cannabisnews.com: Drug War Threatens U.S. 





Drug War Threatens U.S. 
Posted by FoM on June 10, 2000 at 15:17:10 PT
By Alan Keyes 
Source: WorldNetDaily
I am frequently asked whether laws against drugs send the wrong message about the importance of liberty and self-control. Why would someone think such a thing? Usually two reasons are given. First, enforcing drug laws effectively requires that law enforcement authorities and courts prune back or uproot entirely some of our most important civil liberties. The Elian raid has many precedents in the actions of drug law enforcement. 
Second, we are told that it is contrary to the libertarian principles of individual freedom and responsibility for the government to attempt, by law, to control the use of drugs such as marijuana. Far better, so the argument goes, for society to preach the message of "just say 'no' to drugs" without using the inherently coercive instrument of law to attempt to force the decision of supposedly free citizens against the use of drugs. This second argument is more subtle than the first because it invokes directly the question of our national moral character and the role of public policy in the preservation of that character. A war against drugs, we are told, is inevitably a war waged on the premise that citizens cannot make the right choices about drugs out of responsible liberty, but only in fear of the penalties of laws. Accordingly, the war against drugs, and the laws that this war struggles to enforce, are said to send the message that liberty is not the proper condition of the citizen and that we do not really trust one another to achieve self-control without the coercive intrusion of the state. The war on drugs, in short, teaches us that we do not believe ourselves fit for responsible liberty. These arguments are close enough to the truth to require some careful distinctions. Most importantly, we must remember that freedom from constraint or coercion is itself not the ultimate blessing of the American political order. After all, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are not constrained by the coercion of positive law or tyrannical power. Presumably the blessings of liberty that are the inheritance of the American citizen are not merely the liberty of the wild animal. It is the absence of bars that makes a beast free -- but only the truth can make a man free. What, then, are the implications for American liberty of the government's battle against drugs? First of all, I do believe that we have allowed the so-called "war on drugs" to become an assault on the mechanism of our constitutional freedoms; this is a grave mistake. We have allowed the metaphor of "war," with its implicit justification of the extraordinary means that real war often requires, to justify clearly illegal and unconstitutional practices of search and seizure of the person and possessions of those who come under scrutiny by the anti-drug police powers. We do not need a very deep understanding of the meaning and purpose of our constitutional liberties in order to conclude that the wholesale disregard of those liberties is a threat to American self-government. There is no point in safeguarding the integrity of the country by destroying the constitutional system of limited government power that largely constitutes that integrity. Real wars, in so far as they do present a genuine threat to the survival of the country, do indeed sometimes require extraordinary suspensions of civil liberties. The war on drugs is not much closer to justifying such suspensions than was the war on inflation. We would be foolish indeed if we permitted the very real usurpation of our liberty because of the mere application of the metaphor of war to the effort at enforcing the drug laws. In its current form, then, the war on drugs is indeed a threat to our liberty. Does this mean that we should adopt the position that drug laws, and their reasonable and constitutional enforcement, are threats to our liberty? I don't think so. Rather, it means that we must insist that the drug enforcement effort cease violating the constitutional rights of citizens. There is no reason that the pursuit, apprehension, prosecution and punishment of drug traffickers need be any less solicitous of the constitutional rights of the suspected criminals than are the corresponding actions directed against suspected murderers and embezzlers. If the problem is the unconstitutional enforcement of the law, then we must insist on Constitutional enforcement of the law. This, however, is a very different solution than the repeal of the law. The second argument against drug laws per se is more difficult. In fact, many people expect me to agree with the moral case against drug laws because I believe that respect by government for the moral capacity of free citizens is so central to the preservation of our way of life. I am indeed a moral libertarian -- and I think America is founded on moral libertarian principles. But this does not mean that I believe our drug laws must be repealed on moral libertarian grounds. Quite the contrary. There can be no liberty unless the moral foundation of liberty is safeguarded. We can dismiss many of the casual uses of the metaphor of war as overblown but the preservation of our national understanding that liberty is for the sake of justice is most literally a vital national interest. As the Declaration makes clear, our struggle for freedom from external constraint must be understood as flowing from a deeper truth -- that we are obliged by our very nature to seek to accomplish the will of our Creator and to order the instruments we need, including government and its limitations, so we may do that will. Cut-off from this deeper understanding, the struggle for liberty is merely the petulant demands of a talking beast. Accordingly, if we are to prevent the silent death of the nation, we must at all costs preserve in our national soul a right understanding of the purpose and meaning of the liberty from external constraint that we so jealously guard. But the moral foundation of liberty cannot be safeguarded without moral education and the law is inescapably a part of moral education. The moral libertarian -- the thoughtful American -- must be concerned not only with what the law is doing externally, but with the moral message the law represents. Of course, the libertarian objection to drug laws is frequently made in similar terms. As I noted above, it is often said that drug laws imply that we are not fit to use our liberty responsibly and must be coerced by police powers to act rightly. It is inevitable that this implication does some harm to the moral confidence of our citizenry. There was a time when we could avoid this negative effect of drug laws by doing without them -- because the foundations of moral education made them unnecessary. There was a time when the great and decisive majority of young Americans were raised in morally upright families, God-fearing churches and sound schools, through which they were formed in moral precepts that led