e always memorialize the fallen heroes of our wars by saying "They fought to preserve our liberties." True enough. However, no Fascist or Communist has ever taken away any of our liberties. The liberties we lost in the 20th Century were taken away by people who regarded themselves as fine, upstanding citizens. Tyranny was voted by Congress, signed by a President, and upheld by the Supreme Court, despite the First Amendment. It does no good to pledge allegiance to "liberty and justice for all" if we are unable to recognize transgressions, or if we are unwilling to allow people to do things which are disapproved by the majority. I refer, of course, to the War-On-Drugs.
he failure of Prohibition should have told us exactly what the outcomes would be of the War-On-Drugs. They are the same as the outcomes of Prohibition: gangs, drive-by shootings, corruption of the police and other officials and a general decline in law-and-order. It is like the war in Vietnam. It was a war we could not win, a war that should never have been fought in the first place.
he whole point of the science of civilization is to learn from experience. Perhaps as a society we failed to learn anything from the failure of Prohibition because the science of civilization did not exist, so there were no scholars to point out that the War-On-Drugs is a direct violation of the Ideal of Liberty. Social ideals are the hypotheses of this new science, a science which I have invented, and set forth here for the first time. The Ideal of Liberty says that all citizens may do whatever they like in private, no matter how risky, so long as it puts no one at involuntary risk. I can show by many examples that this is the Ideal of Liberty and that the War-On-Drugs violates it.
ome of the illegal drugs are very risky, but fewer people die of them than die directly or indirectly as a result of tobacco and alcohol. Besides, everything is risky. Voluntary risk is irrelevant. We allow people to drive in cars, even though forty thousand people a year die in them. At least another hundred thousand become paralyzed or severely brain damaged. Another twenty thousand pedestrians and bicyclists are killed by cars every year. We allow people to climb eight thousand meter mountains, even though a third of the participants in this sport die of it. For every four people who climb Mount Everest, one will die. The glaciers around Mount Everest are graveyards, containing hundreds of bodies. Voluntary risk is irrelevant.
t is not just the War-On-Drugs that is wrong. It is all the blue laws that were voted in when women got the vote in 1919. This includes the outlawing of drinking, gambling and prostitution. It is not that I advocate or wish to practice these things. Liberty means allowing other people to do things you disapprove of, if they will give you the same right. We all have different lifestyles, different tastes. It doesn't matter if something is a sin according to the preachers. I could say preaching is a sin, since it is a revival of the Puritanism which burned heretics and witches in our early history.
have a lot of Web friends who enjoy marijuana and magic mushrooms. And they are very nice, kind, loving, spiritual people, the best people I know. Yet, they run a terrible risk of persecution at the hands of the jack-booted Nazi thugs of the DEA!! ARGHHH! We should rise up in righteous indignation and overthrow the government that imposes such tyranny upon us. After all, that is why America was founded in the first place. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson 225 years ago, set off a rebellion and a revolution. It must have seemed to the Founding Fathers, scions of the Enlightenment, that Puritanism had been put down and rejected forever as a mere superstition of the dark ages. But apparently Puritanism was only lying low, gathering up its energies, to return with a vengeance in the 20th Century. A Puritan can be defined as anyone who is afraid that somewhere, somehow, someone may be having fun. And the hippies of the 1960s did seem to be having lots of fun, with pot and psychedelic drugs, free love, rock and roll, and freedom of expression in art, face-painting, spiritual and metaphysical pursuits. All of this was to be crushed out of existence in the following decades.
hich is the stronger allegiance? Our pledge of allegiance to "liberty and justice for all," or our actual allegiance to stamping out the production, sale and use of illegal drugs, no matter what the cost in money, the corruption of law and order in nations like Columbia, and the cost in blood on the streets here at home, as rival gangs shoot it out in the night? Whole neighborhoods of our big cities are blighted by gangs. Whole generations are swallowed up in the gangster life, with its blood rituals of initiation. These are the fruits of tyranny. There would be no economic basis for gangs if drugs, gambling and prostitution were made legal. And who are these tyrants? They might be your neighbors. They might be your grandmothers. Normal, law-abiding people, who sing the National Anthem without a shred of irony. We have met the enemy and it is us.
grew up in Oklahoma, which remained a dry state long after Prohibition was repealed in every other state. There was a curious alliance between my grandmother's Women's Christian Temperance Union and the bootleggers. Neither wanted Prohibition to be repealed. As the saying went, "The drys have their law, and the wets have their liquor." The WCTU seemed satisfied that the wicked were punished, while bootleggers and moonshiners made a good living, since liquor was made expensive by its illegality. And the same is true today of the Coca leaf, marijuana plants, opium gum and the various natural psychedelics. Prohibition creates another problem. Addicts have to come up with a lot of money to support their heroin or cocaine habit. So they turn to armed robbery of gas stations and convenience stores, which in turn, often leads to the murder of the clerks. Their blood is on your hands, you fine upstanding citizens, if you are one of the tyrants who support the war on drugs!
