Ty: Do you take drugs Danny?
Danny: Every day.
Ty: Good. So what’s the problem?
Caddyshack
Drugs are bad because if you do drugs, you’re a hippie, and hippies suck.
Eric Cartman, South Park
Different views on a difficult social issue, for sure. The stoners who own the groovy good times van in this picture, outside my hotel in New Orleans at the moment, side with Ty Webb.
But in keeping with the Daily Affirmations philosophy of “tough stands on tough issues” (or is it “serve the queen bee,” I can never remember), its time to take a stand on one of the most compelling moral issues of our day—the War on Drugs. Actually, that was more of a compelling issue in the 60s and 70s, but better late than never.
Imagine, if instead of chocolate, Milton Hershey and his other chocolate-making buddies had gone into ganja, weed, Mary Jane, all those years ago. Suppose instead of building up a factory in mid-west Pennsylvania full of Oompa-Loompas making everlasting gobstoppers and purifying his chocolate in a river, they instead processed coca or marijuana leaves (from South America) on a factory line like Charlie Chaplin’s bolt fastener in Modern Times. Suppose they applied their entrepreneurial skills to promoting drugs instead of chocolate, and polite society became hooked on getting its rush from puffing the magic dragon instead of from fudge and Oreos. Hershey and all the others who rushed in to emulate his success would have lobbied for laws to push their competitors (i.e. chocolate manufacturers) out of business. This isn’t so crazy. Coca-cola originally contained small amounts of cocaine, for example. And, after all, a lot of these drugs weren’t criminalized until the 1920s or 30s. Congress and the states might have banned chocolate as the harmful substance instead of drugs, and we’d have grown up in a world where marijuana or other drug use might seem as normal as eating chocolate today. Except with less fudgy residue around the mouth and fingertips.
Imagine that world. Fatties roaming thru bad neighborhoods at night looking for a snicker’s fix. Shady travel agents booking “holiday” trips to Zurich and Geneva so clients can sample “the bean” in its pure form. Average teens making do with jawbreakers or lemon drops, while the Heathers and other cool kids break out the chocolate chips after football games and before prom, or on graduation night, when they hit the “hard stuff”…dark chocolate. Reese’s peanut butter cups made with, gag, vanilla yogurt. The “CEA” funding cocoa eradication raids in Peru, and following around fat guys at the Miami docks or along the RioGrande. Federal prosecutors trying to shut down California would have legalized “chocolate clinics,” which California legalized because chocolate is shown to have a somewhat beneficial effect on heart disease, where fat guys would go for their “prescriptions.” Richard Pryor singlehandedly starting the dreaded 1979 “chocolate fondue” craze. We’d hear warnings from time to time about sinister “Mexican hot chocolate” or the dreaded “white chocolate” coming across the border smuggled in balloons inserted into people’s body cavities. Sidebar, the Mexican hot chocolate at Café Pasqual’s in Santa Fe is one of the things that no life is complete without having at least once.
You get the point. Hershey went into chocolate, rightly or wrongly drugs got banned through the years, and now if you want to get high you have to make do with drinking, eating bad food, smoking, driving motorcycles, abusing cough syrup, having dangerous sex, sniffing glue, watching TV 18 hours a day, or eating chocolate. That’s totally bogus, dude.
Who decided that? Those idiots in the legislatures and Congress, that’s who. The ones all of you voted for (or didn’t because you decided you had better things to do on election day, like watch Tyra Banks re-runs and eat cheetoes). These are the same people who do lots of other crazy things in your name, like ban murder, rape and kidnapping, set up social welfare programs to help the poor, established free public schools, regulated businesses like insurance, utilities, banking (bad example), built roads (ok, maybe another bad example). Sort of like the “what have the Romans ever done for us” scene in Life of Brian. How did they get that job? At least 50% of the voters put them there, and in most cases sent then back for a return engagement. Unfortunately, these same idiots, in addition to all those other accomplishments, say you have to take a class before you get married to avoid a tax, spend their time angsting over preventing 16 year old girls from getting tans while the economy falls off the cliff, who test high school athletes for steroids but not cocaine or crack, and who worry about “suggestive” high school cheerleaders routines. Here in Texas, Republicans seem hell-bent to remake the world to suit soccer moms, while Democrats make more news when they run off to another state to hide out than when they actually show up for work.
So, when this collection of Thomas Jeffersons criminalizes marijuana, why should anyone listen? Although its crystal clear to everyone except its users (which isn’t surprising because it affects the brain) that marijuana is hazardous to one’s health, so are lots of other legal things and activities to varying degrees. Snow skiing, mountain climbing, motorcycling, pop tarts, scotch, very sharp knives, trapeze flying, driving, walking across the street, Matthew McConaughey movies….
