Note: I started this article in December 2000 but stopped about halfway. Watching Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico address Thursday's NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) conference has galvanized its completion.
Former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Barry McCaffrey recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation on "Drug Use in America." He referred to "the nut bowl effect," "bi-modal distributions," "polydrug abusers," and other phenomena.
Expanding beyond bureaucratic nomenclature, McCaffrey affirmed his support for "the aggressive enforcement of anti-drug laws" (not exactly a surprise). As for the drug users rendered criminals by those laws, "Their personal behavior is disgusting."
Leaving aside the Soviet texture of his agency's abbreviation, such Puritanical vituperation is to be expected from McCaffrey. He typifies the Cromwellian crusade called the War on Drugs that has roundly contused constitutional liberty and instilled an informer mentality among the young. In the days of England's Lord Protector (and Ireland's ravager), McCaffrey would have been known as a Roundhead. (The description is more than figurative; McCaffrey bears a Roundhead's visage.)
Yes, McCaffrey is a loyal soldier in the battle against those vile narcotic-fiends who must feel the State's superiority, ripped from their families and livelihoods. Oh, what a righteous cause!
McCaffrey also displayed quite a flair for irony in his Heritage speech. At one point in his tirade against the heathens he declared, "We live in a free society."
Larry Elder observes in The Ten Things You Can't Say in America: "A free government allows maximum personal freedom, liberty, the power to come and go, to make our own choices, and to experience life as we choose to. In exchange for this freedom, we must accept that others will make bad choices. This is the price of liberty."
The War on Drugs cannot remotely claim to comport with these entailments of freedom; nay, it is antithetical to them. It has perpetrated systematic expropriation, both philosophically and physically.
Dr. Thomas Szasz condemns the War on Drugs as a War on Property and "chemical statism." (See Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market.) He is right on each charge, and let me be even blunter: The War on Drugs is a chronic form of multi-dimensional theft.
In a free society, the War on Drugs would be prosecuted in newspapers, pamphlets, websites, and other media. That is, its efficacy would be determined in the marketplace of ideas by the voluntary choices of autonomous individuals. In America, the marketplace and choice have been criminally displaced.
Some, I fear many, look at the victims of the War on Drugs and think, "Those are just a bunch of bums. Why should I care if they get nailed?" Traditionalists especially might be less than perturbed about the incarceration and/or dispossession of narcotics users.
This is how governments implement tyranny: Select an undesirable segment of society, criminalize it, and incrementally diffuse the policy. By the time people realize the deviants' (so-called) persecution has encompassed them, it's too late. (This, incidentally, is one reason why sodomy laws are so noxious. Assume the power to proscribe consensual intimacy on private property and further omnipotent government is logically implicated.)
The Barry McCaffreys of America are not acquiescent to or mildly supportive of the constitutionally corrosive, autonomy-eviscerating drug regime. They are energetic accomplices in the federal criminality that calls itself justice. These are hard words, yes, but not excessive for those that have the effrontery to speak of freedom as they wage war against it.
April 21, 2001
Myles Kantor lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.
