Melanie Phillips might like to note that you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose drug prohibition. Kevin Myers, hardly the anarcho-capitalist, has a great piece in today's Irish Times:
The idiocy of our drugs laws is matched only by the idiocy of the refusal of our elected representatives to discuss them intelligently - an idiocy mirrored by our media's fulminations on the subject. Instead, most voices in Ireland can be relied on to enter a denunciation sweepstake, thundering on about how drugs ruin lives, squander fortunes and lead to prostitution, mental illness, crime and misery....So nobody's saying that drug-taking's a good thing. It's not. Often enough, it's a bad thing; and usually a really stupid thing. But it's not as bad as banning all narcotics, and thereby handing a monopoly on drugs supply to criminal conspiracies.
There is a very good philosophical argument against drug prohibition which is based on self-ownership. If you own yourself, you have the implicit right to do whatever you like what that "property". If the government punishes you for "damaging" that property, it is asserting a right to it. It should go without saying that Libertarians reject such implicit serfdom.
There is also, however, a very good utilitarian argument against drug prohibition, which should appeal to a wider constituency. Even if you are a hardcore statist and are blasé about government intervention into the intimate quotidian lives of its citizens, it should be possible to recognise, as Myers has, that whatever the intentions of the war on drugs, the outcome is the enrichment of monopolist criminal gangs, and a parallel "service industry" of prostitution and ordinary crime to fund drug-users' habits. Put simply: the "war" does more harm than the "drugs".
please do fill me in then, Frank, on the wisdom of legalisation...
I really fail to see it...
I don't see the government banning alcohol but then i don't see people mugging, stealing, stabbing etc, for a pint.
Nor do i see the destructive powers of alcohol directly to the youth of many parts of Dublin City nor do I expect it to.
I understand the libertarian theory (of which Im occasionally fond) would tend to allow anyone to be responsible for any decision taken within the confines of their own being, but I really dont think many of the people (and families) affected by the hardcore drug epidemic made such logical decisions in the first place.
Posted by: Ciarán | January 28, 2004 at 06:32 PM
please do fill me in then, Frank, on the wisdom of legalisation...
I thought I'd made it pretty clear above, but another way of looking at it is: Fill me in on the wisdom of prohibition. That is, after all, the status quo. What has the war on drugs achieved?
I don't see the government banning alcohol but then i don't see people mugging, stealing, stabbing etc, for a pint.
You obviously haven't spent much time in Dundalk then! :-)
Nor do i see the destructive powers of alcohol directly to the youth of many parts of Dublin City nor do I expect it to.
Open your eyes Ciaran. Alcohol is a very dangerous drug.
In any case the point is: People will always take drugs, that's not going to change, with or without prohibition. The question is not whether people should take drugs but whether people should be punished for taking drugs.
Posted by: Frank McGahon | January 28, 2004 at 08:28 PM