OUR RIGHT TO DRUGS

The Case for a Free Market

THOMAS SZASZ
1992

SURVUND Ed. 1, 2024

PRAEGER
Westport. Connecticut London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Szasz, Thomas Stephen, 1920–

Our right to drugs : the case for a free market / Thomas Szasz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–275–94216–3 (alk. paper)
1. Pharmaceutical policy—United States. 2. Narcotics, Control of—Moral and ethical aspects. 3.
Narcotics, Control of—United States. 4. Drug legalization—United States. 1. Title.
RA401.A3S93 1992
362.29—dc20 91–30378
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright copyright 1992 by Thomas Szasz
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91–30378
ISBN: 0–275–94216–3
First published in 1992
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments, rights
that cannot be repealed or restrained by human law; rights
derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.

—John Adams1
 Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Drugs as Property: The Right We Rejected
2. The American Ambivalence: Liberty vs. Utopia
3. The Fear We Favor: Drugs as Scapegoats
4. Drug Education: The Cult of Drug Disinformation
5. The Debate on Drugs: The Lie of Legalization
6. Blacks and Drugs: Crack as Genocide
7. Doctors and Drugs: The Perils of Prohibition
8. Between Dread and Desire: The Burden of Choice
Notes
Bibliography
 Preface

When the history of human error comes to be written, it will be

difficult to find examples of equal power; and the future will be
amazed that such competent men, such eminent specialists,
could in their own chosen field remain so blind, so stupid.
—Ferdinand von Hebra (1816–1880)1

In this book, I use many ordinary terms and phrases—such as addict, drug
abuse, and drug abuse treatment—whose conventional meanings I reject.
To avoid defacing the text, I have refrained from putting such prejudging
expressions between quotations marks each and every time they appear.
Instead, I should like to state unequivocally that everything I say in this
book is premised on my contention that in today’s American society there
are two kinds of diseases and two kinds of treatments. The first kind of
disease, exemplified by AIDS, is discovered by doctors; the second kind,
exemplified by drug abuse, is mandated by legislators and decreed by
judges. Similarly, the first kind of treatment, exemplified by the surgical
removal of a gall bladder, is advised by doctors and authorized by
competent patients; the second kind, exemplified by participation in a court-
ordered drug treatment program, is imposed by judges on defendants
accused or convicted of violating drug laws. I repudiate the scientific
validity of placing rule-breaking behavior in the same category as bodily
disease—and accepting both, on equal footing, as diseases. And I reject the
moral legitimacy of equating a convicted defendant’s coerced submission to
a court-imposed intervention with a free adult’s voluntary participation in a
medical intervention—and accepting both, on equal footing, as treatments.2
 Finally, for the sake of brevity and convenience, I use the terms
psychiatrist, mental patient, and mental hospital to refer to mental health
professionals, mental health clients, and mental health institutions of all
kinds.
 Acknowledgments

Among the many persons who have helped me with this book, I want to
thank especially my daughter Suzy and my brother George for their
unflagging devotion and advice; Charles S. Howard, for important
suggestions for amplifying my argument; Roger Yanow, for conscientious
reading of drafts; Peter Uva, librarian at the SUNY Health Science Center
at Syracuse, for boundless patience in humoring my requests for references;
and Elizabeth Alden, my secretary, for meticulous attention to details in
preparing the manuscript.
 Introduction

I never write on any subject unless I believe the opinion of those

who have the ear of the public to be mistaken, and this involves
as a necessary consequence that every book I write runs
counter to the men who are in possession of the field.
—Samuel Butler1