But these are legal and pot is not. Why? Because your elected heroes and protectors of the public say so. No amount of self-aggrandizing, goatee-wearing hipster ridicule or by sweater-wearing, know-it-all rationalization can erase that fact. To reject that is, in essence, to reject the primacy of law. Ours is a government of law, not of man. Law prevents tin-horn dictators like Chavez or Castro or Huey P. Long from governing by whim, and prevents anarchy. Even closet libertarians like myself believe in laws and that governments should enforce the laws. And unenforced or ignored laws are the same thing as no laws.
Believe it or not, despite the lingering existence of some normatively “unjust” laws, law on balance reflects the majority will. Lawmakers, whom we can remove if we dislike their choices, enact laws. Courts, made up of judges that we in Texas can remove if we dislike their rulings, apply those laws. Presidents, Governors, and Mayors subject to elections oversee law enforcement organizations who enforce those laws (or don’t, as the case may be). Lawmakers who refuse to adopt policies consistent with the majority will ultimately do not last, as we’ve seen in dramatic fashion after first the Reagan Revolution, then the Clinton Revolution, then the Contract with America, then the Obama “I’m OK, You’re OK” take-back. When society is through with the old crowd’s policies, the old crowd must either change or the voters elect a new crowd with a different mandate. That is the nature of our democracy.
So consider marijuana. Society’s moral consensus has changed on a wide range of issues in the last 50 years, and the laws have on balance kept up. The fact that marijuana and other drugs have remained illegal, albeit with laws enforced against suppliers more heavily than users, reflects another “unpopular truth” among some—society still disapproves of drug usage. Recently in the UK, when the Labor Government decriminalized marijuana conviction penalties, the public reacted with outrage while other nations objected, and the Government had no choice but to revert to the prior sentencing scheme.
I have no inherent objection to someone using marijuana or cocaine or heroin or whatever else gets you going. You want to harm your health, go right ahead. Unfortunately for you, Jeff Spicoli, society has made your choice for you. Laws prohibit drug usage, sales and distribution. To belittle the legitimacy of these laws as akin to speeding tickets misses the point entirely. One does not have the right to decide which laws he will obey; law is not something ordered a la carte as if one were at Luby’s. What would such a right do to a society? No matter what law you name, you can always find someone somewhere who opposes it. Child molester laws? Most child molesters probably oppose those laws. Laws prohibiting serial killing? Serial killers vote “no.” Whether a law is “right” or “just” or “fair” simply does not matter.
But I have a more practical objection to drug usage in the face of such laws, and choose not to associate with those whom I know to use illegal drugs as a consequence. I do not care to associate myself and my name with the carnage the drug industry has wrought in our inner cities and throughout much of the world. Because its usage and sale is illegal, drugs command a higher price than if they were traded in organized commercial markets. Because “drug contracts” cannot be enforced in the courts, drug criminals must enforce their deals and preserve their “market share” by violence and intimidation. Drug violence, which arises as a transaction cost of making revenues and supplying users, has ravaged most American inner cities with official corruption and both random and targeted violence. Drug cartels whose revenues depend on supplying drugs to homeless crack addicts and preppy Amherst pot smokers alike, have through assassinations, attacks, and corruption, destabilized governments, diverted humanitarian aid, enslaved and oppressed millions, and caused countless deaths. What funds the Taliban? Poppy sales revenues. Anyone up for a Ciudad Juarez holiday these days? Those who become addicted must ultimately commit other crimes to fund their addiction, which normally leaves them incapable of performing any normal job. The human toll this causes on families, friends, co-workers, and ultimately other social institutions like emergency rooms, counseling organizations, and the like, has staggering costs. Nearly all this is due to the sale and use of an illegal product with an inelastic demand.
Just like all those flappers and zoot suiters having a great time at the local speakeasy made possible a monster like Capone, so too does you and your girlfriend getting fried at your cousin Ned's Labor Day party help make possible drive-by shootings that leave infants dead. Numerous other intervening causes exist, of course, but these things wouldn’t happen without people using illegal drugs. I do not care to be a link in that chain, or have my name associated with anyone who is.
Former Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis once told me and others a story about being pulled over by a state trooper for driving far above the speed limit. The cop didn’t give him a ticket. He did worse—he gave him a lecture. The cop said that if Speaker Lewis wanted to drive that fast, he should go back to Austin and pass a law allowing people to drive that fast. But if he wasn’t willing to do that, he should follow the laws that he makes just like all the rest of us. Speaker Lewis said he felt about three inches tall after that dressing down.
So, hippies, party on if you must. Leave me out of it.
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