HIGH ANXIETY

Jonah Goldberg is wrong.

Jonah Goldberg wants to "reserve the right to judge people harshly who use
drugs, sell drugs, or who endorse either." No one, of course, is proposing
to take away that right, but some of us wish he would exercise it with a
bit more discrimination and common sense.

Assuming that Goldberg does not condemn all use of psychoactive substances,
he must have in mind some principles that enable him to say when drug
consumption is morally acceptable and when it is not. In the case of
alcohol, people routinely make such distinctions. They see a difference
between children and adults, between responsible and irresponsible use,
between moderate drinkers and alcoholics. The same sorts of distinctions
can and should be applied to other drugs, whatever their current legal
status. The failure to do so -- the insistence that all use of illegal
drugs is, by definition, abuse -- is a way of avoiding serious moral discourse.

Let's consider marijuana, which Goldberg says he's "in favor of
decriminalizing and probably legalizing." Isn't there a clear moral
difference between a guy who smokes pot occasionally, on weekends, or in
the evening, yet manages to be a responsible, productive citizen, and a guy
who is stoned all the time, flunks out of school, slacks off at work, and
has trouble maintaining relationships? It is reasonable to "judge people
harshly" for leading lives so dominated by marijuana (or any other drug)
that they achieve nothing of worth and fail to meet their responsibilities
to friends, neighbors, relatives, and employers. (Legally punishing them is
another matter.) But anyone who accepts moderate drinking will have a hard
time explaining why moderate pot smoking is beyond the pale.

The government's own data indicate that people who use marijuana typically
do so in moderation. According to the National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse, some 76 million Americans, more than one-third of the population
over the age of 12, have tried marijuana.

About one-quarter of these people report using marijuana in the previous
year, and about 15 percent say they've used it in the previous month.

Around 14 percent of the people who use marijuana in a given year, and less
than 4 percent of those who have ever tried it, report smoking it on 20 to
30 days of the previous month.

A 1994 study in estimated that 9 percent of marijuana users have ever
experienced "drug dependence." The comparable figure for alcohol was 15
percent.

Perhaps Goldberg agrees that there is no moral distinction between
marijuana -- the main target of the war on drugs, accounting for nearly
700,000 arrests each year -- and alcohol.

But he seems to believe that any use of "heroin and PCP" is so reckless
that it should always carry a moral stigma. I will not try to talk him out
of that, except to note that the vast majority of people who use these
drugs do not become addicted or suffer lasting harm. Whether heroin and PCP
are so dangerous that any prudent, responsible person ought to avoid them
hinges on how one assesses the risks.

In the case of heroin, for example, it matters whether addiction is
essentially a random affliction that can strike anyone or a process over
which people can and do exercise control.

In any case, these drugs have never been very popular.

The government's survey data indicate that 0.2 percent of Americans have
used heroin in the last year, while 0.1 percent have used PCP. By this
measure, marijuana is nearly 50 times as popular as heroin, 100 times as
popular as PCP. Moral stigma has something to do with that, but so does the
fact that the effects of heroin and PCP do not appeal to nearly as many
people as those of marijuana do. In a legal market, marijuana would still
be one of America's favorite intoxicants, and it would be joined on the
shelves by mild preparations of coca and opium, currently almost impossible
to obtain because prohibition encourages the sale of drugs in their most
concentrated forms. Judging from the alcohol market, where beer and wine
outsell liquor and pure alcohol hardly sells at all, consumers will
overwhelmingly prefer sipping poppy tea and chewing coca gum to injecting
heroin or smoking crack.

This does not mean that "the free market can solve our drug problems in a
flash" (as Goldberg caricatures the libertarian position), any more than
scrapping the 18th Amendment eliminated alcoholism. The case for repealing
drug prohibition is based on two main propositions: that it does more harm
than good, and that it violates the fundamental right to control one's body
and mind. It is possible to hold either or both of these views and still
condemn drug use on moral grounds.

Indeed, the conventional wisdom among reformers is that defending the
morality of drug use needlessly antagonizes those who might otherwise be
inclined to agree that the war on drugs is counterproductive and unjust.

That is why you will often hear ritual denunciations of drug use in
seemingly unlikely places such as the Cato Institute. But the repeal of
alcohol prohibition would have been impossible if most Americans did not
recognize that people, by and large, can be trusted to drink responsibly. A
successful campaign to end the war on drugs will also depend upon a belief
in the possibility of temperance.