Drugs, Liberty, and the Right

By Anthony Gregory
First of all, the concept of having a free society without regulations on
business, taxation of incomes or sales, protectionist tariffs, gun control laws,
government education, government healthcare, subsidies, or violations of basic
rights of due process yet somehow maintaining a war on drugs that somehow
prevents people from using, manufacturing or distributing certain chemicals to
people who want them, is absurd and unimaginable. How can anything close to a
libertarian philosophy allow for a State empowered enough to control what people
put into their own bodies? It cant. Conservatives who say libertarianism is fine
except the drug issue do not, I believe, truly comprehend the implications of a free
society, of individual liberty, of a laissez faire economy. Aside from the ethical and
pragmatic problems with drug prohibition, the program is so incompatible with
liberty and the free market that they simply could not exist together. There is no
such thing as a conservative version of libertarianism that excludes the right to
determine what to put in ones own body. This is why, at the end of the day, most
conservatives who say they are libertarians except on the drug issue will reveal all
sorts of other qualifications and reservations concerning other areas of civil society,
once prodded or questioned enough.
Indeed, as Halderman points out, the Progressives deserve much of the
blame for the drug laws. Before the Progressive Era, there were few drug laws and
drug problems. There were alcoholics, and the most widely abused drug was
probably Laudanum, a beverage of alcohol and opium consumed by middle-class
Americans. But even those who drank more than they should have just like most
today who drink more alcohol than they probably should were still able to function
in society and posed no threat to their neighbors, much less national security.
The first drug laws were on the state level, and pertained mainly to alcohol.
In California, Opium became illegal in the late 19th century mainly as a way to
harass Chinese-Americans. It was during the Progressive Era that the federal
government passed the first major national drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of
1914, which forbade heroin and required prescriptions for cocaine and morphine.
The culmination of the Progressive Era in domestic policy the biggest achievement
of the Progressives was probably alcohol prohibition, with the Volstead Act and 18th
Amendment. When alcohol prohibition ended, federal bureaucrats like Harry
Anslinger were peeved they didnt have anything to do in the prohibition
department, so it wasnt long before Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of
1938 and Franklin Roosevelt signed it. So the first federal marijuana laws were part
of the New Deal. The next major federal interventions on the drug issues, such as
the creation of drug scheduling and the ban of LSD and other drugs, came during
the Great Society.