MILTON FRIEDMAN ON DRUGS

Shortly before his 90th birthday later this month and in honor of his
lifetime achievements, President Bush invited Nobel Laureate Milton
Friedman to the White House.

Calling him a "hero of freedom," Bush praised the economist's contributions
to American liberty, especially his advancement of "a moral vision: the
vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where
government is not as free to override their decisions."

"Milton Friedman has shown us that when government attempts to substitute
its own judgments for the judgments of free people, the results are usually
disastrous."

To prove this right, conservatives must point no further than public
education, burdensome tax policy, bureaucratic red tape, and Social
Security. Few will, however, point to the drug war.

They should.

Ever since Nixon kick-started the war on drugs in 1972, Friedman has been a
vocal opponent of the policy. Yet conservatives, many of whom are
prohibition's biggest supporters, have covered their ears to Friedman's
objections. They fail to understand that the same motivating factors behind
his assaults on taxes and regulatory madness also support his decision to
oppose the drug war.

Friedman's argument against government meddling with pensions and cough
medicine is the same as pot and cocaine - the meddling usually provides
results worse than the problems, while expanding government at the expense
of citizens' freedoms.

How so? While the government may promise great things, it rarely delivers.

"There is a sure-fire way to predict the consequences of a government
social program adopted to achieve worthy ends," he wrote in 1982. "Find out
what the well-meaning, public-interested persons who advocated its adoption
expected it to accomplish. Then reverse those expectations. You will have
an accurate prediction of the actual results."

In his 1984 book, "Tyranny of the Status Quo," he points to alcohol
Prohibition as an example of this in action: "Prohibition undermined
respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, and created a
decadent moral climate - and in the end did not stop the consumption of
alcohol."

But beyond blasting bureaucratic failures, Friedman also opposes the drug
war for its fetters on individual freedom.

"On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of
government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug
addict?" he questioned in a May 1972 Newsweek column. "For children, almost
everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults,
I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell
him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that
we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow
man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs."

Some may pounce on the adjective "responsible" and say a-ha!, as if they
found a sizeable breech through which to smuggle their statism. But they
shouldn't. A free society presumes responsible adults. If they act
responsibly and refrain from harming their fellows, we leave them alone. If
they don't, they're stopped by the state.

But if they're stopped before they act either responsibly or irresponsibly,
then kiss freedom goodbye. The entire concept is scrapped because, instead
of people being free to choose, we now have people in cages.

At bottom, this was Friedman's biggest concern - that the drug war would
eat away at traditional American liberties and land us in the gulag.

"Every friend of freedom," he told drug czar Bill Bennett in 1989, "must be
revolted at the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp,
by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of
enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

With an eroded Fourth Amendment and more than 2 million prisoners in the
U.S. - a huge percentage of whom are locked down due to drug violations,
many of them nonviolent offenders - Friedman's concern is more relevant now
than ever. And prescient.

Almost anticipating the 2001 shoot-down of the Bowers family over Peru,
Friedman concluded his letter to Bennett by saying, "A country in which
shooting down unidentified planes 'on suspicion' can be seriously
considered as a drug war tactic is not the kind of United States that
either you or I want to hand on to future generations."

Toasting his accomplishments and the reforms he has inspired around the
globe, Bush said, "the world is finally catching up with Milton Friedman."

I only hope some day we truly do.