he violence of American society began with Prohibition, and continues because of the War-On-Drugs. We not only incarcerate more of our population than any other nation, we also have the highest murder rates among First World Industrialized nations.
s one piece of evidence for that claim, I refer you to a New York Times article of June 27, 1990, p. A10, which offers a comparison among industrialized countries of the number of murders per year per 100,000 young men between ages fifteen and twenty-four. The years of the study were 1986-1987. Austria was the safest place, with 0.3 murders per 100,000, followed by Japan with 0.6 per 100,000, followed by West Germany, Denmark, Portugal and England. England had 1.2 murders per 100,000. Over the entire nation, we had twenty-one murders per 100,000, but some regions were much worse. Michigan had a murder rate of 232 young men murdered per 100,000. Detroit's rate was higher still, well over 300, a thousand times worse than the murder rate in Austria. Murder has become the number one occupational hazard for women, in part because of the number of convenience store clerks murdered by utterly sociopathic robbers, and in part due to berserk mass killers. "Going Postal" is what we call it in the US. And this doesn't even count the thousands of young women who just "go missing" every year, and are never found, obviously the victims of dozens of serial killers like Ted Bundy, smart enough to hide the bodies where they will never be found.
s the satisfaction the Puritans get from "punishing the wicked" sufficient to reconcile us to a murder rate 1000 times worse than other First World Nations? That is comparable to Third World countries like Liberia! Can we justify the murder of hundreds of convenience store clerks by desperate crazed junkies? Perhaps the Puritans think that legalization would produce more desperate crazed junkies. It wouldn't if we treated addiction as an illness rather than a crime. How do I know? Look at the example of the Netherlands.
arijuana has never been illegal in Holland for citizens, and they treat addiction to harder drugs as medical conditions, rather than a crime. Addicts from other countries are deported. Treatment usually consists in free maintenance doses of the drug of addiction. And they have seen no increase in addicts nor any rise in other sorts of crime. The rest of Europe is now following their lead, and has begun to introduce a little bit of liberty and common sense into their drug policies. See Newsweek, "Europeans Just Say 'Maybe'," 11/1/99, p. 53.
he Puritan Overclass in the US may be afraid that legalization would result in chaos---streetwalkers on every corner and crack dealers in every schoolyard. But notice that the definition of liberty only applies to private behavior. It does not follow that it must be permitted in public. Every community should have the right to determine its own composition and to set standards for what is done in public, within that community. This is another ideal, that of Public Vs Private behavior. This ideal, one of several which I regard as true and well-established, says that every community has the right to set its own standards for what is allowed in public, what is permitted at work, or in stores, or on public media, or public transportation. See the chapter "True Ideals."
he Ideal of Liberty says we must allow prostitution, but we do not have to allow streetwalkers. We can instead have private "sporting houses," which was, in fact, the pattern in the US in the 19th Century, before the 20th Century wave of Puritanism. I suggest drawing a distinction between the public Herb shops and the private dealers, who must deliver to your home.
n the public Herb shops, we would find natural leaf tobacco, opium gum, local bottled wines and beers, marijuana, magic mushrooms, peyote buds, fresh or dried coca leaves, ayahuasca vines, and herbs and aromatic plants of all kinds. Cocaine, Camels and Jack Daniels would be purchased from a private dealer. Thus, you see that I advocate putting some things in the Private category that are presently in the Public category. Cigarettes and distilled spirits, for instance.
he boundary of all liberties, including religious freedom, freedom of the press, personal liberty, and free speech, is placing others at involuntary risk. Some say that drugs, gambling and prostitution do have involuntary victims, because legalization increases public health problems, such as addiction. While this factual claim is untrue, let us ask if drugs, gambling and prostitution in private would put anyone at involuntary risk. I freely admit that doing it in public would place people at involuntary risk, which is why it should be kept in the private category. Drinking and driving is not allowed in public, either.
ny activity can be said to have unwilling victims, in the grievous loss suffered by friends and relatives of the diver who is now a quadriplegic, or the parents of the toddler drowned in the backyard pool. These are accidental victims, not covered by the rule on involuntary risk. Note that "victimless crime" is an oxymoron. How would you punish it? Make the pot smoker smoke still more pot?
