The War on Us

The conservative and liberal factions in this country have, in collusion, turned moot the nonpartisan desire for personal responsibility and liberty which we the people embrace. As a result, the 'war on drugs' has shifted in the last several years to a war on the people.

Sound far-fetched? Think carefully. Just about all of us, conservative and liberal, think that people who commit crimes ought to pay the penalty, no excuses. We also believe, again almost unanimously, that people who commit no crimes ought to be left alone.

Instead, because of the war on us, people who do drugs but commit no crimes go to jail daily, while those who do drugs and commit crimes have their sentences reduced in favor of rehabilitation programs. The former is misguided morality, the latter misguided compassion - all misguided reason.

While the roots of the problem in reality are undeniably economic, the form of the current arguments to make victimless, nonviolent drug use a crime boil down to two: drug users are wasting their lives (liberal), and drug use is connected to crime (conservative).

With regard to the latter: in case you don't know, allow me to instruct you - criminals are criminals, whether or not they do drugs. An individual's personal responsibility is not suspended when they do a drug, and most drug users know that. A person who would steal to feed a drug addiction was a thief before doing any drugs at all, period. Ask yourself this: if a person with no criminal record took a job with a big corporation, discovered an 'easy' way to steal a lot of money from the company, and took the opportunity, would you say that the corporation was to blame? Maybe corporations should be illegal, because they do nothing but entice persons to crime? No, you'd say that the person was a thief before ever taking the job. They should take the consequences without leniency, regardless of the strength of temptation provided by the company.

As for the 'wasted life' argument, it was no less than Jimmy Carter (the only one of the last four presidents who, while certainly ineffective, yet legitimately held the interest of the people in the highest regard) who said that no law, enacted to protect people from harm, should itself cause more harm to those it was designed to protect. Want to talk about a wasted life? - put a person in jail for ten years to protect him from wasting his life. That's a wasted life. And isn't it the height of arrogance to suggest that I know what it is that wastes a life? Many would say that tireless devotion to work is a wasted life. Should we make that illegal? Set up work diversion programs?

The conservatives started it by calling drug use immoral, the liberals exacerbated it by offering excuses for human frailty. The argument emanating from these viewpoints are many and confused. But the fact remains that if persons who've committed no crime are released from jail, and those who commit crimes are put in jail, whether or not they do drugs, there would be no need to build a new prison for many years to come.

February 20, 1999