usually very easy to notice when people are intoxicated, and it is easy to avoid them. The dangers brought about because of drug laws however, are not so easily avoided. Danger is threaded into the fabric of our society through the systemic nature of the illicit substance world, through the premature release of violent criminals, through child imprisonment and through gangs. Gangs are funded primarily through drug sales, and often use the murder of innocent people as an initiation process for new members. Clearly the theory of narcotics creating violence is not a well-founded reason to make drug use illegal.
Maybe the criminalization of drug use has more to do with property crimes than violence. If the threat of thievery is enough to make drug use illegal, then drug laws should protect our money. How much would we expect to be stolen annually if narcotics were legal? Keep in mind, according to psychologist and drug researcher Dr. P.J. Goldstein, the majority of drug related economic compulsive crimes are committed in the perpetrators own neighborhood (Goldstein, Drug/Crime Nexus 5). So, if one is truly worried about being victimized by drug users, one should simply not associate with people who use drugs and not move into a neighborhood of drug users. Even so, let us assume that if drugs were legal Americans would have three billion dollars stolen annually due to drugs. According to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), between federal and state governments, $373.9 billion dollars (11.2% of the total $3.3 trillion budget) were spent on the war on drugs (CASA, Shoveling Up). That is over 100 times the amount we should be "saving" by having these drug laws. That is enough according to payscale.com, to pay for almost ten million teachers with over five years experience each (Middle School Teacher). With most of the states within the U.S. cutting multiple budgets including education, we really cannot afford to keep drugs illegal.
Some people will say that drugs are dangerous and should be illegal. While drugs are dangerous, skydiving is also dangerous, but also legal. The important thing is how we deal with these dangers. When a person goes skydiving, that person must first go through an instructional course that explains the equipment, the physiology behind free fall from that altitude, and procedures that need to be taken during free fall. Once the class portion is completed satisfactorily, the amateur skydiver is only allowed to skydive tandem with an instructor. Since people are going to skydive no matter how dangerous it is, we teach people how to skydive as safely as possible. Only through this approach can we expect to reduce the risks of narcotics use. Classes on safe drug use cannot be truly effective in a society that punishes drug users. Even in places where safe drug use classes exist, potential patrons are skeptical of attending for fear of being under a legal microscope. Because of the laws restricting drug use, any American citizen that wants to experiment with drugs has to do so without any guidance as to how to do it safely.
Quality control is another element missing from the black market. If drug sales are dependent on potency of the drugs being sold, it is in the dealers best interest to make his or her drugs seem as potent as possible. The most honest way of doing this is to research ways of increasing the potency of the drugs the dealer is selling. That can be quite expensive and really unattainable for most dealers. Most dealers who want to raise the potency of the drugs they sell resort to lacing the drugs with more powerful ones. Sometimes that means another illicit substance but most of the time that is not cost effective. The economical answer, disgusting as it may be, is rat poison. Nearly any drug can be laced with rat poison to give it a more potent feeling. If Jack Daniels whiskey blinded somebody because Jack Daniels Corp laced their alcohol with a dangerous chemical, the company would find itself in a lawsuit almost immediately. The same could be said about any legal substance. Companies generally prefer not being sued over being sued because getting sued costs a lot of money. Through legalization R&D becomes a far more cost effective way to increase product potency, thus increasing sales.
Users of illicit substances are generally too wary of police intervention to call for an ambulance when a friend ingests poorly made narcotics. Involving the authorities seems out of the realm of possibility when paranoid from the drug's side effects. Rarely do cases of alcohol poisoning or the bends avoid the hospital. The problem is that we give people an incentive not to call an ambulance when there is a medical problem pertaining to narcotics. Drugs are illegal, and nobody wants to get caught doing something illegal, especially while intoxicated, so medical problems needlessly persist.
Ultimately, is it the government's job to defend us from ourselves? Aside from the obvious totalitarianism this type of thinking creates, what makes the government enough of a subject matter expert in any field to be the ultimate decider on what is good and what is bad? Government officials like to think that the "best and brightest" work for the government, but that is simply not true. If we follow the rule of capitalism, people will for the most part, go wherever they get paid the most. The civilian sector has billionaires like Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, etc., while Government salaries are notoriously low. The full benefit packages are usually the most enticing aspect of government employment, while money draws the best and brightest towards civilian entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the government is rampant with corruption. Every year politicians are found guilty of accepting bribes or some other form of corruption. How can we trust these people to assess what is good for us and what is bad while leaving their own interests out of the equation? The concept of the government defending us from ourselves is clearly not a logical one.
The Bill of Rights was placed into the constitution as a countermeasure against this form of totalitarianism. The tenth amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Since there is not a single mention of illicit substances anywhere in the constitution, the federal government does not have the authority to restrict the usage of said substances in any way. If the U.S. government decides that narcotics are to be federally banned, the Senate must amend the constitution like they did with the 18th amendment for prohibition. The fact that drug laws exist without any constitutional amendment is a scary but enlightening indication that our government is failing.
Aside from the 10th amendment, our nation's Supreme Court has determined that any level of government restriction on what people do with their own bodies is unconstitutional. The constitution was intended to retain the rights of the people, not strip them away. Roe vs Wade was an abortion case fought in the early 1970's.The plaintiff was a woman by the name of Norma McCorvey who wanted to have an abortion but under the Texas state laws was not allowed one. She sued the state of Texas, and the case was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided that the state of Texas, or any other state did not have the right to restrict women from having abortions during the first trimester due to the ninth and fourteenth amendments to the constitution. Our nation's highest court decreed that one has the right to do as one wishes with regard to one's own body without government intervention. Why is there a separate set of standards when it comes to drug use?
Children, however, do need to be protected from themselves because they do not have the ability to make rational decisions while weighting the consequences of those decisions. Laws against drugs seem to be having a reverse effect on children. According to a 2009 CASA survey of children ages 12-17, two thirds of high-school students report that drugs are available in their school (CASA, Attitudes Towards Substance Abuse). Perhaps it is time we adopt an anti teen substance abuse policy that works. According to a study done on teen smoking by the University of Michigan, teen smoking dropped from 13.6% to 12.6% between the years of 2008 to 2009 (Rabin, Teen Smoking). Clearly the teen smoking campaigns have found some success. Truth ads suffer from the common misconception that they are aimed at getting people to stop smoking when in fact, they are aimed at stopping children from ever starting. Trying to stop an addict is much harder than preventing someone from becoming an addict. Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." After nearly 80 years of drug laws, is it not about time to try a new approach to the growing problem of teen drug use?
“...all experience hath shewn (sic) that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable (sic) than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” (U.S. Declaration of Independence). It seems that these brilliant men understood the true expansive nature of government. Simply growing accustomed to an evil does not make it any less evil. The fact is that ingesting illicit substances does not turn a good person into a bad person. Narcotics do not make a person hazardous to the point that we have no other recourse other than imprisonment. Laws restricting drug use are nothing more than superfluous legal padding that needlessly destroys lives.