t is possible to do something about the public health problems associated with drug use. Communities with long exposure to a particular drug have developed customs which protect them from addiction and disease. Pre-Columbian Native Americans did not have lung cancer or emphysema, because they didn't smoke all day or every day. Smoking was part of a social ritual, when entertaining visitors, or conducting pow-wows. Italian peasants don't become alcoholics because they use wine as a food. It is only consumed at meals, with grandma and the children present (who get watered wine). It is shameful to become inebriated at the family table. Distilled spirits are avoided. Andean peasants don't have a cocaine addiction, because they chew the raw coca leaves, with lime, and they do so to give them strength and endurance in the rarefied atmosphere of the Andes. Turkish peasants don't have heroin addictions because they use the raw opium gum only to treat toothache and other pain. It is apparent that we should all try to emulate these folk customs. Just to take opium as one example, the experience of physicians is that one never becomes addicted to opium if it is only used to alleviate pain, no matter how much opium it takes to accomplish that.
ut how do we treat addicts? I would suggest two routes. Those who wish to get rid of their addiction can be admitted for a free 6 month stay in the locked grounds of a rehabilitation center. Those who do not should be given a free maintenance injection every day at the local Free Clinic. As for the rehab center, once a person voluntarily signs himself in, she has to stay for 6 months. There would be doctors and medicines to help with the initial detoxification. Everyone who has passed that phase would be put on a low dose of Prozac to increase the Serotonin level in their brains. Serotonin induces neurogenesis. It takes 3-4 weeks for a neuron to become mature, and several more weeks or months for it to be put to use. That is why a person must stay for 6 months. That is long enough for the brain to heal and relearn how to live a sober, unintoxicated life.
ouldn't we have more junkies if we legalized drugs? The Puritans were sure there would be more alcoholics as a result of repealing Prohibition. But that did not happen. So the question now is whether or not the ideal of liberty (now that you understand its implications) is true or not?
ow do we apply scientific method to social ideals? What we need is the equivalent of a theory, a test, and the results. Then, as the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the alternatives, my Dear Watson, whatever remains, no matter how unpalatable, must be the truth." I have taken a few liberties with this famous passage from "The Sign of Four." The alternative that survives all testing is the well-established conclusion. Maybe at some future time, a better theory will be thought up, or continued pushing on the envelope of testing may eventually refute even a well-established theory. But for the time being, it is the best we can do. It is the only known solution. See the chapter "Scientific Method" for more details.
n the Science of Civilization, which I sometimes call "Utopian Analysis," for reasons to be explained later, the equivalent of a test is a political experiment, such as the 75 years of the Socialist experiment in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the afore-mentioned experiment in Prohibition. The result of such a test is what I call a "normative particular." I suppose you could call it a "value fact," so long as it is understood that values are not facts, nor facts values, nor can one be inferred from the other, which would commit the Naturalistic Fallacy. What we observe is the failure of socialism, whenever and wherever it has been tried. We also observe the failure of prohibition. The collapse of the Soviet Union is an historical fact, but the failure of the Soviet Union or of Prohibition is an observed normative particular. We did not infer it. We could not have predicted it without making the test. It is an object lesson from history. And we shall see in the course of this book that every social controversy is a consequence of two conflicting social ideals. This is the "analysis" part of Utopian Analysis, digging out the relevant ideals. And we shall also see that every major ideal and its alternatives has been tried, somewhere, at some time. So history provides us with all the political experiments we need to study. I do not regard communes (intentional communities which have withdrawn from the larger societies) as adequate political experiments. A commune can live on idealism or the charisma of its leaders. Real world political experiments cannot.
n ideal is something to be pursued, but rarely perfectly attained. "Utopia" is often taken to mean "perfection," where every true ideal is fully realized. I do not use the term that way. In my usage, any attempt to improve society is utopian, and ideas about improving society should be practical. "Utopia" does not mean "the impossible." In looking for evidence for liberty, we must compare societies which are relatively authoritarian with those which are relatively libertarian. So it is Sparta versus Athens, Rome versus Classical Greece, France of the Sun King versus England of the Glorious Revolution, which made Commons superior to monarchy, Lords or Barrister. More recently, it is 19th Century America versus the monarchies, Czars and Emperors of 19th Century Europe, and during the Cold War, it was the democratic West versus the autocratic East.
he Hellenic world imitated Athens, not Sparta. Two thousand years of scholars have preferred Classical Greek culture over the brutal world of the Roman Empire, at least in most respects. During the Cold War, the Soviets had to put up walls to keep their population in, since it was rapidly evaporating to the West. And 19th Century America was the light of the world. That is why immigrants poured into this country from all over the world, and still do. The people of France gave us the Statue of Liberty because they admired our society above all others. "Send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free," wrote Emma Lazarus in the famous poem now found on a plaque at the foot of Lady Liberty. "I lift my lamp above the Golden Door," says Lady Liberty, and so she does. Our ideals of liberty are the light of the world, and have spread the ideals from the Book of the Law she holds in her left hand around the world. Now if only she would shine a little light on the darkness we have built right here at home!
Copyright © Dr.H 2001
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