For good or ill, this has been true as well of the books I have written, this
one included. In the present case, it is because the contemporary debate on
drugs, drug abuse, and drug legalization is a monument to our collective
ignorance and eagerness to forget.
From the founding of the American Colonies until the Civil War,
marijuana was an important cash crop, yielding the raw materials needed
for the production of canvas, clothing, and rope. The colonists, including
George Washington, grew marijuana.2 Of course that is not what they called
it. They called it “hemp,” just as they called their Negro slaves “three-fifths
Persons.”3 Although few people realize that the Constitution so stamps
some of the people who built our country, at least those who do realize it
understand how such fictitiously fractional persons became real, full-
fledged human beings. But how many people know that hemp, coca, and
the opium poppy are ordinary plants, understand how they became
transformed into dreaded “dangerous drugs,” and realize that in losing our
rights to them we have surrendered some of our most basic rights to
property?
This book, then, is about rights, responsibilities, the law, and the
Constitution—not as abstractions in philosophical treatises or legal briefs,
but as the practical realities of our daily lives. Specifically, it is about our
laws and lawlessness concerning the substances we choose to call “drugs.”
Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens.
But eating and drinking are much more important acts. If given a choice
between the freedom to choose what to ingest and what politician to vote
for, few if any would pick the latter. Indeed, why would anyone be so
foolish as to sell his natural birthright to consume what he chooses in return
for the mess of pottage of being allowed to register his preference for a
political candidate? Yet this is precisely the bargain we the American
people have made with our government: more useless voting rights in
exchange for fewer critical personal rights. The result is that we consider
the fiction of self-government a blessed political right, and the reality of
self-medication an accursed medical malady.
In 1890, less than half of adult Americans had the right to vote. Since
then, one class of previously ineligible persons after another has been
granted the franchise. Not only blacks and women, as they deserved, but
also others with questionable claims to that privilege—for example, persons
unable to speak or read English (or read and write any language). During
this period, every one of us—regardless of age, education, or competence—
has been deprived of his right to substances the government decides to call
“dangerous drugs.” Yet, ironically, most Americans labor under the
mistaken belief that they now enjoy many rights previously available only
to a few (partially true only for blacks and women), and remain utterly
unaware of the rights they have lost. Moreover, having become used to
living in a society that wages a relentless War on Drugs, we have also lost
the vocabulary in which to properly articulate and analyze the disastrous
social consequences of our own political-economic behavior vis-à-vis
drugs. Mesmerized by the mortal dangers of fictitious new diseases such as
“chemical dependency” and “substance abuse,” we have become diverted
from the political perils of our totalitarian-therapeutic efforts at collective
self-protection. Long ago, Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), a French political-
economic thinker and pioneer free marketeer, warned against the dangers of
precisely such folly. “Protection,” he wrote, “concentrates at a single point
the good that it does, while the harm that it inflicts is diffused over a wide
area. The good is apparent to the outer eye; the harm reveals itself only to
the inner eye of the mind.”4
 Precisely wherein lies our drug problem? I submit it lies mainly in the
fact that most of the drugs we want are ones we cannot legally make, sell,
or buy. Why can we not do these things? Because the drugs we want are
literally illegal, their possession constituting a criminal offense (for
example, heroin and marijuana); or because they are medically illegal,
requiring a physician’s prescription (for example, steroids and Valium). In
short, we have tried to solve our drug problem by prohibiting the “problem”
drugs; by imprisoning the persons who make, sell, or use such drugs; by
defining the use of such drugs as diseases; and by coercing drug users to
undergo treatment (coercion being necessary because drug users want
drugs, not treatment). None of these measures has worked. Some suspect
that these measures have aggravated the problem. I am sure of it. They have
had to—because our concept of the nature of the problem is mistaken, our
methods of responding to it are coercive, and the language in which we
speak about it is misleading. I submit that making, selling, and using drugs
are actions, not diseases. Authorities can go far in maintaining the illusion
that (ab)using a drug is a disease, but an illusion it remains.
Moreover, the complex set of personal behaviors and social transactions
we call “the drug problem” does not, in the literal sense, constitute a
problem susceptible to a solution. Arithmetical problems have solutions.
Social problems do not. (The solution of an arithmetical problem does not,
ipso facto, create another arithmetical problem, but the solution of every
social problem inexorably creates a new set of social problems.) It is a
grievous mistake to conceptualize certain drugs as a “dangerous enemy” we
must attack and eliminate, instead of accepting them as potentially helpful
as well as harmful substances, and learning to cope with them competently.
Why do we want drugs? Basically, for the same reasons we want other
goods. We want drugs to relieve our pains, cure our diseases, enhance our
endurance, change our moods, put us to sleep, or simply make us feel better
—just as we want bicycles and cars, trucks and tractors, ladders and chain
saws, skis and hang gliders, to make our lives more productive and more
pleasant. Each year, tens of thousands of people are injured and killed as a
result of accidents associated with the use of such artifacts. Why do we not
speak of “ski abuse” or a “chain saw problem”? Because we expect people
who use such equipment to familiarize themselves with their use, and avoid
injuring themselves or others. If they hurt themselves, we assume they did
so accidentally and we try to heal their injuries. If they hurt others
negligently, we punish them by both civil and criminal sanctions. These, in
brief, are the means by which we try to adapt to—rather than solve—the
problems presented by potentially dangerous devices in our environment.
However, after generations of living under medical tutelage that provides us
with protection (albeit illusory) against dangerous drugs, we have failed to
cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent
adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.
Indeed, as I shall show throughout this book, our medical-statist policies
with respect to drugs closely resemble the Soviets’ economic-statist policies
with respect to consumer goods. After a protracted war on self-medication,
we are thus mired in a mess that is its direct result—just as after a
protracted war on private property, the people in the Soviet Union are mired
in a mess that is its direct result.
My thesis is that what we call “the drug problem” is a complex set of
interrelated phenomena that are the products of personal temptation, choice,
and responsibility, combined with a set of laws and social policies
generated by our reluctance to face this fact in a forthright manner. If that is
false, then nearly everything in this book is false. But if it is true, then
nearly everything the American government, American law, American
medicine, the American media, and the majority of the American people
now think and do about drugs is a colossal and costly mistake, injurious to
innocent Americans and foreigners, and self-destructive to the nation itself.
For if the desire to read Ulysses cannot be cured with an anti-Ulysses pill,
then neither can the desire to use alcohol, heroin, or any other drug or food
be cured by counterdrugs (for example, Antabuse versus alcohol,
methadone versus heroin) or so-called drug treatment programs (which are
coercions masquerading as cures).
Unlike most criticisms of the War on Drugs, which are based on
pharmacological, prudential, or therapeutic arguments, mine is based on
political-philosophical considerations. I shall argue the following:
1. The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as
hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote.
2. A limited government, such as that of the United States, lacks the
political legitimacy to deprive competent adults of the right to use
whatever substances they choose.
 3. The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down
in the Constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical
profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in
effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
4. Hence it is futile to debate whether the War on Drugs should be
escalated or de-escalated, without first coming to grips with the
popular, medical, and political mind-set concerning the trade in drugs
generated by nearly a century of drug prohibitions.
I am familiar with recent essays arguing the impracticality of drug
legalization.5 I share that view. The idea of selling cocaine as we do
cucumbers while preserving our prescription laws restricting the sale of
penicillin is obviously absurd. But this proves only that unless we are
willing to come to grips with the profoundly paternalistic implications and
perilous anti-market consequences of prescription laws, which I discuss in
this book (especially Chapter 7), we are doomed to impotence vis-à-vis our
so-called drug problem. “The collectivist,” warned A. V. Dicey in 1914, the
year the first law protecting us from dangerous drugs was enacted, “never
holds a stronger position than when he advocates the enforcement of the
best ascertained laws of health.”6
The result of our protracted drug-protectionist policy is that we now find
it impossible to re-legalize drugs—we lack both the popular will for it and
the requisite legal-political infrastructure to support it. We long ago decided
that it is morally wrong to treat drugs (especially foreign, plant-derived
drugs) as a commodity. If we are satisfied with that state of affairs and its
consequences, so be it. But I believe we ought to consider the possibility
that a free market in drugs is not only imaginable in principle, but, given the
necessary personal motivation of a people, is just as practical and beneficial
as is a free market in other goods. Accordingly, I support a free market in
drugs not because I think it is—at this moment, in the United States—a
practical policy, but because I believe it is right and because I believe that—
in the long run, in the United States—the right policy may also be the
practical policy.
OUR RIGHT TO DRUGS
 1

