[420 Girl]

Albert Einstein is often attributed as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Since the 1937 federal ban on marijuana, usage of the plant has gone up 4,000 percent according to the government’s own estimates. Yet the unwinnable war on drugs drags on and on.

The libertarian calls for an end to the drug war for multiple reasons. Those libertarians enamored with the Constitution, e.g., point out that nothing in the document grants the federal government authority to regulate drugs. Thus, at least at the federal level, drug prohibition is unconstitutional.

But the libertarian also rejects prohibition on the grounds that the state has no legitimate ownership over your body. Self-ownership was the rallying cry of the abolitionist libertarian William Lloyd Garrison, and this concept serves today as the philosophical foundation of libertarian thought. If you own your own body, then you have the right to do with it as you please, so long as you do not use it to initiate or threaten to initiate force or fraud against the person or justly-acquired property of anybody else.

There are also utilitarian arguments in favor of re-legalization. Drug prohibition creates a black market, which in turn causes the rate of violent crime to skyrocket. While firms compete on the free market through advertising and improving the quality and safety of goods and services, gangs on the black market compete with guns and violence. Re-legalization would solve this problem just as it did during alcohol prohibition. These days, you’d never see the employees of Jack Daniels shooting up the offices of Budweiser, and this is precisely because alcohol is no longer a black-market commodity.

As of 2007, we had over two million Americans in our overcrowded prisons and jails, over a quarter of whom were there on nonviolent drug-related charges. Unfortunately, violent criminals — e.g., rapists, thieves, murderers — are routinely released early on “good behavior” to make room for nonviolent drug users. Moreover, if cops were legally permitted to pursue those who initiate or threaten to initiate force or fraud instead of wasting their scarce time and our tax dollars pursuing the nonviolent, we’d have far less real crime.

The war on drugs also discourages the education of American youth. Whenever the state bans a certain substance, it artificially reduces the supply relative to the demand, which in turn drives up the price of the commodity and ensures huge profits for the peddlers. “Why waste time in school,” many poor children think, “when I could start making real money now?” Thus, drug prohibition draws many poor persons into the world of gang warfare.

Then there are the asset-forfeiture laws. If you’re accused of selling drugs, you can have your property seized by the cops. Even if you turn out to be innocent, your property is as good as gone. And when one considers the tens of billions of tax dollars spent every year on this frivolous crusade, it’s difficult not to think about economist Milton Friedman’s reference to the drug war as a “socialist enterprise.”

I can understand that some may be at first worried about this proposal. But when one considers that private companies will still be free to require potential employees to undergo testing, and that addicts are more likely to seek help when they don’t fear being arrested for coming forward, and that re-legalization would allow dying patients to self-medicate if they wish, it becomes clear that this is the only humane and sensible drug policy.

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