Who Owns Your Body?

In the American Spectator, Peter Hitchens wrote an article, railing against conservatives and libertarians who support pot legalization. The war on drugs is one of those topics that can really bring out the crazy in otherwise reasonable people.

Hitchens' article brings up nearly every misguided mischaracterization of the effects of drugs and the laws against them on our society all in one short article. It's useful because it's almost the perfect storm of prohibitionist wrong-headedness.

I'll try to take his arguments one at a time. There's so many fallacies to debunk it's a bit overwhelming to contemplate. The only way I'm going to get through this is to digest it in small bits.

But first, Hitchens appears to have written at least one book directly on this topic. In the column, he writes:

SOME TIME AGO, I became aware that the supposed severity of my country’s drug laws was a sham, concealing a de facto decriminalization that had been proceeding for more than 40 years. This led me to examine a second mystery. What on earth, I wondered, could be the purpose of the repeated claims, in broadcasting, in the intelligent magazines, and on op-ed pages of major newspapers, that we were in fact enduring a Draconian prohibition regime? The authors of these arguments were clever and apparently informed. I wrote a book showing clearly that they were wrong, packed with unimpeachable historical research. It was almost universally unreviewed, though it had a reputable publisher, was ably publicized, and I am not completely obscure in my own country. After a while, the waters of silence closed over it, and it was as if it had never been written.

Jus a nitpick: it's all well and good to avoid self-promotion, but if you're the author of a book that deals directly with the subject you're writing about. It's only reasonable to at least give the title of the book and preferably a link to it! I searched around Amazon and first found The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs, but it didn't seem like that could have been the book he was talking about, because it wasn't written "some time ago," it's a brand new, just-released book that doesn't even have any Amazon reviews up yet. However, I can find no other book that closely matches the topic. So, to characterize his own just-released book as completely ignored seems very odd.

It's also interesting to note that Hitchens has been a great promoter of individual liberty and resistance of expanding state power, as he mentions early in the article and in such works as A Brief History of Crime and Abolition of Liberty (possibly different revisions/releases of essentially the same text: the book descriptions in Amazon are the same). That makes his views on the drug war even more puzzling.

Hitchens' first anecdote about the evils of drugs concerns Malcom Muggeridge:

But this process can go no further until the United Nations and several national governments can be persuaded to abandon laws against this drug which have been in place for nearly a century. Those interested in the origin of those laws should consult Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1972 autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time in which he jeered at the “respected citizens, clergymen, purported scientific investigators and other ostensibly informed and enlightened persons” whose apologies for hashish forced him to recall the “stupefied faces and inert minds,” resulting from marijuana use, which he had seen among students during the 1920s in Cairo. He described the legalization campaign as an instance of “the death wish at the heart of our way of life.”

Note the phrase "for nearly a century." That coincides with the dawn of the modern progressive movement. In the U.S. We were steamrolled right about then with a number of quickly-implemented constitutional amendments, including prohibition, the income tax, direct election of senators and women's suffrage, only one of which (women's suffrage) I'm prepared to concede was a reasonable amendment. It was a period of tremendous moral outrage, "experimental government" and the effective beginning of the rule by "experts" who would dictate to the masses for their own good. The eugenics movement rose out of the same origins and the same desire to "improve" the population whether it liked it or not.

While a century may seem like a long time to ephemeral creatures such as us, it's also instructive to note that we managed to thrive without prohibitions against marijuana for more than 130 years as a nation, hundreds of years as a colony, and many thousands of years as a species. In fact, one really can really only point to drugs becoming a pervasive social problem after they've been criminalized.

I have no doubt that the people Muggeridge saw in Cairo were pathetic, and that marijuana contributed to their state, but this anecdote does nothing to show that marijuana was causative -- it's almost a platitude that many (most) of these people would have led stupid and inert lives even absent marijuana. It also doesn't explain why we should go to great effort to deny them their drug and attempt to raise them up over their own objections. Throughout human history, the percentage of people who have led lives of no particular achievement or consequence approaches 100 percent. The vast majority of humanity merely exists, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. At least, the burden of proof is on you if you want to fight against the tide of tens of thousands of years of empirical evidence.

Hitchens continues:

The left, or what remains of it, is now just a political vehicle for urban bourgeois bohemians who want to remove the remaining legal, moral, and customary obstacles to self-indulgence they embraced half a century ago, dressed up as militant rationalism....

The old, socially conservative left of temperance and working-class self-improvement, often rooted in the churches, has largely vanished. The ascetic, self-disciplined left of the Bolshevik sort, whether Trotskyist or Stalinist, has also withered away thanks to the failure of proletarian revolution and of its last best hope, Third World socialism.

