THE FREEDOM WAY - DRUG WAR BLUES

There are many issues about which it is important to do a lot of
thinking - the distinctions are murky and the policies ambiguous, so
it takes a lot of figuring to get it right. Just how far should the
military go in its efforts to defend the country? Should 14-year-old
kids be prosecuted as adults for grave crimes? Is abortion a rights
violation or would its prohibition be? Does the Second Amendment's
reference to "people" mean individuals or groups?

Yet there are issues over which I have stopped debating and now just
feel sad and angry. George W. Bush's re-ignition of the miserable and
shameful war on drugs is such an issue.

I have written my heart out arguing against this policy over the
years. I have debated state attorneys general and professors of
chemistry, and by now I am just angry with anyone who thinks the
government or anyone else is authorized, morally and politically, to
force people to go to jail for engaging even in the most "abusive"
drug consumption and trade. How can anyone with the slightest sense
of justice tolerate this damnable approach to trying to deal with
drug abuse?

First, it is mostly self-abuse - drug abusers do not force anyone to
take drugs. Second, even the sale and distribution to adults of the
harmful drugs cannot be anyone else's business aside from family and
friends - certainly, clearly, not to the extant that others somehow
gain moral rights to physically, forcibly interfere!

Who on earth are these folks who take it upon themselves to bully
their way into other people's lives to rescue them from themselves in
the most uncivilized way that people can interact, by means of the
gun! Yes, they are drug czars -- and doesn't that clue folks into
just how evil they are? For at the end of every legal edict there has
to be guns, and when the edict is unjust, these guns will have to be
used unjustly whenever compliance isn't forthcoming.

Over the years, ever since I lived through the wild '60s, I have
witnessed this vain effort to force people into sane behavior, at
first mainly by conservatives but later by too many in the
mainstream, even as some conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr.
have come to their senses about the matter. The only consistently
wise prominent voice on the topic has come from the Nobel
Prize-winning economist - go figure - Milton Friedman, who has been
calling for decriminalization for decades.

Nothing justifies this horror to which millions of Americans are put
and which confronts, most visibly, the likes of actor Robert Downey
Jr. who are in the public eye. Perhaps because of the resentment many
feel toward celebrities who risk their careers and talent so
flagrantly by indulging in drug abuse, the general public seems to
have no sense of the gross injustice of whisking these people off to
court over and over again.

Yet it is the millions of unknown "criminals" who are forced to
linger lengthy stretches of time in jail who are shown the most
severe neglect and abuse with the injustice perpetrated against them
when the soldiers of the war on drugs carry out their vile mission.
Folks should be in an uproar over this.

Instead of commentators and political leaders fretting about
PC-related injustices - using the wrong words for blacks or Indian
terms for baseball teams - it would be so gratifying to see all those
who speak out in columns and other places in the media to mount a
serious assault on the insanity that is the war on drugs.

But somehow the spirit of justice seems to have left the bulk of the
people of this country. Not even the shameful fact that America -
"the leader of the free world" it used to be called - is now reputed
to be a Western nation with the highest number of its citizens in
jail (mostly because of the insane war on drugs) seems to move folks
to quit this war.

One thing is for sure: On this score there is no difference between
the liberal and conservative political leadership. George W. is not a
bit compassionate when it comes to those who engage in drug abuse and
the distribution and sale of the substances - never mind that alcohol
kills far more people than even the hardest of drugs and never mind
that ... . Well, I am just too nauseated by this feature of our
society to go through all the arguments again. Not that I have any
sympathy for drug abusers, anymore than I would for those who peddle
yellow journalism or sell sex or ruin their lives - I had to walk out
of "Leaving Las Vegas" because I couldn't stand how the Nicholas Cage
character drank himself to death!

But none of this is the state's business, not when it is clear enough
that those running the state have no moral authority to impose upon
others their will, no matter how much support they have!

A free society puts up with sleaze, as it does with trash and
pornography and other undesirable stuff, because in such a society
all men and women are supposed to be equal under the law! And the law
must be confined to the securing of our rights instead of being
perverted into an instrument of morally obscene paternalism.