Drugs as Property:
The Right We Rejected

In its larger and juster meaning, it [property] embraces

everything to which a man may attach a value … [and includes
that] which individuals have in their opinions, their religion,
their passions, and their faculties.
—James Madison.1

Surely, it would be wrongheaded to contend that drugs do not belong on

Madison’s foregoing list. In principle, every object in the universe can be
treated as property. Two questions thus arise: Whose property is X? And
should owning X, qua private property, be legal? X may stand for the shirt
on my back or the sidewalk in front of my house, the money I earn as a
gardener or the marijuana I grow in my garden. That drugs, like diamonds
or dogs, are a form of property no one can deny. Accordingly, we must now
ask why the private ownership of drugs should not be just as legal as the
private ownership of diamonds or dogs.

THE RIGHT TO PROPERTY

In the English-speaking world, especially since the seventeenth century,
the word freedom has meant the inalienable right to life, liberty, and
property, the first two elements resting squarely on the last. “Though the
Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all men,” wrote John Locke
in 1690, “yet every man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body
has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body and the Work of his
Hands, we may say, are properly his.”2 More than any other single
principle, this idea informed and animated the Framers of the Constitution.
“If the United States mean to obtain and deserve the full praise due to wise
and just governments,” wrote James Madison in 1792, “they will equally
respect the rights of property and the property in rights.”3
The quintessential feature of capitalism as a political-economic system is
the security of private property and the free market, that is, the right of
every competent adult to trade in goods and services. As Milton Friedman
pithily put it, “‘Free markets,’ properly understood, are an implication of
private property.”4 To ensure such a free social order, the state is obligated
to protect people from force and fraud and, to the maximum extent possible,
abstain from participating in the production and distribution of goods and
services. Of course, no such perfect capitalist order has ever existed or,
perhaps, could exist. Still, it is a beacon that lights the way toward respect
for persons and social cooperation based on the mutual, noncoercive
satisfaction of needs.
The extraordinarily heavy emphasis on the right to property in our
Anglo-American tradition does not mean that property is more important
than life or liberty, or—as the enemies of individual liberty like to put it—
that property is more important than people. It means only that property is
“the convention” that best protects life and liberty; that “when life and
liberty are at stake, they are already in jeopardy”; and hence that the right to
property constitutes “a kind of ‘early warning system’ to invasions of life
and liberty.”5 We ought to heed our loss of the right to drugs as precisely
such a warning. Moreover, inasmuch as this alarm was first sounded nearly
a century ago, the warning can hardly be said to be early. On the contrary,
the sirens have sounded for so long that we no longer hear them: On no
other front have the American people been subjected to so relentless a state
pressure against their constitutional rights than on the issue of the right to
drugs; and on no other front have the American people yielded their rights
to encroachments by the federal government so readily, willingly, and
indeed eagerly as on this one. I want to show that—because both our bodies
and drugs are types of property—producing, trading in, and using drugs are
property rights, and drug prohibitions constitute a deprivation of basic
constitutional rights.6

Negroes and Narcotics: What Counts as Property?

 My argument that drug prohibitions constitute a deprivation of the
constitutional right to property hinges on our accepting drugs as a form of
property. Depending on one’s values, that may or may not be an obvious
proposition. In any case, if the issue of what counts as property affects
emotionally charged customs and vested economic interests, then nothing is
obvious, and everything is subject to the fiction-making powers of
lawmakers—as the precedent of slavery, which holds an important lesson
for our problem with drugs, illustrates.
In his classic 1792 essay on “Property,” Madison flatly asserted that
“government is instituted to protect property of every sort.”7 The legality of
slavery rested, of course, on the definition of the Negro as property, a
definition that could not be challenged within the slave system. When the
judicial system of the United States finally allowed it to be challenged, in
the celebrated Dred Scott case, the formal articulation of the controversy
signaled the beginning of the end for slavery.
Dred Scott was an illiterate Negro slave who had been purchased in
Missouri, in 1833, by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. Emerson
subsequently traveled with Scott to Illinois, a free state, and then, after a
sojourn in Louisiana, took him back to Missouri, a slave state. In 1846, with
the help of an anti-slavery lawyer, Scott sued Emerson’s brother-in-law
John Sandford, who became Scott’s owner on Emerson’s death, for his
freedom (as well as for the freedom of his family, having in the meanwhile
married and become the father of a child). The ground for Scott’s suit was
that his residence in a free state made him a free man. The lower court
upheld his claim, but the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him; the
case was subsequently heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus did Scott v.
Sandford (1857) become one of the most famous and notorious decisions
ever rendered by that high court.
The gist of the Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney,
was that because Scott was property when he was bought and was property
when he brought his suit, he had no legal standing to sue; while Sandford,
his owner, had a constitutional right to his property—that is, to Dred Scott. I
cite a few illustrative lines from Judge Taney’s opinion:
They [Negroes of the African race] are not included, and were not intended to be included,
under the word “citizens” in the Constitution…. He [Scott] was bought and sold, and
treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic…. This opinion was at that time
fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race…. No one of that race [black
Africans] had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily; all of them had been brought
 here as articles of merchandise…. No word can be found in the Constitution which gives
Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less
protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power
coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner of his rights.8