What is really startling is that conservatism now has no moral core resistant to the idea of mass self-stupefaction. The dogma of “libertarianism,” actually a liberal idea based on a misreading of John Stuart Mill, has become a sort of substitute gospel. The only drug that Mill considered in On Liberty was alcohol, and in dealing with its nastier abuses, he resorted to some remarkably illiberal thoughts. After saying airily that ordinary drunkenness was “not a fit subject for legislative interference,” he quickly backtracked. The persistent violent drunkard, he suggested “should be placed under a special legal restriction, personal to himself.”

 First, Hitchens tries to semantically pair "legal" and "moral." The two concepts do not exist in a state of equality. It's the eternal wish of many moral men that they could make the world as moral as they are. This has never worked by coercion, at least not without the imposition of even greater horrors than the perceived immorality (I'm sure most North Koreans behave in a very "moral" fashion, for woe unto them if they displease their Dear Leader).  Law follows morality, it doesn't create it. If a people first believe a thing to be true, then codify it as law, the law will be efficacious. People will follow it. But if a bare majority, or a tyrannical few, impose a moral law on a population that doesn't share that moral belief, the law will only cause strife. People will only follow it out of fear, not out of a sense that it is right, and they will disobey the law whenever they think they can profit by doing so. This is, unarguably, the state of our drug laws today.

Hitchens accuses libertarians of misreading John Stuart Mill, but to me it's obvious that he's misreading Mill right here in the very quotations he cites. How hard is it to understand the difference between thinking that ordinary drunkenness is "not a fit subject for legislative interference" and the idea that the "persistent, violent drunkard" "should be placed under a special legal restriction, personal to himself." The key word that unlocks the difference is "violent" -- a violent drunk is hurting others. No libertarian believes drinking or drugs is an excuse to allow one person to do violence to another.

This, by the way, is not to say that U.S. alcohol prohibition failed because it was firm, a fallacy endlessly advanced by “libertarians” to counter suggestions for effective drug laws. On the contrary, it was feebly policed in a country with long and (in those days) unenforceable borders with two nations that did not prohibit alcohol. It also, much like current British law on marijuana, prohibited manufacture, importation, and sale, but did not prohibit possession, a combination guaranteed not to succeed.

Hitchens appears to lament that prohibition was enforced so feebly. If only people who possessed alcohol could also have been imprisoned! If only enforcement was more brutal and draconian! If only we were more like North Korea! Is it so hard to see when the "cure" is worse than the disease?

BUT WHAT ABOUT this argument that drug legalization is a road to liberty, and that the individual’s right to fry his brains in his own home is equivalent to his freedom of speech, thought, or assembly (or even his freedom to bear arms)?

 Yes, what about that?

I find it odd that this claim should be made for a drug that tends to make its users passive and acquiescent, not to mention incoherent in speech.

Ah, we're back to saving people from themselves. Making the population what we want it to be. Hitchens then delves into a long section explaining how Huxley's Brave New World was far more prescient than Orwell's 1984. This is an idea I agree with entirely. However, I draw far different conclusions, as we will see.

For Soma is loose among us in many forms, from “ADD” medications given to small children, to marijuana effectively legalized under the laughable cover of “medical” use, to the millions of “antidepressant” prescriptions now being written throughout the advanced world....

...It is the thing that Huxley warned against most particularly and wanted us to learn from Brave New World—the danger that we would come to embrace our own servitude. More specifically, it was his prediction that we would voluntarily drug ourselves into conformist contentment and artificial joy, so losing our curiosity and our free spirit.

 I can totally see where Hitchens is coming from on this, and I agree with him that people voluntarily descending into conformist contentment (And not just with drugs, with popular entertainment and diversion!) is a terrible thing.

But what is most chilling about Brave New World is that it's easy to feel in your gut that the world depicted is wrong. But it's hard to give concrete reasons why. The compliant, conformist citizens live in a crime-free world. They're arguably happier with their lives than John the Savage. They are willing participants in the structure of their uncurious, conformist society. From the outside, looking in, we can see what they've lost. We can see ourselves in John the Savage. But would we really be doing any of the characters in the book a favor by dumping them back in 21st century earth as it is?

The important thing to keep in mind is that it's only a book. A metaphor. To create its Utopia/Dystopia, Huxley has to ignore much reality about human nature. While a certain large percentage of the population would embrace the Brave New World, a significant minority would constantly be agitating for destabilization, or trying to secure a better situation for themselves, or gaming the system to their advantage. Those traits are as central to human nature as the love of comfort and pleasure.

I used to believe in drug prohibition for many of the very same reasons as Hitchens. I believed that people deserve better than a life spent satiating their base pleasures. But a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance kept tickling the back of my brain whenever I considered the prohibitionist prescription.

