As quoted in Laurence Vance’s The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom, political philosopher John Gray states:

• The drug war has maimed, traumatized, or displaced uncounted numbers of people.
• In spite of it, drug use has remained embedded in the way we live.
• The costs of drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits.
• Penalizing drug use drives otherwise law-abiding people into the criminal economy.
• Prohibition exposes drug users to major health risks.
• Illegal drugs can’t easily be tested for quality and toxicity.
• A great many drug users in years past lived productive lives before drugs were banned.
• Drug users face inflated prices, health risks, and the threat of jail.
• Politicians who have used drugs have not suffered any significant political fallout.
• The extreme profit reaped from selling illegal drugs corrupts institutions and wrecks lives.
• The antidrug crusade in Mexico has escalated into something like low-intensity warfare.
• Some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money.

Seven reasons to oppose drug prohibition laws:

1. The war on drugs is a failure. The cost of drug prohibition far outweigh any possible benefits.
2. Drug prohibition is unconstitutional.
3. It is not the purpose of government to protect people from bad habits, harmful substances, or vice.
   Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action:
   “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”
4. The government has a problem with drug regulation, with arbitrary decisions as to what is legal and what isn’t. The drug war fosters too much trust in government regulators.
5. There is no government ban on alcohol and tobacco, yet abuse of the two are leading causes of death.
6. Vices are not crimes. You can’t equate making the moral case for drug freedom with making the moral case for murder, theft, or arson.
7. It is a grave mistake to look to the state to enforce morality.

Freedom, always freedom

The moral argument for the freedom to use or abuse drugs is for freedom’s sake. Freedom to use one’s property as one sees fit. Freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor in whatever way one deems appropriate.  Freedom to use one’s body in the manner of one’s choosing.  Freedom to follow one’s own moral code.  Freedom from being taxed to fund government tyranny. Freedom from government intrusion into one’s person life.  Freedom to be left alone.

It is those advocating the liberty to take drugs and a free market in drugs who are taking the moral high ground.  How can anyone with any sense of morality support seizing someone’s property, destroying his family, and locking him up in a cage to be raped and humiliated for smoking a plant the government doesn’t approve of?

The case for drug freedom is a moral case because the war on drugs is a war on natural, civil, personal, and constitutional rights. Who should determine how and why a drug should be used?  In a free society, it is the individual.  In an authoritarian society, it is the state.

What to Do?

It has not, nor will it ever be a better time to push for the repeal of the Controlled Substance Act. Democrats speak it in their platform.  Government does not have the right to tell a woman (and we add man) what she can do with her own body.  They are actually stating what we’ve been stating for 15 years—the government has no business in the doctor’s office.  They need to embrace the end of the drug war with their current platform.  To not do so would be hypocritical.

Yes, it is pleasant to dream that future President Harris, in the midst of all the other dilemmas she is facing, may one day ask herself whether America or the world can any longer afford the absurd war on drugs. We know, from his statements that former President Trump has no plan to change this for the better. Instead, he is projecting the death penalty for drug dealers, similar to socialist countries like China and the Philippines.  What would that hold then, for doctors convicted as drug dealers?  Death?

Why don’t conservatives oppose the war on drugs? Conservatives who claim to revere the Constitution should be ardently opposed to the drug war on the federal level.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, there are 18 specific powers granted to Congress—the enumerated powers.  Everything else is reserved to the states—with or without the Tenth Amendment.   Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to concern itself with the nature and quantity of any substance Americans inhale or otherwise take into their body.

So everyone needs to communicate with the democratic legislative candidates for this year’s elections and explain to them why they need to support the repeal of the CSA and make that a part of their platform.  Go to https://doctorsofcourage.org/call-to-action/communication-campaign/ for example letters to send to these candidates, as well as those to send to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.  I will be creating these messages and I welcome anyone else contributing.