Only Retired Politicians . . .

The Legalization of Drugs

In the West there is only one country which banned the production and sale of alcohol.  In the nineteen twenties, the United States initiated a policy known as Prohibition which outlawed grog.  It was a miserable failure.  Except for organized crime.  The Mafia went ahead in leaps and bounds.  It moved rapidly to control the illicit alcohol trade and became exceedingly wealthy as a result. 

Banning a substance risks it becoming very valuable, since a diminution in supply increases its market price.  When something becomes both relatively scarce and highly priced, organized criminal gangs get interested. 

One other lesson was on display.  Human beings cannot be controlled as to what they will eat and drink and consume.
  To control that is to control the human body; any state that overreaches in an attempt to control the body of every citizen has become authoritarian.  Those states that actually achieve it for a time have become totalitarian. 

Fast forward to the illicit drug trade.  It is a modern example of the failed policy of Prohibition.  As Gwynne Dyer wrote recently,

Twenty years ago Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner, the most influential economist of the 20th century, and an icon of the right, said: "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel." It is only because the government makes the drugs illegal that the criminal cartel has a highly profitable monopoly on meeting the demand.

On the issue of the rights and authority of government to control what we ingest, Dyer went on:

Milton Friedman also said: "Government never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do." But there are a quarter of a million Americans in jail for possessing or selling drugs. Nobody is in jail for producing, marketing or eating junk food.

Dyer reckons that all senior politicians know this but to promote the de-criminalisation of drugs would mean  electoral suicide, so no-one (at least while in office) promotes it.  Anyone politician of any standing that even hints at it is immediately attacked from every quarter. 

Friedman was right, of course, but 40 years of the war on drugs have also shown that arguments based on logic, natural justice, or history (the obvious parallel with alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s and early 1930s) have very little effect on policy in the main drug-importing nations. Many politicians there know that the war on drugs is futile and stupid, but the political cost of leaving the herd and saying so out loud is too high.

The Christian approaches this question in two ways.  Firstly, there is the issue of the legitimate role and responsibility of the State, as the minister and servant of God.  We challenge anyone to develop a biblically coherent case from Holy Writ to show that the Lord Himself has delegated to the State, His servant the authority and power to legislate and control what people eat and drink. It is a vast overreach of state power and an act of rebellion against the Most High.

Secondly, Christians believe in freedom of conscience.  In part, freedom of conscience means that people have a freedom right (as far as the State is concerned) to go to Hell in the way of their choice.   Sinful men do sinful things which leads to their destruction.  Trying to prevent them sinning is futile. 

Now it may well be entirely appropriate for civil society to educate and warn people of the dangers and harm that results from particular behaviours and ingestion.  But prevention, using the power of the State, is in an entirely different league. 

Meanwhile, criminal gangs are more powerful now around the world than they have ever been--even to the point of actually threatening the sovereignty of states that incubate them.  And the illicit drug trade is at the very centre of it.  The evils these criminal monster wreak are far, far worse than the harm prohibition is designed to prevent.