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November 29, 2006

A Challenge for 'Libertarian' Democrats

There are a lot of things that libertarians and Democrats are never going to agree on. But there's one area where they ought to be in agreement, if there are in fact any areas of overlap between them: the drug war. Every year the federal government expends billions of dollars trying to prevent people from putting certain substances in their body, with negligible effects on the availability of those substances but with fearful consequences for the American people.

For the average libertarian, federal drug laws are an abomination. Congress has no power under the Constitution to tell people what they can or can not put into their bodies. At best, Congress could place some taxes or tariffs on illegal drugs, but nothing in Article I suggests that Congress has the ability to outlaw drugs simply because they are viewed as harmful to the users.

From a personal liberty standpoint, the view is similar. Believe it or not, I have never used illegal drugs in my life. Doubtless I was a victim of all the anti-drug propaganda I was fed as a child. But I see no reason whatsoever to prevent people from using illegal drugs if they so choose. If it makes you happy to smoke marijuana or shoot heroin, that's your business, not mine. I'd be in favor of making sure that laws against driving under the influence applied to driving while using those substances as well, but if what you're doing doesn't harm others, outlawing it on the basis of 'your own good' strikes me as a terrible principle for any government. If we don't have the right to control our own bodies, our rights are basically null and void save for those the government is willing to grant us. While that is, de facto, how governments work, it is the antithesis of how government is supposed to work. When we establish governments, their primary purpose should be to protect our rights, not to decide what rights it is willing to grant us.

Then there is the question of collateral damage. Above and beyond the people who are killed or hurt in needless drug raids, there are the millions of people who live in neighborhoods that have been terribly damaged by crime, much of which is drug crime or drug-related crime. By making drugs illegal, the government has created as vast infrastructure of crime that disproportionately harms the poor and most-vulnerable members of our society. Ending the drug war won't make the poor any richer, but it might mean less of them having to worry about their children dying in senseless gang violence. It will take years to undo all the bad results brought on by drug criminalization, but that will only get worse over time until we finally choose to stop this 'war'.

Ending the drug war would have several positive outcomes. It would free up vast space in our jails currently occupied by people whose only crime was providing a substance other people were willing to buy. It will free up vast amounts of police time to investigate more important crimes; every minute a cop is trying to buy a dime bag from an informant is a minute the cop isn't trying to find out who burgled a home, raped a woman, or murdered someone. I know what I'd rather see the police doing. It would reduce the incentive for 'no-knock' raids on people's homes, the kind that place police and citizens alike in unnecessary danger just to prevent the alleged threat of a dealer flushing his stock. And it would scale back the unnecessarily broad power of the federal government to interfere in people's lives.

It is this last that I know scares some Democrats. I still recall with horror the opinion of Matt Yglesias to the ruling in Gonzales v. Raich: "Sympathetic as one might be to the defendants in this case, a victory for their side could have led to very bad consequences down the road." Yes, this might have led to some limitations on the power of the federal government, and we all know the horror this brings to some Democrats. Better that people suffer so we can use the power of the federal government to make more people suffer. Yes, I know that's not Yglesias' view; he thinks he's going to use the power of the federal government to solve the world's problems. Of course, a lot of despots rise to power with the intention to use government power to do good; we've seen how well that works out.

But if there are libertarian Democrats to be found out there, this would be a great place for them to start. If the Democrats are looking to draw in libertarians to their point of view, taking on America's foolish Drug War would be an excellent place to start the campaign.

Update: As I should have noted up front, this piece was inspired by Glenn Reynolds' look at the militarization of police forces.

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