Internet Commentator

Nice little tale from the drug war frontline

Doesn't this story (at Reason, Hit and Run) just warm the cockles of your heart?

Jason Burnham was walking down the street in Mount Dora, Florida, when he was stopped by a local police officer, Brad Cline, who thought he "appeared intoxicated." Burnham told Cline he had taken Xanax that was prescribed for his depression after his 9-month-old daughter's accidental death in 2002. Cline asked about illegal drug use, patted Burnham down, and searched him. Then, according to a lawsuit Burnham and his wife filed last week, Cline opened a silver cross-shaped pendant that Burnham wore around his neck and dumped the contents onto the hood of his police car. According to the suit, Cline thought the pendant contained cocaine; it actually contained the ashes of Burnham's baby daughter. "Defendant Cline, after seeing that the ashes were not cocaine, wiped Plaintiff Burnham's daughter's ashes to the ground," the suit says.

Better safe than sorry, I say. Imagine if it had been cocaine. All that separates us from drug-fuelled chaos is the thin blue line represented by fine public servants like officer Cline.

Please protect our children from this dangerous substance!

Rafe Champion warns of the dangers of bread:

7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.

8. Bread is often a “gateway” food item, leading the user to “harder” items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.

9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread pudding person.

Drugs

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".