We want a curious, free, intelligent populace. Drugs dull curiosity and intellect. Yet at the same time the prohibitionist believes that he has a special awareness of this fact, and that the masses are too dull to comprehend this very important point themselves. "We want you to be enlightened, but you are too unenlightened to be enlightened unless we, the enlightened, guide you to enlightenment. And we'll destroy you if you don't go along quietly!"

Not only is the attitude arrogant, the idea that you are endowed with a special raised consciousness that entitles you to force others to conform to your ideals, it is also unrealistic and Utopian. The vast majority of people will never be of particular consequence or intellectual distinction. And that's OK. It's not wisdom to stand against the tides and try to force them back by strength of will. Wisdom involves understanding not only physical realities, but the realities of human nature, and accepting them.

Yes, certainly, we might find it distasteful to see a pig wallowing in the mud and rooting around in the garbage. We might think it's undignified. The pig doesn't think so. And it's subjecting the pig to a particular and worse sort of indignity to dress him up in human clothes and force him to parade around on two legs.

This is not to equate the mass, middling portion of humanity with pigs. They are people, sentient, and capable of great wisdom and intelligent choice. The point of the analogy is that it is a debasement, an affront to their dignity to try to "dress people up" to act the way we want them to, rather than to grant them the simple dignity of making their own choices, even if such choices seem to us, the "enlightened," as little better than wallowing in the mud.

Whenever you start to think that you are a good judge of what's best for anyone besides yourself and, generally, your immediate family, you should take a moment to humble your thoughts. Who appointed you the lord of these peoples' lives? It doesn't matter that you're not their literal lord, that you're trying to use "the democratic process" to "express the will of the majority" the bottom line is that you are comfortable with using force (for that is the state's only real power) to make someone do what you want. You are setting yourself up as a lord over that person. How will you feel the next time the mob decides that it knows what's best for you? Today maybe you're going along with the mob that's of the opinion that no one needs semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines to defend themselves, or that nobody needs to be putting mind-altering substances into their bodies. Tomorrow you may find the mob coming after you because you want abortion to be legal, or because you think the government shouldn't be snooping on your private emails without a warrant. It's probable that one day you'll find yourself the victim of people who think they know better then you do how you ought to live your life. If you're wise, you'll realize that the real problem isn't the issue of the day, it's people that think they know what's best for you.

The entire point of a Constitutional system with limited, enumerated government powers and broad recognition of the rights of the people is to prevent government from doing things "for your own good." Because that's the only reason government ever does things. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, all thought and think they're acting "for the good of the people." Oddly enough, there's no visible limit to the horrors that can be visited upon a people "for their own good."

So for many people, “conservatism” is forever confused with a strange attempted dogma called “libertarianism,” which tended to be accompanied by radical economic and social change, and which certainly did nothing to bring back stable marriage, rigorous state education, or the old culture of self-restraint and deferred gratification.

Again Hitchens employs the trick of listing several different things under the implied assumption that they're the same. "Rigorous state education" is almost entirely a 20th century progressive construct. The brilliant minds of the founding fathers, Abe Lincoln, and the industrial giants who built American prosperity were not products of "rigorous state education." What does that even have to do with the argument at hand? In my opinion, the supposed connection is the word "state." I suspect Hitchens regards compulsory state education as another area where our betters need to be making us do what they want, "for our own good."

The institutions of marriage and the culture of restraint and deferred gratification, on the other hand, are a completely different thing. They pre-date the state! In other words, the state merely recognizes and gives support to established cultural norms. The state didn't create them. It's done an awfully good job of destroying them, though, through growth of the entitlement state.

Let us go back to my critic from the Adam Smith Institute, who said, “As an adult, I should be able to stick whatever I damn well like into my body. Provided that I am aware of the risks, nobody is better placed to make my personal cost/benefit calculation for any given action.”

There is a very simple answer to this harsh, self-centered calculation. We do not own ourselves. We have obligations, first of all, to those who love us, whose happiness and peace of mind depend, to any extent, on our well-being.

 There's quite a non sequitur here. Even should I grant the concept "We do not own ourselves," which I emphatically do not, Hitchens' list of people who do "own" us, "those who love us, whose happiness and peace of mind depend ... on our well being" most certainly does not include the state!

Hitchens jumps from the honorable concept that we have obligations and responsibilities greater than ourselves to justifying state control of our persons. That's a leap I can never make. There's a difference between the the concept of responsibilities and obligations, and the concept of state ownership of your body. It's such an elementary difference, it seems to hardly need more argument than to state it. It's one thing to make a law that says a father has a responsibility to support his children. It's quite another thing to make a law that because a father must support his children, the state gets to regulate his behavior to make sure he doesn't engage in any activity that might jeopardize that support.

