Drugs and the Morality of Legalization

Are Drugs a Moral Issue?
First it is necessary to determine what constitutes a moral precept. Then it is necessary to determine what, if any, moral precepts apply to a given issue. Finally, after these are established, it is possible to determine whether drug policy should be driven as a moral absolute, or as a pragmatic issue.

To start, the issue of human rights arises. Do humans have innate rights? If so, what is the authority that gives these rights their force? And what exactly are those rights?

Positive Rights
Human rights are seen two separate and diametrically opposite ways. The first way is through “positive” rights, which is a derivation of evolutionary, natural law. If natural law is thought to be “natural law, tooth and claw”, or “red in tooth and nail”, the survival of the fittest, the “will to power”, then the most evolutionarily fit will assume the most power, including the power to declare the rights that others are allowed to have. Under such a scheme, the only rights humans would possess are the ones “positively” designated: positive rights. This is the view of human rights that is held by Philosophical Materialists, Atheists and totalitarians.

Negative Rights
The second viewpoint on human rights is that humans have innate rights that are bestowed from authority above and beyond the authority of any human. No human has the authority to revoke these rights, which are termed “unalienable” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and which are preserved in the Bill of Rights, especially in amendments 9 and 10. These rights are designated “negative” rights because they include the rights to all pursuits that are not specifically prohibited by legislation. This view of human rights necessarily requires the view that a higher power is the authority that gives human rights their undeniability and force.

Why Choose Negative Rights?
So in the first viewpoint, positive rights are not absolute, and are determined solely at the disgression of other, more powerful humans. This elicits variable, situational “ethics”, that are devised and used to control populations; these are the rights of statists, totalitarians over the rights of the individual.

The second viewpoint, negative rights, presumes an absolute set of human rights which are liberties not to be removed from humans; laws are used only as necessary to facilitate and mediate social situations (stopping at intersections which display a red light) and to deal with destructive social aberrations (murder, robbery), not as general control for all personal behaviors. These are the rights of individuals over the restricted rights of the state. Historically the USA has chosen and cherished negative rights.

Morality and Negative Rights
If the term “morality” refers to behavior that is consistent with the liberty of negative rights and with certain other concepts such as personal responsibility, integrity, and justice, then we can begin to judge the inherent moral aspects of our nation’s policies, such as the war on drugs.

In fact certain rules of thumb can be enlisted to help us decide. These can be derived by asking the following questions:

1. Is it moral to make decisions concerning the safety of social situations?

2. Is it moral to make decisions concerning the safety of individual adults?

3. Is it moral to be required to save individual adults from destructive behaviors, against their will?

4. Is it moral to protect children from destructive behaviors?

While there are other ramifications of moral theory, these four suffice to proceed with the argument concerning drug policy.

Morality and Coherence with Negative Rights
It is consistent with negative human rights and with personal responsibility, integrity and justice, to make moral decisions for social situations, but not for individuals; individuals are responsible for their own decisions concerning their own safety, if it does not affect others in a social situation.

It follows that it is not consistent with negative human rights, personal responsibility, integrity and justice to save individual adults from destructive behaviors forcibly.

However, for children who have undeveloped skills of personal responsibility, it is moral to protect them from destructive behavior.

In answering the question, “are drugs a moral issue”, we can now answer that only for protection of children is this the case.

Using these precepts, we can now turn toward analyzing the U.S. policy on drugs.


The War on Drugs:
Recent news items include substance abuse of canned air and aerosol whipped cream. When I was young it was sniffing glue, and every sniffable substance has been huffed ever since. There were spells of choking off the blood to the brain and releasing just as the addict passed out. Meth and other drugs were created out of drug store commodities. There are so many ways to create intoxicants or intoxicating experiences that they can’t all be banned without measures too draconian to consider.

The U.S. war on drugs has failed to prevent drugs from their pervasive capture of Americans, from adults clear down into elementary schools. If American borders are porous to people, how could we keep out drugs? The hotter the war on drugs, the more available they have become, and from a pragmatic standpoint, that should be evidence for either a vastly tougher war, or declaring peace.

Legalizing drugs that strip away the brain, change one’s entire personality, and rip apart families seems like a moral issue. But is it? If an adult makes that choice, should he not be free to do so, if he doesn’t violate any other statutes? The moral precepts above indicate so.

Moreover, if children already have access to drugs, then any moral aspect of maintaining drug illegality automatically loses its validity: illegality has failed to produce the needed results. The type of war needed to produce the desirable results would necessarily produce a severe reduction in human rights to all. A real war always does that; this war would be a permanent war, with permanent reductions in human rights.

In terms of drug availability, nothing would actually change much if drugs became legal, cheap, and marketed like, say, beer. What would change is the behavior of international drug thugs, smugglers and distributors.

Opponents have long said that legalization sends the wrong message, that more people would become users. But the message being sent now is that it is acceptable to defy the law when you are pursuing a personal path. Not only are the drugs illegal, so are the means necessary to get them: robbery, burglary, sex for drugs, etc. Since these are necessary for many or most users, for them the law ceases to be a behavior modifying feature in their decision process.

Alcohol policy went through this same thought process. Alcohol kills brains and families and innocent bystanders too. But would we ever go back to prohibition?
Prohibition produced lawlessness and death well beyond the evil of the addiction.

I have never, ever advocated the legalization of drugs, until now. My reasoning has been based on the moralization of drug availability to children. But drugs are available to children right now. Not just drugs but possibly dirty, contaminated drugs (if that’s not an oxymoron). And drugs in unlimited amounts, if the child can raise the cash. Any moral dogma here, then, is obviated by the evidence: legalization could not be worse than what we are doing now.

If drugs were regulated rather than banned, some really good things would happen, including the cessation of drug murders and halting the enrichment of brutal criminals. But also a huge amount of money would be freed up, for return to the taxpayers (OK, I know, that would never happen). But the focus could be less on catching murderous drug runners, and more on funding rehabilitation, education, and nailing other criminal types, such as congressmen and governors.

The prisons would empty out a sizable portion of their populations. Leftover cash could be spent for prisoner rehab here too. Policing efforts would be relieved of much of their current work load. Courts and the entire justice system would experience a vastly reduced load.

I am not endorsing a free license to use drugs on the job, in public, while driving, or in any hazardous fashion, any more than I endorse using alcohol in those situations. The correlation between drugs and alcohol is not perfect but it is similar. Alcohol is as damaging to youth as are drugs. This is the war we should fight: keeping both alcohol and drugs away from the nation’s children. This is an entirely different arena than banning drugs and alcohol from use by adults.

Of course adults will sometimes buy these things for underage users. As it is now, though, drugs are marketed directly to, and by, underage users, supplied by adults. It can’t be more difficult to control than that.

There is one alternative that seems to work well. In Singapore, anyone caught with drugs is executed. It is clean, simple, and effective. It even worked with chewing gum, which was banned (for a time) due to gum blobs on city streets: get caught with gum, get lashed with cane whips. No need for a trial or jury; the tribunal could dispose of justice much faster. And if caning doesn’t work, well…. Singapore is mostly drug free.

I have come to think that maybe it is not the possession that is the crime. It is whatever other laws or transgressions that occur which are the crime. Perhaps if we cane anyone who sells to the under-aged we might make more progress.

I support legalizing drugs, with the following caveat: if, and only if, rigid provisions are made to protect society from users, and children from pushers. I think that that moral issue remains. Adult users should be responsible for themselves, just as are adult alcoholics.

The sooner this is done, the better off we will be.