Legalizing Drugs: Alluring But False

FIRST, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Then, it becomes an orthodoxy
whose truth seems so obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought
differently.
This is just what is happening with the idea of legalizing drugs.
Millions agree that it is the obvious, indeed only, solution to social
problems that arise from the consumption of drugs.
The arguments are twofold philosophical and pragmatic in favor of
legalizing the use of all narcotic and stimulant drugs. Neither argument is
negligible. Both are mistaken. According to the philosophical argument,
adults in a free society should be permitted to do whatever they please, if
they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and they
cause no direct harm to others.
In practice, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make people take
all the consequences of their own actions. Addiction to or regular use of
most currently prohibited drugs cannot affect only the person who takes them.
It might he argued that millions of people have derived
innocent fim from taking stimulants and narcotics. But the consumption
of drugs has the effect of reducing freedom by circumscribing the range
of a person's interests. It impairs the ability to pursue more important
human alms such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations.
Very often, it destroys the ability to pursue gainfully employment. It
promotes parasitism.
The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is
very thin. It hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence.
People whose appetites are their laws are not liberated but
enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the
touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow.
The proponents of legalization rest the larger part of their case on a
pragmatic argument.
They claim that the overwhelming majority of the harm done to society by
the consumption of currently illicit drugs is not caused by the
pharmacological properties of these drugs. Instead, it is there
prohibition, and the resultant criminal activity that prohibition always
calls into being, that does harm to society.
In this view, suppression is useless when demand is widespread. What's
more, say the legalizers, the vast profits to be made from illegal drugs
exert a deeply corrupting effect on producers, distributors, consumers and
law enforcers alike.
And since society already permits the use of some mindaltering
substances known to be both addictive and harmful, it appears
hypocritical, arbitrary and dictatorial in prohibiting others.
It stands to reason, therefore, that all these problems would be
resolved at a stroke if people were permitted to smoke, swallow or inject
anything they choose.
But a certain modesty in the face of an inherently unknowable future is
surely advisable. There is reason to doubt whether the crime rate would
fall quite as dramatically as advocates of legalization have suggested.
Amsterdam, where access to drugs is relatively unproblematic, is
among the most violent and squalid cities in Europe.
Having met large numbers of drug dealers as a doctor in an English
prison, I doubt that they would return to respectable life if the
principal article of their commerce were to he legalized.
Far from evincing a desire to be reincorporated into the world of
regular work, they express a deep contempt for it and regard as cowards
and fools all those who accept the bargain of a fair day's work for a
fair day's pay.
For the proposed legalization of drugs to have its much vaunted
beneficial effect on the crime rate, drugs would have to be both cheap
and readily available.
The legalizers assume that there is a natural limit to the demand for
these drug and that if their consumption were legalized, the demand would
not increase substantially.
But price and availability, I need hardly say, exert a profound
effect on consumption. It is perfectly possible that the demand for drugs
would rise dramatically were their prices to fall and their availability
to increase.
It is also possible that this rise in consumption would have the
effect of swamping the decrease in the crime rate that resulted from
decriminalization. We would have just as much crime in aggregate as before,
but many more addicts.
The situation could be very much worse if we legalized the
consumption of drugs other than opiates, which exert a generally
tranquilizing effect. Unfortunately, there are stimulants, like crack
cocaine, whose consumption directly leads to violence because of their
psychopharmacological properties.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician who regularly sees patients in an English
prison, wrote a longer version of this commentary for the Manhattan
Institute's City Journal.