them to have contempt for the abuse of conscience and liberty that drugs represent. As long as these institutions were permitted to do their proper work, the rising generations simply did not have the problems of character that make young people vulnerable to the abuse of drugs. Because this was the condition of society for much of our history, the proliferation of drug laws in America did not occur until the latter half of the 20th century. When a society begins to generate new laws, it is almost always a sign that it has previously begun to generate new evils. The rise of American drug laws has been a response to the rise of the new problem of drug abuse. This problem, in turn, arose because of our diminished national willingness to attend to the moral elements of education and childrearing. This is why the undeniably negative implication of the drug laws cannot be escaped by simply repealing them. We have placed ourselves in this position by decades of moral laxity. The root of the drug problem was our excessive permissiveness in the moral formation of our children. But having allowed this to happen, we have limited the choices open to us now. A repeal of the drug laws will inevitably be interpreted as a further grant of permission for this kind of behavior. Whatever rhetoric of confidence in the moral capacity of our people cloaks such a repeal, it will in fact reinforce the moral destruction we are suffering. Accordingly, because we are not in the innocent condition that preceded the need for drug laws, but are rather in the morally compromised condition that continues to demand a collective response to the moral damage we have permitted, it is essential that we maintain the laws. We should not enforce drug laws in abusive ways that undermine our rights but we should maintain them in order to convey what must be the clear message to our people, and particularly our young people, that to be enslaved to chemicals is incompatible with freedom. A free people must understand what freedom is. And in our present situation the law must not be permitted to contribute to the widespread confusion of liberty with licentiousness. Liberty is not an abstract right to do whatever we feel like without regard to the consequences. It especially does not mean this in those areas where the consequence of abuse is to destroy liberty. If we want to hold on to liberty, then we must limit those abuses that will destroy it. We can't have it both ways. This means that at some level, in the laws of a free society, limits must be set which respect the requirements of freedom. A free people simply cannot allow its laws to remain neutral on an issue pertaining to its very fitness for liberty once such an issue is raised. Any public retreat that signals unconcern about maintaining that line is an assault on the very principle of our liberty. We see this most clearly today, perhaps, in the case of abortion. When we claim the right to decide who lives and who dies, we destroy one of the foundations of liberty. We assert that one human being can legitimately determine whether or not another human being has rights that must be respected. Of course, this means that none of us has rights that must be respected by everyone else. The doctrine of abortion rights is actually a direct assault on the claim to any rights and is a recipe for the destruction of liberty. Eventually, if we are to remain a free people, we will have to remove from our legislation this affront to the requirements of freedom. Drug abuse, and the public response to it, raises a similar challenge. Because freedom doesn't just require that we refrain from assaulting each other. It also requires that we acknowledge our duty to participate as rational agents in the great project of self-government. That means that one of the requirements of freedom is a clear head. The need for drug laws does indeed carry the discouraging implication that we have permitted the moral evil of drug abuse to take root among us and are, accordingly, not able to trust ourselves completely to non-governmental self-control in the face of this challenge. But this discouraging implication has the redeeming quality of being true. And, it is also true that retaining in our laws the firm and public commitment to repudiate moral self-destruction is worth the price of this discouragement. The public example of drug laws will play its part in what we trust will be the eventual victory of the American people in their true war on drugs, carried out in the hearts of a citizenry resolved to overcome its moral weakness and recover its full fitness for self-government. mailto:ambassador keyes2000.orgSaturday, June 3, 2000© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.Related Articles:Making War On Free Speech - WorldNetDaily http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6010.shtmlThe Drug War's Unequal Justicehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6004.shtmlLegalization Will Not Stop Problems Addiction Causehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5996.shtml
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Comment #6 posted by Freedom on June 11, 2000 at 20:32:12 PT
Is this guy still running?
So eloquent, quite ignorant... > There is no reason that thepursuit, apprehension, prosecution and punishment of drug traffickers need be any less solicitous of the constitutional rights ofthe suspected criminals than are the corresponding actions directed against suspected murderers and embezzlers.Of course there is a reason. The nature of the crime requires unconstitutional activity to catch the criminals.The other crimes have complaintants, and are not easily concealed.Number two, there are over 20 million users of "recreational drugs" in our culture. No matter what the crime, when this many people are engaging in an act, you must consider alternatives to arrest and the justice system. Along with considering your law may be unjust.Mr. Keyes appears to believe that we have unlimited resources, and also appears totally nieve to the nature of the prohibitionist mentality. Can he say with a straight face that he honestly believes the prohibitionist establishment may be tamed to respect liberty? He has little sense for their priorities.It is most laughable that he considers casual use of marijuana a threat to our nation, and to liberty. I always find that argument quite amusing. As for the supporting of the national moral character angle... would Mr. Keyes like to criminalize any and all fondling and sexual experimentation by teens, and jail them? Perhaps we should jail homosexuals, those with multiple sex partners, people who eat too much... liberty is very much the freedom to make poor choices, when you do not infinge another's liberty.I always wonder if this type will start calling for alcohol prohibition, I have yet to witness it though, oddly enough.Why? Surely, all the arguments apply evenly, and alcohol is surely more threatening as to the point of infringing another's liberty (drunk driving).Keyes is an eloquent, rationalizing puritan.
