Criminology: DOPE

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time,
Drugs, "hard" drugs, were thought a crime.

But I guess you knew that. You may not know that in this former age
there lived a second-rate actor named Robert Downey Jr. (son of Robert
Downey Sr., a third-rate film director), who continually used illegal
drugs and continually got caught doing it. Junior once got so stoned
that he walked into a neighbor's house, went into a bedroom, lay down on
the bed, and passed out. He was arrested for that. He was arrested a lot
of times, not for doing anything particularly harmful, but for using
illegal substances. He once went to prison for a few months. At other
times, he submitted to the "diversionary treatment" that well-off white
boys often used to evade the slammer.

This is a boring story, one that reflects no credit at all on either
Robert Downey Jr., or the paranoid fear of "drugs" that flourished among
the early 21st-century middle classes. What's mildly interesting is a
statement that Junior came out with in one of his brief moments of
cunning self-interest. Hoping to curry favor with the forces of law and
order, Downey told an interviewer that he wouldn't wish his prison
experiences "on an enemy. But there was value in it." It "motivated him
to change his life."

It also motivated him to exchange one stupid interpretation of the law
for another: "I would have been the first to say it's unconstitutional,
to put drug abusers in jail or prison. Well, it's unconstitutional to be
a human being and screw your life up that way." Right. The Constitution
exists to protect people like Downey from themselves.

Downey's insights into the real meaning of the Constitution were
reported on Sept. 19, 2000. Within a few months, he had been rearrested
twice and was using all legal means to stay out of another motivational
trip to jail. So what else was new? Nothing, including the two great
warring ideas of America's drug war:

(A) Drugs are harmful, and the way to deal with them is to send the
people who use them to prison.

(B) The only problem with drugs is the fact that the people who use them
are liable to be sent to prison.

The first idea represents the insanity of the mainstream; the second,
the insanity of... well, us, the libertarians.

(Here I can drop the pretense of speaking for the blissful Future Age,
and enter the war myself.)

There's no point in refuting notion A, which I've dignified as an "idea"
only for the sake of parallelism. Prison as a cure for drug abuse? It
certainly cured Robert Downey Jr., didn't it?

But the use of Downey as a poster boy for abolition of the drug laws is
almost equally loony. Downey would be a jerk no matter what he ingested,
but it's pretty clear that drug use didn't make him any cannier. If
drugs were legal, as they should be, I suppose he would have used still
more of them. I suppose he would have gone wandering into more people's
bedrooms, or automobiles, or lanes of freeways.

If drugs had been legalized in, say, the 1970s, crime rates would have
fallen precipitously in inner-city neighborhoods, instead of rising
astronomically. Young males would not have been tempted to run drugs
instead of taking entry-level jobs that offered greater prospects for
advancement and security. The prison population would not have doubled.
Solid citizens would no longer have suffered police terror simply
because they wanted to enjoy the occasional recreational or poetic
snort, or because they needed to take drugs to help them deal with the
effects of AIDS or bone cancer. Government would no longer have employed
wandering bands of hooligans to ferret out "abuse" and punish it with
savage terms of incarceration whenever the "abusers" lacked the fame and
money of Robert Downey Jr.

That's the good side of drug liberation, and it's good enough for me.
But there's a bad side, too. Abolition of the drug laws would certainly
result in a relatively small but significant rise in drug use, as people
of all social classes found it easier and cheaper to purchase a good
time. Some of these people would certainly set about making asses of
themselves a la Robert Downey Jr. Some of them would drive through
stoplights and obliterate other motorists. A few of them would suddenly
discover that their spouses were the spawn of Satan and proceed to
liquidate the menace. A few of them would even ruin their careers in
film! Would they do the same thing without "the influence of drugs"?
Probably not.

It's important to realize that elimination of the drug laws is a
worthwhile object, but that, like all other worthwhile objects, it is
not a panacea. The quest for panaceas is, indeed, the source of all
authoritarian delusions, and it ought to be countered at every turn. Its
demand for perfection must never be allowed to pass unchallenged,
because liberty will never win an argument for perfection. Liberty is
not a solution to every problem. There is no solution to every problem.
When people ask, "How will we prevent all the harm that drug use causes,
if we don't enforce the drug laws?" the answer is, "We cannot prevent
all the harm that drug use causes." Period.

Sixty-five years ago, Isabel Paterson, the mother of libertarianism,
addressed this panacea problem. She was writing a weekly column in the
New York Herald Tribune, where she spent a lot of time demanding
reductions of government meddling in every area of life. Her reward was
a deluge of angry letters calling her a "snob" and a "hypocrite" because
she claimed to desire the best for all people while advocating nothing
better than merely leaving them alone. How, her enraged readers wanted
to know, could laissez-faire capitalism guarantee that all babies would
have milk, all old people would have pensions, and all young people
would find "a solution of their troubles"? A solution for everything --
was that too much to ask?

Yes, Paterson replied; it was. "What these correspondents really
demand," she said, "is dope. If we don't believe in their dope, what
dope can we suggest in place of it?"

In this sense, Robert Downey Jr., the pathetic druggie, is exactly like
the nice folks who demand to know "how legalization will solve the drug
problem." What all these people really desire is a pill that, once
swallowed, will bring the age of bliss, square the circle, recover the
Holy Grail, and unearth the Applegate Treasure. Sorry, that pill is
unavailable.

What dope did Paterson have to offer? "None whatever," she said. "We do
not even know a remedy for gullibility." Neither do I, and neither do
you. But we do know something. We know the plain, unintoxicated truth
about the individual's proper relationship to government. That's
something unique, and something uniquely powerful. And that's what will
get us from the current age of panaceas to the age when the worth of
ideas is no longer measured by their ability to solve each and every
problem of the Robert Downey Jr.'s of this world.