THE WAR ON DRUGS AS A MARXIST JIHAD

Private property is conventionally construed as an external good: homes,
cars, marshmallows. Ownership becomes a dominion over something discrete
from oneself.

While private ownership of homes, cars, and marshmallows is certainly
essential to a free society, it remains subsidiary to the paramount
property right of self-ownership. As John Locke observed, "[E]very man has
a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself."
James Madison similarly wrote that man "has a property very dear to him in
the safety and liberty of his person." Without this fountainhead, all the
mansions, Masseratis, and marshmallows in the world mean nothing.

Suppose one lives on an island where he enjoys any conceivable luxury: an
in-door racquetball court, Turkish bath, the entire Rifleman series shown
in an IMAX theater. The only drawback to this land of splendor is that he
may not leave without the permission of the island's head of state. If
after reading Intruder in the Dust and Light in August he wishes to visit
the land that inspired Faulkner's prose, someone else's opinion is
determinative.

This ostensible paradise is thus a prison. Its plenitude does not negate
the expropriation of self-ownership (aka enslavement) it perpetrates
against the resident. In Andrei Sakharov's words, "A free country cannot
resemble a cage, even if it is gilded and supplied with material things."

The supremacy of self-ownership having been illustrated, let us turn to the
War on Drugs, which is a regime of laws and concomitant coercion deployed
against the consumption of particular chemicals.

Murray Rothbard noted the separation of property rights and human rights
reduces people to "ethereal abstractions," and public discourse about drug
prohibition generally overlooks its palpable, oppressive effect on
non-aggressive bodily - that is, proprietary - choices. We hear about
efficacy strategies, reinforcement programs, etc. To discuss these matters
presupposes the legitimacy of the enterprise.

The enterprise in this case is nothing short of a Marxist jihad since the
War on Drugs is fundamentally a war on the paramount property right of
self-ownership, prosecuted with much greater intensity than the 18th
Amendment's War on Alcohol. (To examine the drug war's subversion of
constitutional norms and militarization of law enforcement, see After
Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, ed.,
Timothy Lynch.)

Marxism, of course, is less than smitten with private property. The
Communist Manifesto refers to making "despotic inroads on the rights of
property" and "the abolition of private property"; the "Address of the
Central Committee to the Communist League" affirms, "For us the issue
cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation."

By criminalizing an innocuous indulgence, the drug war perpetrates
abridgment of our most personal property. The expropriative underpinning of
drug prohibition would apply equally to the prohibition of high-cholesterol
foods or tobacco products. ("Pizza and cigarettes promote unhealthy living,
so they must be stamped out.") In short, drug prohibition implies a mandate
for government to prohibit anything.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "No man has a natural right to commit
aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the
laws ought to restrain him." The drug war forecloses this quintessentially
American vision with systematic dispossession and inflation of central power.

Today's drug way tyranny cannot comport with the Founders' design or a free
society. Simply put, we own our bodies or we don't.

Myles Kantor [send him mail] edits FreeEmigration.com and lives in Boynton
Beach, Florida