Volumes upon volumes have been written on this case, to which I can
probably add nothing. Note, however, that Taney specifically cited the fact
that the Negroes were bought and sold like property as proof that they were
property. What I find remarkable in bringing together the Dred Scott case
and the Harrison Narcotic Act is that in 1857, American whites had a
constitutional right to own American blacks, because Negro slaves
constituted property; and that a mere half-century later, in 1914, Americans
no longer had a right to own opiates, because Congress declared them to be
“narcotics,” which could not be bought and sold as “articles of
merchandise.” From the fiction that Negroes were property and the laws
built on it that empowered whites literally to enslave blacks, the nation
moved to the fiction that certain drugs (metaphorically) enslaved people
and to the legislation built on it that outlawed the slave-holding drugs. (For
further discussion of this theme, see Chapter 6.) Sic transit infamia mundi.
How terrifyingly right Edmund Burke was when he observed,
We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history…. History consists, for the
greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge,
lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites which
shake the public…. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws,
prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always
found in some specious appearance of a real good.9

The Body as Property

The phrase right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, once a
vibrantly defiant proclamation, has become meaningless cant, a kind of
semantic mummy—the carefully preserved corpse of what only yesterday
was a courageous Man. As the preamble to the Declaration of Independence
and the Founding Fathers’ other writings on political philosophy imply,
they saw Man as a being endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights,
among them the right to life, liberty, and property. To exercise such rights,
Man must be a self-disciplined adult possessing a right anterior to those
they enumerated—a right so elementary it never occurred to the Framers
that it needed to be named, much less that its protection needed to be
specifically safeguarded. They viewed self-ownership thus because, as did
Locke, they assumed it precedes all political rights and because, as
exemplars of the Protestant Enlightenment, they had a clear view of the
distinction between God and state, self and society. Indeed, albeit only in
passing, Thomas Jefferson alluded to the crucial importance of bodily self-
ownership as a political issue. He mocked would-be statist meddlers into
our diets and drugs by reminding his readers that “in France the emetic was
once forbidden as a medicine, the potato as an article of food…. Was the
government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in
such keeping as our souls are now.”10 But is this not precisely what our
government is doing now? Is it not what we expect and demand of it?
Foolishly, we embrace the state’s “prescrib[ing] to us our medicine and
diet” as fulfilling its enlightened duty, guaranteeing us our “right” to health
—instead of rejecting it as a crass deprivation of our right to our bodies and
to the drugs we want.
It is clear that the Founders took for granted that Jesus’ admonition about
the soul applied to the body as well, and could be paraphrased thus: What
does it profit a man if he gains all the rights politicians are eager to give
him, but loses control over the care and feeding of his own body? Mark
Twain’s following remarks—provoked by the American medical
profession’s earliest attempts to monopolize the practice of healing—still
reflect that point of view:
The State … stands between me and my body, and tells me what kind of a doctor I must
employ. When my soul is sick, unlimited spiritual liberty is given me by the State. Now
then, it doesn’t seem logical that the State shall depart from this great policy … and take
the other position in the matter of smaller consequences—the health of the body…. Whose
property is my body? Probably mine…. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I,
not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh, no.11

I contend that, strange as it may sound, we have lost our most important
right: the right to our bodies.12

