America’s Unjust Drug War

Here, I explain the injustice of drug prohibition.*

[*Based on  “America’s Unjust Drug War” in The New Prohibition, ed. Bill Masters (Accurate Press, 2004), pp. 133-44, http://www.owl232.net/papers/drugs.htm. This paper is very popular and has been reprinted in several anthologies.]

1. The Issue

Many Americans use or have (at least once) used illegal drugs. According to a Census Bureau survey before I wrote the paper, something close to a third of all Americans over the age of 11 had tried some illegal drug. Many millions have used an illegal drug in the last year (https://www.statista.com/topics/3088/drug-use-in-the-us/). As part of the government’s “war on drugs”, hundreds of thousands of Americans are currently being held in prison for a drug crime.

Should we continue this policy? Or should we maybe let people use whatever drugs they want?

2. The Presumption

The presumption should be (in this as in all cases) in favor of liberty: It’s wrong to restrict people, to throw them in jail, or otherwise to deliberately harm them, without a good reason. If I kidnap a random person on the street and lock them in a cage, that is wrong. Similarly, it’s wrong to lock drug users in cages, unless there is a good reason to do that. I don’t need to give a reason why people “should be allowed” to use drugs; the prohibitionist needs to give a reason why users should be thrown in jail.

So what are the reasons for punishing drug users?

3. Reasons for Prohibition

Basically, I think there are no good reasons, and thus we should legalize all recreational drugs. Following are the most common reasons given for prohibition:

a. “Drugs harm users’ health.”

This is of course true of many drug users, though it’s worth noting that some users are doing fine (depending on the drug and the user), contrary to the alarmist propaganda that you heard if you went to a government school in the U.S. It’s also worth noting that some legal drugs are causing much greater harm, yet we don’t prohibit them. E.g., the CDC says that tobacco smoking kills 480,000 Americans per year (https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html). That’s way worse than most illegal drugs. (And yes, I took into account the number of users, because I’m not an idiot. After taking account of that, tobacco was about 7 times more dangerous than illegal drugs.) Alcohol kills an estimated 95,000 Americans per year (https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/alcohol-facts-and-statistics). In 2015, it was estimated that prescription drugs killed 100,000 Americans, while illegal drugs killed 10,000 (https://newspunch.com/100000-deaths-per-year-in-the-u-s-caused-by-prescription-drugs/).

Anyway, you’re allowed to harm your health. For instance, you’re allowed to lie on the couch all day munching potato chips. No one thinks that you should be thrown in jail for doing that, even though doing so is bad for your health. (And that’s not a trivial health harm. Poor diet and lifestyle choices, apart from illegal drugs, are probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths per year.)

b. “Drugs ruin your life.”

Drugs can also ruin your life in non-medical ways. They could cause you to lose your job, damage your relationships with other people, and generally be a loser.

However, you are allowed to do all those things independently. E.g., you can quit your job any time you want, and no one will accuse you of a crime. You can also end your relationship with another person (of course, if it’s your kid, you have to put the kid up for adoption; you can’t just lock him out and tell him to fend for himself. But for anyone else, you can just refuse to talk to them again). You can, in general, just be a total loser in life, and no one throws you in jail. Nor should they, obviously.

But if you can do all these things directly and deliberately, the surely the fact that drug use might cause you to indirectly do these things isn’t a good reason to prohibit drug use.

c. “Drugs harm other people by making you unreliable.”

Drug use also may also make you a crappy (unreliable, unproductive) worker and an apathetic citizen.

But those things aren’t illegal either. If you deliberately, directly decide to be a crappy worker and an apathetic citizen, no one should throw you in jail. Therefore, again, the fact that drug use might cause you to do those things isn’t a sufficient reason to ban drug use.

d. “Drugs cause you to commit other crimes.”

A lot of violence and crime is drug-related.

However, pretty much everyone in social science knows perfectly well that most of this crime is due to the drug laws themselves. The drug laws guarantee that the drug industry will be controlled by criminal organizations, rather than law-abiding businesses. Drugs are the main revenue source for organized crime, which would be crippled as soon as drugs were legalized. An instructive case is alcohol prohibition – during the Prohibition era, organized crime took over the industry and made tons of money. After the repeal of Prohibition, organized crime was driven out of the industry.

The drug trade is also associated with violence because participants are unable to rely on the police or the courts to protect them, enforce contracts, or resolve disputes. They can’t rely on the police or courts because they’d be arrested as soon as the cops found out they were doing a drug transaction. Therefore, buyers and sellers in this industry have to enforce contracts and resolve disputes themselves. Which leads to a lot of violence.

So, given that the drug laws cause most of the drug-related crime, this crime can hardly be a reason to maintain those laws.

4. General Philosophical Point

Here is the more fundamental point: Individuals own their own bodies. By that, I mean that you ought to have (at least) the same sort of say over what happens to your body that you have over what happens to your car, or your jacket, or your house. You have the right to do what you want with your own stuff, even if you’re damaging it, as long as you’re not damaging someone else’s stuff. Likewise, you have the right to do what you want with your own body, even if you are damaging it, as long as you’re not damaging someone else or their stuff.

Granted, your use of recreational drugs might ‘harm’ other people in some sense – e.g., by making you a crappy friend or an unproductive worker. But it doesn’t harm other people in the ways that we normally prohibit or consider rights violations. E.g., being a crappy worker isn’t a rights violation and shouldn’t be prohibited, so that doesn’t count.

The main harm of this is that the U.S. presently has about 373,000 people unjustly imprisoned  (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html). That’s the number of incarcerated people for whom a drug charge is their most serious offense. Prison is, needless to say, an extremely unpleasant, dangerous, abusive environment and just about the last place you would want to be. It also has multiple ancillary harms besides the inherent awfulness of living in prison – e.g., it hardens criminals, acts as a sort of school for learning criminal skills and anti-social values, removes people from the work force and makes them live at taxpayer expense, and breaks up families.

Thus, drug prohibition is not only a rights violation but also a plausible candidate for the most harmful law in the U.S.