David K wrote a piece disingenuously paying lip service to the legalization of drugs, while simultaneously giving all the arguments why they should stay illegal.
His enthusiastic ambivalence highlights the moral and practical conundrum of our current prohibition. While Mr. K supports the legalization of drugs on ideological principle, he remains opposed to it as a practical consideration.
Last week, in the responses to his article, I addressed the practical reasons why the drug prohibition is counterproductive, but my reply came after 40 other responses, and may not, therefore, garner the attention I feel it deserves. So let me repeat it here.
Here is my response, as it appears in the comments section of David K's article:
Let me put it simply, so even a conservative can understand it.
People deal drugs because there's a lot of money in it. There's a lot of money in dealing drugs because drugs are expensive. Drugs are expensive because producing and distributing drugs is risky. Producing and distributing drugs is risky because drugs are illegal.
If you make drugs legal, you remove the money incentive. Without the money incentive, you don't have people trying to kill each other.
Now can somebody explain to me why drugs are illegal? It seems like the only reason drugs are illegal is to keep them expensive. If it's to keep people from doing drugs, it's not working. If a person wants to get drugs, it's pretty easy.
Am I missing something?
The crux of Mr. K's argument is based on two suspect premises.
The first is that, to quote Mr. K, “more people would get hooked [on] the cartel's top selling products” if drugs were legal. And surely, the illegality of drugs is sufficient disincentive to keep some people from doing them. The question, though, is how many? Would the social costs of increased drug use and addiction exceed the staggering social costs of the drug war?
Would Mr. K be a junkie if heroin were legal? Would you?
As Bill Tilney points out in his column, the United States currently houses a quarter of the world's prison population, with half of those incarcerated doing time for drug related offenses. These social costs are born disproportionately by minorities, exacerbating already strained relations.
The other fallacy in David K's argument is that, because of government regulation, drugs would still be expensive if they were legal, and they'd be of poorer quality.
Of course, eliminating the financial incentive for the drug cartels is the motive for legalizing drugs. To prop the cartels up with excessive taxes and price controls would be sabotaging the whole process.
To bolster his quality argument, Mr. K suggests that the government regulates the strength of alcoholic products. “No, the government tends to be pretty wimpy when it comes to the strength of mind altering substances,” he writes. “Just ask the boys in Tennessee who prefer 'white lightning' over the store brands of alcohol.”
Presumably, 190 proof Everclear is available in those counties in Tennessee where alcohol sales are legal. Moonshine is probably more popular only in those counties where an alcohol prohibition is still in force. I bet “those boys” in Tennessee would prefer George Dickel if they could get it.
The main point that we can take away from Mr. K's column, and the comments that follow, is that the drug problem is complicated. The War on Drugs has been propagandized to the point where mere logic alone won't solve the problem. Drug use is symptomatic of the bigger problems facing this country, including the emphasis on consumption, and the lack of both social mobility and meaningful work opportunities.
People's identities are defined, to a point, on how they feel about drugs and their continued illegality. Unfortunately, this has produced a situation where no solution is consensually acceptable. We are at an impasse, chained to opposing identity structures. In a deadlock, the status quo usually prevails.