How We Lost the Right to Our Bodies

How can a person lose the right to his body? By being deprived of the
freedom to care for it and to control it as he sees fit. From the time the
Pilgrims first landed until 1914, the American people had the freedom as
well as the obligation, the right as well as the duty, to care for and control
their bodies, manifested by legally unrestricted access to the medical care
and the medicines of their choice. During all those years, the government
did not control the market in drugs or the peoples’ use of drugs.
To follow the critique of the War on Drugs presented in this book, it is
crucial that we keep in mind this question: How can a person lose the right
to his body? And that we not waver from answering thus: A person can lose
the right to his body the same way he can lose the right to his life, liberty, or
property—namely, by someone’s depriving him of it. When a private
person takes away an individual’s life, liberty, or property, we call the
former a criminal, and the latter a victim. When an agent of the state does
such a thing, and does it rightfully, according to law, we regard him as a law
enforcement officer carrying out his duties, and regard the person deprived
of his rights as a criminal receiving his just punishment. However, when
agents of the therapeutic state deprive us of our right to our bodies, we view
ourselves neither as victims nor as criminals, but as patients. There is, of
course, a third way we can lose our right to property, namely, by taxation.
When a criminal deprives us of property (to enrich himself), we call it
“theft.” When the criminal justice system deprives us of property (to punish
us), we call it a “fine.” And when the state deprives us of property (to
support itself, ostensibly to serve us), we call it a “tax.” Taxation and drug
prohibition are both coercive state interventions, and both are justified
largely on paternalistic grounds. In the case of taxation, the state lets us buy
those things it considers we can manage by ourselves (for example, food
and lottery tickets), while it extracts that proportion of our income it deems
“socially just,” ostensibly to provide us with those things it considers we
cannot provide for ourselves (such as health care and postal service).
Similarly, in the case of drug controls, the state lets us buy those drugs it
considers safe for us to use (over-the-counter drugs), and it removes those
drugs it considers unsafe for us to use (prescription drugs and illicit drugs).
Then, in the process of taxing us and depriving us of drugs, the state also
expropriates sufficient funds to provide politicians and other government
parasites with a comfortable living. Surely, it is not an accident of history
that only one year separates the enactment of the Sixteenth Amendment,
creating the legal authority for the federal income tax (1913), and the
passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), creating the legal authority for
the first federal drug prohibition. In short, when the state deprives us of our
right to drugs and justifies it as drug controls, we ought to regard ourselves
not as patients receiving state protection from illness, but as victims robbed
of access to drugs—just as when the state deprives us of our right to
property and justifies it as taxing personal income, most of us regard
ourselves not as beneficiaries receiving state services for our needs, but as
victims robbed of some of our income. Indeed, the deep sense that our
property rights are inalienable—that they are not gifts of the government—
accounts for the ineradicable streak in the American spirit that continues to
regard taxation as legalized robbery.
At this point I want to note briefly that I recognize a need for limiting the
free market in drugs, just as I recognize a need for limiting the free market
in many other goods. The legitimate place for that limit, however, is where
free access to a particular product presents a “clear and present danger” to
the safety and security of others. On such grounds, the state controls the
market in explosives, and on such grounds it may legitimately control the
market in plutonium or radioactive chemicals used in medicine. But this is
not the basis for our current drug controls.
Since the beginning of this century, through a combination of medical
licensure and direct drug-control legislation, the American government has
assumed progressively more authority over the drug trade and our drug use.
The ostensible aim of these restrictions was to protect people from
incompetent doctors and unsafe drugs. The actual result was loss of
personal freedom, without the gain of the promised benefits. It is important
to keep in mind that our elaborate machinery of drug controls rests largely
on prescription drug laws, which, in turn, rest on a medical profession
licensed by the state. While in Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
does not mention drug controls, he addresses the even more sacrosanct
subject of medical licensure, and gives it its libertarian due. “The
conclusions I shall reach,” he writes, “are that liberal principles do not
justify licensure even in medicine and that in practice the results of state
licensure in medicine have been undesirable.”13 Regardless of their lofty
motives, drug controls encourage people to expect politicians and
physicians to protect them from themselves—specifically, to protect them
from their own inclinations to use or misuse certain drugs. The result is
state control of the drug market and an interminable War on Drugs—
symptoms of our having, in effect, repealed the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights.
 The Breached Castle
Consider the following imaginary scenario. Don, a retired widower in his
sixties, lives alone in a suburban home. He has many friends, enjoys good
health, is economically secure, and has no dependents. His hobby is
gardening in the greenhouse attached to his home. A genius at making
things grow, Don’s home overflows with exotic plants and fresh flowers,
and his tomatoes are legendary. Let us imagine further that Don, an
adventurous and enterprising person, acquires some marijuana, coca, and
poppy seeds, plants them in his greenhouse, nurtures the seedlings into
mature plants, harvests them, and produces some marijuana, coca leaves,
and raw opium. Much given to privacy, Don does not even let a cleaning
person in his home, though he could well afford it. Hence, there is no way
for anyone, legally, to know about his miniature drug farm. Finally, let us
assume that on an occasional Saturday evening, Don, alone at home,
smokes a little marijuana or chews some coca leaves or mixes some opium
powder into his midnight tea.
What has Don done, and how does American law—criminal and mental
health law—regard him and his behavior? Ownership of land and buildings
is a basic property right. Privacy, especially since Griswold v. Connecticut
and Roe v. Wade, is also a basic right.”14 Thus, Don has simply exercised
some of his property and privacy rights: his right to his land, his home, and
the fruits of his labor in his own home. He has deprived no one of life,
liberty, or property. Conventional wisdom and medical disinformation to the
contrary notwithstanding, Don has not harmed himself either. Nevertheless,
American criminal law now regards him as guilty of criminal possession
and use of controlled and illegal substances, while American mental health
law regards him as a psychiatric patient suffering from chemical
dependency, substance abuse, personality disorder, and other
psychopathological aberrations as yet undiscovered. Moreover, stigmatizing
Don as a mentally sick person, criminalizing his behavior as that of an evil-
minded lawbreaker, dispossessing him of his home and imposing an
astronomical fine on him, and incarcerating him as a dangerous offender—
all this is now considered to be perfectly legal and constitutional. At this
point, the reader might wonder how legal scholars and justices of the
Supreme Court reconcile such seemingly excessive—and hence “cruel and
unusual”—punishment with the Constitution.
 Justifying Therapeutic Slavery
How can the government of the United States—crafted and considered to
possess the most prudently limited powers of any government in the world
—prohibit a competent adult from growing or ingesting an ordinary plant,
such as coca leaf or hemp? And how can it impose such staggeringly
disproportionate punishment—compared, for example, to the punishment
imposed on many persons convicted of murder—on an individual who
inhales the products of such a plant?15 The answer is that where there is a
political will, supported by popular opinion and powerful factional interest,
there is a legal way, paved with the legal fictions necessary to do the job. At
the end of the eighteenth century, operating in the context of the old practice
of slavery plus the new principle of apportioning congressional seats by
population, the manufacturers of legal fictions fabricated the ingenious and
ignominious concept of three-fifths persons. Since 1914, the politicians’
desire to control the use of certain common plants and their biologically
active ingredients, together with the public’s fascination with and fear of
certain glamorized and scapegoated substances, has led to the fabrication of
analogous legal fictions to justify the prohibition of the production, even for
private use, of plants or substances deemed dangerous by the government.
The trick to enacting and enforcing crassly hypocritical prohibitions,
with the conniving of the victimized population, lies in not saying what you
mean and avoiding direct legal rule making. Thus, the Founders did not
declare, in so many words, “To justify slavery, in the slave states blacks
shall be counted as property; and to apportion more congressional seats to
the slave states than they would have on the basis of their white population
only, black slaves shall be counted as three-fifths persons.” Similarly, our
lawmakers do not say, “We shall impose draconian criminal penalties on
anyone within the borders of the United States who ingests marijuana he
has grown on his own land for his own personal use only.” What, then, do
they say? Why do legal scholars consider such a prohibition to be
constitutional?
The answer to these questions is briefly this. Under the police power, the
states can prohibit a wide range of activities regarded as endangering the
public welfare, for example, gambling, obscenity, and drugs, notably
alcohol. However, Congress has no police power over the nation as a whole.
That is why making the sale of alcohol a federal offense required a
constitutional amendment. However, there is another route to federal drug
prohibition, namely, through the Constitution’s Commerce Clause (Article
I, section 8, clause 3), which empowers Congress to close the doors of
interstate commerce to any unwanted product. Thus, the key subterfuge
undergirding the alleged constitutionality of our federal antidrug laws is that
their purpose is to protect commerce, not to punish persons for crimes. But
where is the commerce in producing a plant for one’s own use only? Or in
picking a plant found growing in the wild and ingesting it?
Of course, the constitutionality of the drug laws, beginning with the
1906 Food and Drugs Act, was challenged in the courts. Not surprisingly, it
was consistently upheld by the Supreme Court, as for example in the 1913
McDermott case, where the Court declared,
[Congress] has the right not only to pass laws which shall regulate legitimate commerce
among the States and with foreign nations, but has the full power to keep the channels of
such commerce free from the transportation of illicit or harmful articles, to make such as
are injurious to the public health outlaws of such commerce.16

