The U.S. government made drugs illegal in 1914. The government deemed Americans too dumb to educate themselves and their children about proper and improper drugs and drug use, and too weak-willed to resist using them properly or improperly. Instead, it simply banned them.
What do we read 103 years later? In Louisville, we read that overdose calls spiked recently. This is not unusual: “Nationwide, the spike in opioid overdoses is blamed on heroin and fentanyl, a pain reliever often given to cancer patients. Death rates from synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, increased 72.2% from 2014 to 2015, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.”
In nearby Crawford County, Indiana, we read “8 people facing drug charges in Crawford County“, again not unusual for just about anywhere in this country.
In Louisville, the mayor says “…the police department is hiring 150 more officers and adding two new squads of detectives to address crimes involving narcotics.” Who pays for this? We the Taxpaying People. Will it pay for itself in beneficial results? No. More people will be arrested and more jailed as in Crawford County, which also We the Taxpaying People will pay for.
This kind of news is the same across this entire country. Outlawing drugs has several effects. It causes bootlegging of drugs. It causes gangs that deal in drugs. It fills prisons with drug offenders. It causes new and more potent drugs to be smuggled and used. It shifts police resources from catching criminals to catching drug users. It makes some people feel good that their schools, communities and children are being insulated from drugs, when the very opposite is occurring. It makes drugs attractive as a forbidden fruit. It makes drugs a sign of rebellion and breaking away from parents. It relieves some parents who abdicate the education of themselves and their children about drugs. It lines the pockets of a number of interest groups. Using police methods to control drug use doesn’t accomplish the goal of reducing drug use. There is only one alternative: Legalization and education.
Way too many people are taking prescription drugs. The psychiatric sector, which considers itself as a profession and which prescribes a host of drugs, is far more of a danger to Americans than terrorism is. It is not a profession. It’s a guild that constantly enlarges its list of “illnesses” of the mind and correspondingly enlarges prescription drug use as its remedies. Parents who take these drugs and allow them to be prescribed for their children are not only not being educated properly about drugs and their use, they are positively being mis-educated.
Americans are a very confused people, in my opinion. The thing they are most confused about is how to deal with evils. If they see or are induced to think they see evil in a foreign country, they support their government in making war against it. If they see bad effects of drugs, which there are, and see it as evil, which actually depends on many individual circumstances, they support their government in making war against it. They think that they know what’s evil and what isn’t, and then they think that the evils should be forcefully resisted. This in itself is not always a correct procedure because evils cannot always be identified objectively; and vices can easily be tagged as evils to be fought when they are not in that category. In many cases, attempting to eradicate a supposed evil only makes matters worse.
Where many Americans go wrong, very, very wrong, is in thinking that applications of force and laws are the appropriate means of facing evils and dealing with them. They think it’s common sense to force an evil dictator of Iraq from office or to banish a drug dealer from his trade and imprison him. These methods backfire, however. There are evils that need to be faced in other ways than government force, with patience, education, dedication, and sacrifice.
What superficially seems sensible is not always at all sensible because of its unseen consequences. Americans need to look far enough ahead at consequences. They trust government too much when government panders to them by simple solutions that do not work. They gloss over individual differences in favor of blanket laws. And, what is as bad as these failings, many of us do not seem capable of learning from experience when bad laws produce bad effects. We may know that the war on drugs fails to produce good results, but we go along with those who claim it’s because we haven’t fought the war deeply enough and call for more police and money to get drug dealers off the streets and out of the schools.
The two alternatives to the brute force methods of government, which contravene freedom directly and indirectly, are private social means and private individual means. This comes down to education and training. Americans are up to this task, if given a chance. They can’t get there, however, without government ending its war on drugs and that means applying ballot box and communications pressures on their representatives. In my state, New York, this means removing Charles Schumer, an avid drug warrior, from the Senate. He also “Voted YES on authorizing use of military force against Iraq,” not his only such vote.
9:53 am on February 13, 2017