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Comment #5 posted by Suspect Stereotype on June 11, 2000 at 18:35:13 PT
Hats Off to Nemo...
For saying so eliquently what it was that I was thinking. Your pen is a formitable weapon.After reading the above article, the only thing that came to my mind was that Keyes could probably talk the panties off a nun.Nemo put it much more deftly. Touche'Again, Hats off KapSS
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Comment #4 posted by kaptinemo on June 11, 2000 at 14:41:03 PT:
Well, I listened... just long enough
Ambassador Keyes, like many of his Republican brethren, has a nasty Achilles heel. Which in his case, is truly unfortunate; of all the Rep contenders for the office of Prez, he is the *only* one IMHO who is operating with something close to a full sixpack. Which is why this latest pronouncement of his is particularly saddening.Keyes's basic idea that America has lost its' moral anchor (of course, as he and other Reps define morality) is particularly insulting because it fails to take into acount one simple fact: it is not the Average Joes out there selling their souls and raking in the bucks as special interests groups. It is not the Average Joes who are taking money from de facto foreign intel groups and allowing that money to sway their deliberations on legislation. It is not the Average Joes who are clamboring for anti-Constitutional monstrosities like the Anti-Meth Bill. Nope, the professional pols and their hirelings are doing that. They, and their religious cohorts. Keyes's brethren. The very same kind of people (many of them religious leaders out to convert the 'heathen Chinee') who as self-appointed moral proctors, established the first laws against drugs early in the last century. The Harrison Narcotics Act and all subsequent legislation stemming from it have caused untold heartache and pain to people whose moral turpitude was never the question, but their biochemistry was. And these people presume to question *my* morality, when their brand of it has caused more suffering than I ever could?There's an old saying: "A thief will always suspect you of theft, and a liar of lying." Add to that the caveat that a pol will always suspect you of being as venal, narrow-minded and stupid as he is.I thought Keyes was a good deal sharper than that, but it seems I was wrong; he's no better than the rest of them.
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Comment #3 posted by Dankhank on June 10, 2000 at 19:17:22 PT:
Write well?
Lose no sleep about writing as well as Alan Keys.You put forth more personal views than he in a very short comment.Alan Keyes loves to hear and read of himself. The twisted logic he uses by which he validates a negative comment by observing that a redeeming quality of that comment is that it is true is the key to his failure to speak and convert people to his ideas. By the way, the comment he validated in such a fashion is FALSE. Here it is again ... what crap!!"The need for drug laws does indeed carry the discouraging implication that we have permitted the moral evil of drug abuse to take root among us and are, accordingly, not able to trust ourselves completely to non-governmental self-control in the face of this challenge. But this discouraging implication has the redeeming quality of being true. And, it is also true that retaining in our laws the firm and public commitment to repudiate moral self-destruction is worth the price of this discouragement. The public example of drug laws will play its part in what we trust will be the eventual victory of the American people in their true war on drugs, carried out in the hearts of a citizenry resolved to overcome its moral weakness and recover its full fitness for self-government."Is it any wonder that Keyes lost his bid for the Presidency? No one can figure out WHAT he reall means, except that we can see that he is another brainwashed, fool who wants to lock more people up that we already have.Shame on you Mr. Ambassador, you are another ambassador of hatred, misinformation and lies.Small wonder that noone listens to you ...
HEMP n STUFF
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Comment #2 posted by Dankhank on June 10, 2000 at 19:15:22 PT:
Write well?
Lose no sleep about writing as well as Alan Keys.You put forth more personal views than he in a very short comment.Alan Keyes loves to hear and read of himself. The twisted logic he uses by which he validates a negative comment by observing that a redeeming quality of that comment is that it is true is the key to his failure to speak and convert people to his ideas. By the way, the comment he validated in such a fashion is FALSE. Here it is again ... what crap!!Is it any wonder that Keyes lost his bid for the Presidency? No one can figure out WHAT he reall means, except that we can see that he is another brainwashed, fool who wants to lock more people up that we already have.Shame on you Mr. Ambassador, you are another ambassador of hatred, misinformation and lies.Small wonder that noone listens to you ...
HEMP n STUFF
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Comment #1 posted by J Christen-Mitchell on June 10, 2000 at 16:42:22 PT:
I Wish I Could Write This Well
Mr. Keyes is very eloquently misinformed. This piece winds around and goes nowhere, but it does go there with lots of style. It seems remarkable to me how Black Americans defend White Gods and Laws while the enslavement or imprisonment of the Black race seems to be the goal of same. Does he he truly believe that morality has issued from churches. With its history of intolerance and cruelty? 7% of Black America is behind bars and he thinks drug users have clouded minds. The Libertarian Ideal government protects it's citizens from force and fraud while holding no opinions. Abortion is a murder of convience.Prohibition is destroying this country. Moral high ground is the slipperiest of slopes and often only defendable with denial. 
Hemptopia
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