For most of my life, I have been a drug legalizer. I came to this conclusion while sitting at a campus lounge reading Adam Smith’s treatment of the English corn laws. It struck me at the time that if you replaced “corn” with “drugs” you have a nearly flawless argument against prohibition. It was one of those revelations common in the youth of the intellectually curious. It is also common amongst lunatics who end up in cults, but that’s not unimportant. At that age, simplicity is naturally more attractive because the mind is untrained and inexperienced. As you grow older you come to understand that the world is an infinite combination of simple transactions, thus making itself unknowingly complex.

Still, I have stuck with the idea of legalizing drugs.  The cost of locking up a million drug offenders is high. That portion alone is something like 50 billion in taxes. Layer on the courts, cops and social service barnacles and the war on drugs probably costs us a hundred billion a year on the conservative side.  These guys say that’s a good number, but this site puts the number much higher. Put a million people in jail at $50K a man and you get 50 billion. The basic numbers alone have always struck me as proof enough that the drug war is a scam and a failure. Even accepting there is a cost to legal drug use, it has always seemed to me that the scales tip in favor of legalizing as Milton Friedman argues here.

There is another argument, one I’ve often used against libertarians when I don’t feel like hearing them go on forever about weed. That is, people are all for legal drugs until Walmart has a sale on their extra special brand of heroine. That’s when the women start mobilizing for the children. Libertarians hate that argument, because it is true. Libertarians, like liberals, have an uncomfortable relationship with the human condition. Honestly, I never much cared for it either, but it avoided hearing yet another lecture on the evils of the drug war. Libertarians are like all fanatics in that they can’t change their mind and they won’t change the subject.

What I’ve never thought through, has been well thought out by Peter Hitchens. I don’t entirely agree with Hitchens, but he offers up something I’m finding more attractive as I grow older. That is the central question of human society. What sort of society do you want to live in as a free man? Do you want one where drug addicts fill the parks and drunks fill the doorways? Or, do you want one where the drunks and drug addicts find it hard to be drunks and drug addicts? If it is the latter, then the question is not about how we legalize. The question is how we come up with better forms of prohibition.

In that regard, Hitchens is correct when he argues against addiction as a disease. This exchange is good stuff. Drug addiction is no more a disease than jumping off a building. I have some tendency toward addiction. I know this because I have plenty of addicts in my family tree. I really like getting drunk and I used to like tobacco. I temper my drunkenness and avoid tobacco. I hate cancer and tooth decay. There’s nothing I can do to prevent either of them other than pray. Calling addiction a disease is simply excusing behavior that civil and sane people want to limit in themselves and others.

I don’t know the right answer, but I am reconsidering the idea of legalization. It may be more economically efficient to legalize drugs. It may be economically efficient to kill malformed babies. It may be more efficient to kill old people when they reach 70. Western civilization did not come into existence because of efficiency. There’s no libertarian argument to explain the rise of the West. The story of the West is like minded people working to create a world they wanted and killing anyone who tried to stop them. There’s an appeal there that does not exist in the ovens of the Left or the soulless machinery of the libertarian.

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