| Like everyone else in America, I had never really listened to the arguments of the drug legalization crowd because ... it's not going to happen. These people are like scholars whose area of expertise is an obscure bug in a Third World country. Their theories could be completely insane, but no one cares enough to bother listening to them.
The most superficially appealing argument for drug legalization is that people should be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies, even if it ruins their lives. Except that's not true. Back on Earth, see, we live in a country that will not allow people to live with their own stupid decisions. Ann has to pay for their stupid decisions.
"We" have to "invest" in "our" future by supporting people who freely choose to inject drugs in their own bodies and then become incapable of holding jobs, obtaining housing and taking care of their children. So it's not really quite accurate to say drugs hurt no one but the user, at least until we've repealed the welfare state.
And don't give me the now-we'll-have-to-regulate-fatty-foods slippery slope argument. Precisely because you can see a difference in eating a hamburger and smoking crack means there is a huge difference between the top of the slope and the bottom -- which is why pure slippery slope arguments are always stupid. Let me just ask: Before he serves you, would you prefer that your bus driver or investment banker had consumed a hamburger, a cigarette or marijuana?
In fact, smokers and fatty-food consumers clearly benefit society through their years of tobacco- or hamburger-fueled hard work. They also undoubtedly save the taxpayers money by dying relatively swift deaths from corroded arteries or cancerous lungs. (Junk food and tobacco companies tend not to want to advertise that particular great savings to the Social Security system, but it's true.)
As Joseph Califano has pointed out, even John Stuart Mill said there were some things people could not be permitted to choose to do with their own bodies in a free society: "The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom." Drugs enslave people.
So do cigarettes and alcohol, the drug legalizers say. Indeed, they fervently claim that alcohol and cigarettes are no better (and probably worse) than marijuana.
As Gary Johnson, governor of New Mexico (and only the most recent Republican to figure out that the path to fawning media coverage is to adopt a dumb liberal idea) puts it (as summarized in a fawning article in The New York Times): "Last year 450,000 people died from smoking cigarettes. Alcohol killed 150,000, and another 100,000 died from legal prescription drugs. How many people died last year from the use of marijuana? Few, if any. From cocaine and heroin? Five thousand." Continued... |