In his scholarly review of the constitutionality of drug laws, Thomas

Christopher concludes that “there has been no serious discussion by that
body [the Supreme Court] of the over-all constitutional question [of drug
regulation]. It would seem that that issue is too well settled.”17 Here we
come to the nub of the matter. Under the pretext of the Commerce Clause
plus the prevailing medical legerdemain about dangerous drugs, the
Supreme Court has, in effect, become the mouthpiece of the Food and Drug
Administration and of organized American medicine. Christopher puts it
more elegantly. The Court, he writes, “has always shown great respect for
the Food and Drug Administration, and for its administrative findings and
rulings…. [d]oubtless [this] is owing to the fact that health matters are
involved.”18
The Commerce Clause as a decoy for the paternalistic-prohibitory
purposes of drug laws is a contemporary example of the use of a powerful
legal fiction in the service of a popular cause. But the therapeutic state thus
engendered is no fiction. The Wickard case exemplifies the implausible
ends to which the means of Congress’s right to regulate commerce may be
put in order to justify depriving Americans of their right to manage their
own self-regarding, drug-using behavior.
 In 1940, pursuant to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, an Ohio
farmer named Roscoe C. Filburn was allotted 11.1 acres for his 1941 wheat
crop. He sowed 23 acres. Seeking exemption from the regulations, Filburn
filed a civil suit against Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, asking
the court to enjoin him from enforcing the act against him. The lower court
ruled in Filburn’s favor. But in Wickard v. Filburn the Supreme Court
reversed the decision, holding that the act could be applied to Filburn. What
was Filburn’s violation? Committing “farm marketing excess.” What was
Filburn’s defense? That he used his crop “to feed part to poultry and
livestock on the farm … some in making flour for home consumption …
and keep the rest for the following seeding.”19 The Supreme Court ruled
against Filburn, declaring:
The Act includes a definition of “market” and its derivatives so that as related to wheat in
addition to its conventional meaning it also means to dispose of “by feeding (in any form)
to poultry or livestock which, or the products of which, are sold, bartered, or
exchanged….” Hence, marketing quotas … also [embrace] what may be consumed on the
premises. Penalties do not depend upon whether any part of the wheat … is sold or
intended to be sold.20

Note the Court’s redefinition of the word market so as to include

supplying one’s own needs, and its candid admission that such redefinitions
may legitimately be manufactured ad hoc—in this case, “as related to
wheat.” The result of using the Commerce Clause as a pretext for drug
prohibition is that, de facto as well as de jure, the American government is
empowered to deprive us, as it sees fit, of our ancient freedom to grow—on
our own soil, for our own consumption—any crop of its choosing.

