ANTI-LEGALIZATION ARGUMENT 'DANGEROUS, IRRELEVANT'

"He that complies against his will Is of his own opinion still."

- - Samuel Butler

In a recent column John Kanelis stated his support for this country's "war
on drugs" because the benefits of waging it outweigh the costs. This
strikes me as both a dangerous and an irrelevant justification, and I
believe we owe it to ourselves to examine this path.

The first and most obvious flaw is to subject any freedom to a cost-benefit
analysis. There isn't a single freedom we possess that can survive such a test.

The cost of free speech can be enormous when you consider all the schlock
on the market, what it costs to produce it, what it costs to be rid of it.

For every Gettysburg Address or "I Have a Dream" speech there are thousands
of wicked, inflammatory, denigrating or just plain boring streams of
rhetoric on radio, on television, in print, in the air around us. Martin
Luther King, Jr., was a bodacious orator, but if you added up just what it
cost to clean up after his march on Washington, you would have to conclude
free speech was too expensive to be borne.

The second flaw in the argument is to compare tangible costs and intangible
benefits. People use illegal drugs to produce or to reduce feelings - that
is, to gain what are known as "psychic rewards." But the costs of drug
abuse are measured in dollars. When we look at the dollar tab on the left
and the psychic reward on the right, it's easy to say the benefits aren't
worth the cost, especially when it's our money and someone else's benefit.

But it is also an error, since by doing so we are not making a legitimate
comparison. It's worse than apples and oranges, both of which are at least
fruit. It's like comparing the price of our apples to the taste of someone
else's oranges, then deciding oranges should be illegal.

The last problem I see in Mr. Kanelis' argument is that it rests on an
inadequate understanding of people. The official reason we have this "war
on drugs" is to reduce, even eliminate, drug abuse in this country.

It won't. It can't. But that's the argument. It's a fiction, like two
lawyers agreeing to stipulate that the Earth is flat so they can
productively argue more salient points, but their little stipulation does
nothing to change the planet's shape.

I advocate ending the war on drugs and taking the problem away from law
enforcement, and my motivation is identical: to reduce or even eliminate
drug abuse.

How can we be so out of step?

Well, it is seductive to think that "government" can solve this problem if
we only give it enough money, enough power, enough prisons, enough targets.
What we are really after when we refer problems of personal habit to the
government is to wash our hands of a problem while still asserting that we
are doing something about it. It's like asking the fox to make sure the
chickens don't eat too much. Even if it works, we will certainly come to
regret it because the fox has only one means of persuasion.

I used to smoke cigarettes. I knew the dangers, but I did it anyway. And I
didn't stop doing it because the government warned me or because the cost
of a carton went from $10 to $30 to cover a punitive tax. I did it because
I decided I'd had enough. What nudged me over the top was a friend of mine
betting me a dollar I couldn't quit for a month. I collected. This was not
the coercive power of the state at work, this was "enlightened
self-interest," a la Adam Smith, right down the middle of the lane.

This is the real nature of human motivation. Habits we abandon out of
choice are broken; habits we surrender under threat are merely interrupted.

The enlightened thinkers who produced the keel philosophy of this country
saw freedom as something that needed no justification. Freedom, they said,
was the state in which God made us. What required justification in their
eyes was any government action limiting freedom; and they saw, as we do
not, that the best person to limit a freedom is the person exercising it.

I understand the frustration of those who see drug abuse as a serious
national issue. But once we invite the government into the domain of
personal freedom, it's damned difficult to get it out again. There are no
constitutional safeguards for freedoms we surrender voluntarily, and when
government officials squat on what is ours, it becomes theirs.

So if we must distract ourselves with questions of costs and benefits,
let's do ourselves and our progeny a real favor. Let's look at the lifetime
cost of a freedom we forfeit.

Greg Sagan of Amarillo is a consultant to corporations on organizational
performance and an Amarillo Voices columnist for the Globe-Times. Readers
may contact him at P.O. Box 2091, Amarillo, Texas, or via e-mail at
letters@amarillonet.com.