"Excuse me, Mr. President, may I have permission to ride my horse today?" "Ewww, no. You might end up like Christopher Reeves. How would you be a decent father to your kids then?" Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with calls to outlaw horseback riding without a license and proof of insurance. But what, exactly is the substantive difference between that and laws against marijuana? I'm risking my life every time I get on that horse's back. And it's not something I need to do, like drive my car to work. I'd say the only reason horseback riding isn't outlawed isn't a difference in principle, it's A) a rural or rich man's hobby, and B) just too far down on the list to have drawn the attention of the nanny state yet. The same with downhill skiing, motocross, auto racing, football, boxing, sky diving, scuba diving, surfing, mountain climbing, and any number of activities we're still allowed to engage in.

Now, people who undertake dangerous tasks for the good of all—lifeboat crews, firemen—do risk hurting their families, but for a noble purpose. Those who train to do difficult, risky, but inessential things such as riding horses or climbing mountains take a comparable risk whose rewards, in strength, trained courage, self-control, and fortitude will certainly benefit society as a whole by their increased presence among us. But those who take drugs for pleasure, and risk permanent, irreversible mental illness by doing so, cannot offer any defense of this that is not profoundly selfish and rather cruel.

Hey! Horseback riding! Who would have thought he'd address that directly? I have to come clean here. I'm not a better person because I ride horses. It grants me no special virtue. There are safer ways to get some fresh air and exercise. Safer ways to interact with a domestic animal. More productive ways to build courage and fortitude, I'm sure. I do it because I enjoy it. End of story. I'd be lying if I claimed that horseback riding makes me a better member of society. I could break my neck tomorrow and life would be a lot harder for the family. Hmm. Sounds kind of selfish when I put it that way!

As for the selfishness of drug use? True, but what of it? Shall Hitchens and his elite police all of our motives? Shall we outlaw selfishness? Does Hitchens condone the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice? Does he recognize the inherent problem in the fact that the Saudi, Islamic concepts of vice and virtue enjoin the committee to engage in horribly cruel and barbarous acts by UK and US standards? Would he feel so cavalier about societal standards of virtue being imposed upon him if he was a Jew or Coptic Christian in Saudi Arabia?

Yet the Committee is condoned and supported by the government and the elite of Saudi society, the Saudi "best and brightest, " it's most influential moral leaders, by their own accounting. Will the world only run right when it's Hitchens concept of virtue that's being promoted? Is Hitchens so certain of his own virtue? I guess we should all just bow down and worship right now.

Many people smoke pot on a regular basis and lead quiet, inoffensive lives. They love their children. They are good neighbors and good friends. Is promoting the virtue of a drug-free life worth the vice of criminalizing their behavior, fining and imprisoning them or the people who provide the product they willingly buy?

Hitchens references the book Henry’s Demons to illustrate the unique danger of marijuana to the psyches of those who use it. But he utterly misrepresents to book. In the NYT book review I link to, we see that Henry was an extraordinary case, a severe schizophrenic. Even if you accept that marijuana is an aggravating factor in people with a predisposition to schizophrenia (nobody suggests it as causative in Henry's case, as far as I can tell in the review), then banning marijuana for a rare reaction is like the hysterical move to ban energy drinks because a girl with a pre-existing condition who should not have been ingesting caffeine in any form died after drinking energy drinks. By the same logic, we should ban aspirin, alcohol, peanuts, and a host of other common foods that are safe for the vast majority of the population but deadly when consumed by people with certain rare conditions.

There's also a "for the children" thread in Hitchens' article. Virtually no one objects to laws against tobacco and alcohol use by minors. What makes Hitchens think that reasonable people object to keeping marijuana or other drugs out of the hands of minors, even though we believe adults should be free to choose? Please point me to these people promoting unrestricted marijuana use by children. I'm sure they're out there, but they're as representative of typical libertarians as snake handling cults are of mainstream Christianity.

Hitchens and people like him ask questions like "What will become of our poor youth if we send the message that marijuana is a legitimate substance for adult use?" Carnage! Chaos! Rioting in the streets! Dogs and cats living together! Exactly what planet are we living on? Please meet President Barack "Choom Gang" Obama. The genie is out of the bong. There is plenty to criticize about Barack Obama and his politics, but I'd hardly go so far as to say that marijuana has enfeebled his mind. Marijuana is all around for any kid who wants it growing up. By far the greatest danger is that they're caught growing, possessing or selling it. All other dangers to their well-being pale in comparison with what the state will do to them once it labels them drug felons.

I've got five children. Two are adults out on their own. None seem in any imminent danger of becoming crack whores or meth heads. This is not because of laws. If the only reason they weren't stoners or crackheads was "because it's illegal" I'd feel as if I had failed as a parent. They're smart kids who can obviously recognize a bad idea when they see one. I never felt like I needed to throw anyone in jail to get that across to them.