Rights: Opportunities vs. Risks

The normal reader, defensive of the rationale of current drug
prohibitions, might be inclined to dismiss my hypothetical scenario about
“Don” as irrelevant to real life, and might want to change the subject to real
problems such as intravenous drug use, AIDS, crack babies, and other
assorted horrors. My rejoinder is two-pronged. First, let us remember the
adage that hard cases make bad law. Hence there is merit in considering the
easiest case first. If such a case suggests that a particular law violates an
important political principle, it ought to make us think twice about casually
overriding the violation in the name of some temporarily fashionable social
cause. Second, let us keep in mind that the essence of freedom is choice,
and that choice implies the option to make the wrong choice, that is, to
“abuse” freedom and suffer the consequences. Thereby hangs a long tale,
with a hopeless quest and many enthusiastic questers as its leitmotif. Like
medieval searchers for the Holy Grail, these modern seekers look for the
correct answer to an absurd question, namely: How can we reduce or
eliminate the risks and undesirable consequences of liberty, while retaining
its rewards and benefits? The fact that we cannot do this has not stopped
people, especially “democratic socialists” and other optimistic statists from
trying. Indeed, the history of modern welfare states is, in part, the history of
that self-defeating effort.
Rights entail opportunities as well as risks. This is why some people see
the right to property as giving us prosperity and liberty, and others see it as
giving us booms and busts; why some see the right to property in land and
houses as giving us builders, real estate agents, and landlords who provide
us with homes, while others see it as giving us unscrupulous moneylenders
and greedy slumlords to exploit people’s homelessness. Similarly, we can
see the right to drugs as giving us control over our medical and
physiological destiny, or as giving us drug abusers and crack babies.
Both images are real. Both are true. And the choice is ours. For example,
we choose to view the owners and managers of American supermarkets as
providing us with the best and most bountiful food and drink in the whole
world, not as malefactors determined to make life difficult for troubled
anorectics and bulimics. We do not blame the obesity of fat persons on the
people who sell them food, but we do blame the drug habits of addicts on
the people who sell them drugs. Obviously, the supplier of every good or
service is, ipso facto, a potential seducer as well; the only question is
whether he is a successful or unsuccessful seducer. The successful seducer
becomes a flourishing businessman or entrepreneur; the unsuccessful one
goes broke or quits the market. This, in a nutshell, is the free market—the
one and only secure foundation of individual liberty. If we try to redefine
liberty in such a way that it is not liberty unless its results are individually
and collectively “healthy”—which, in the case of drugs, means providing us
with effective and affordable treatments for disease and protecting us from
the abuse of drugs by both patients and doctors—we fool only those foolish
enough to believe in miracles. Sometimes, that category includes the
majority. We then speak, usually in retrospect, of a crowd madness.21
THE RIGHT TO DRUGS AS A RIGHT TO PROPERTY
Obviously, viewing the right to drugs as a species of property right
presupposes a capitalist conception of the relationship between the
individual and the state, incompatible with a socialist conception of that
relationship. We are familiar with the fact that capitalism is premised on the
right to property. As for socialism, Webster’s defines it as “a system or
condition of society or group living in which there is no private property.”22
Q.E.D.: Drug censorship, like book censorship, is an attack on capitalism
and freedom. Psychiatrists either ignore this cardinal connection between
the chemicals we call “drugs” and politics, preferring to treat drug use as if
it were purely an issue of mental health or psychopathology, or—if they
recognize it—treat the relationship with their customary hostility to liberty
and property. To illustrate this point, I shall juxtapose the views on liberty
and property of two of the most important thinkers of our age: Ludwig von
Mises and Sigmund Freud. Although both men lived in Vienna at about the
same time and addressed some of the same momentous issues, I have never
seen their differing judgments compared and brought to bear on our current
views concerning drug controls.

Ludwig von Mises vs. Sigmund Freud

In 1922, Ludwig von Mises—the most unappreciated genius of our
century—published a book entitled Socialism, establishing his reputation, at
least among the cognoscenti. His closing sentences in that work read thus:
“Whether Society is good or bad may be a matter of individual judgment;
but whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to
misery, must accept … without limitation or reserve, private ownership of
the means of production.”23
Seven years later, Sigmund Freud—the most successful charlatan of our
century—published Civilization and Its Discontents, adding more lustre to
his already considerable fame especially among the scientistically minded
enemies of capitalism and freedom. “I have no concern,” declared Freud,
“with any economic criticism of the communist system; I cannot inquire
into whether the abolition of private property is expeditious or
advantageous.”24 Freud’s anti-capitalist remarks were not isolated
comments, tossed off at the spur of the moment. Years before, he greeted
the Bolsheviks’ declaration of war on private property and religious
freedom with a mixture of naiveté and optimism. “At a time when the great
nations announce that they expect salvation only from the maintenance of
Christian piety,” he wrote in 1917, “the revolution in Russia—in spite of all
its disagreeable details—seems none the less like the message of a better
future.”25 In public, Freud chided the United States for not sharing his
disdain for religion; in private, he conducted his business in U.S. dollars
only.
Unfortunately, modern liberals continue to focus on human rights rather
than on property rights. Why? Because it makes them appear socially
concerned—“caring” and “compassionate.” By splitting off property rights
from human rights, liberals have succeeded in giving the former a bad
name, undermining the moral legitimacy of all other rights in the process.
But property rights are not only just as valid as human rights; they are
anterior to, and necessary for, human rights.

Liberty as Choice
Private property is indispensable as an economic base and precondition
for forming a government fit for freedom. I use this unfamiliar expression to
emphasize that no government is, or can be, committed to freedom. Only
people can be. Government, by its very nature, has a vested interest in
enlarging its freedom of action, thereby necessarily reducing the freedom of
individuals. At the same time, the right to private property—as a political-
economic concept—is not a sufficient foundation for a government serving
the needs and meriting the loyalty of free and responsible persons. It may
be worth remembering here that Adam Smith, generally regarded as the
father of free-market capitalism, was not an economist (there was no such
thing in the eighteenth century). He was a professor of moral philosophy.
As such, his brand of economics made no attempt to be value-free. Today,
professional economists and observers of the economic scene err in their
efforts to make the study of these human affairs into a value-free social
“science.”
What, then, is the moral merit of the free market? What is good about it,
besides its being an efficient mechanism for producing and delivering goods
and services? The answer is that the free market is good because it
encourages social cooperation (production and trade) and discourages force
and fraud (exploitation of the many by a few with the power to coerce), and
because it is a legal-moral order that places the value of the person as an
individual above that of his value as a member of the community. It is
implicit in the idea of the free market that persons who want to enjoy its
benefits must assume responsibility, and be held responsible, for their
actions; that they look to the principle of caveat emptor—not the
paternalistic state—for protection from the risks inherent in the exercise of
freedom; and that among the risks with which they must live are those
associated with drugs and medical treatments. In short, the fundamental
precepts of moral philosophy and political economics cannot be separated:
They are symbiotic, the one dependent on the other. “It is … illegitimate,”
Mises warned, “to regard the ‘economic’ as a definite sphere of human
action which can be sharply delimited from other spheres of action…. The
economic principle applies to all human action.”26
If we are willing to use our political-economic vocabulary precisely and
take its terms seriously, we must conclude that just as the Constitution
guarantees us the right to worship whatever gods we choose and read
whatever books we choose, so it also guarantees us the right to use
whatever drugs we choose. Mises’s observation about the characteristic
conflict of the twentieth century—which, with welfare-statism in mind, he
offered at its beginning—remains true toward its end and applies with
special force to the drug problem:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religion was the main issue in European political
controversies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe as well as in America
the paramount question was representative government versus royal absolutism. Today it is
the market economy versus socialism.27

Mises never ceased emphasizing that our bloody century is characterized

by a struggle between two diametrically opposite types of economic
systems: command economies controlled by the state, exemplified by
socialism (communism), versus free-market economies regulated by the
supply and demand of individual producers and consumers, exemplified by
capitalism (classical liberalism). States based on command economies are
inherently despotic—a few superiors issuing orders, and many subordinates
obeying them. States based on market economies are inherently democratic
—individuals deciding what to produce, sell, and buy and at what prices,
producers and consumers alike being free to engage or refrain from
engaging in market transactions.

The American Drug Market Today

To clearly understand what has happened to the market in drugs in the
United States during the past century, it is necessary, first, to distinguish
between consumer goods, which are depleted in use, such as food and
clothing, and capital goods, which are used to produce goods, such as
machines and tools. This distinction immediately alerts us to the fact that
the term consumer good has a distinctly individualistic (non-paternalistic)
connotation: It implies that an individual, qua consumer, has an interest in a
particular product. After all, not everything a person might be able to
consume is—at all times, for all individuals—a consumer good. To qualify,
there must be consumers who want it. And the only way we can be certain
that a customer really wants a good or service is if he is willing to pay for it.
This is what economists call a “demand” for a good. And this is the
meaning of the adage “People pay for what they value, and value what they
pay for.”
Obviously, the presence or absence of demand is an economic and
cultural—not a scientific or medical—issue. For example, in the United
States today, there is a demand for marijuana, but there is no demand for the
powdered horn of the rhinoceros (except perhaps in San Francisco). To be
sure, the concept of demand (like the concept of illness) is a man-made
category: In each case, the contours of the concept may be redrawn to suit
the strategies of the definers; and both “conditions” may be imposed on
individuals against their will. Courts now routinely order persons who use
illegal drugs to attend drug treatment programs, from which mental health
experts and economists conclude that there is a huge demand for drug
treatment services in our society. (This creation, by court orders, of drug
abusers and a demand for drug treatment services is similar to the creation,
by court orders, of mental illnesses and a demand for mental health
services. The pathetic and now discredited principles of statist—that is,
Soviet—economics thus continue to flourish in our own drug-control and
mental-health systems.)
Let us suspend our customary concerns with the drug user’s motivations,
society’s judgments of drug use, and the pharmacological effects of
particular drugs. And let us focus instead on the various ways an American
who wants to use drugs now actually gains access to them. We can then
categorize drugs according to their availability or mode of distribution, as
follows:
1. No special government controls limiting sales: for example, coffee,
aspirin, laxatives. Produced by private entrepreneurs; distributed
through the free market. Product called “food,” “beverage,” or “over-
the-counter drug”; seller, “merchant”; buyer, “customer.”
2. Government controls limiting sales:
a. To adults: for example, alcohol and tobacco. Produced by private
entrepreneurs; distributed through the free or state-licensed market.
Product called “beer,” “wine,” “cigarette”; seller, “merchant”;
buyer, “customer.”
b. To patients: for example, digitalis, penicillin, steroids, Valium.
Produced by government-regulated pharmaceutical manufacturers;
distributed through state-controlled physicians’ prescriptions and
pharmacies. Product called “prescription drug”; seller,
“pharmacist”; buyer, “patient.”
c. To addicts: for example, methadone. Produced by government-
regulated pharmaceutical manufacturers; distributed through
special federally approved dispensers. No legal sellers or buyers.
Product called “drug (abuse) treatment”; distributor, “drug
(treatment) program”; recipient, “(certified) addict.”
3. Government controls prohibiting sales to everyone: for example,
heroin, crack. Produced illegally by private entrepreneurs; distributed
illegally through the black market. Product called “dangerous drug”
or “illegal drug”; seller, “pusher” or “trafficker”; buyer, “addict” or
“drug abuser.”
As such a market-oriented perspective on drug distribution shows, we
have nothing even remotely resembling a free market in drugs in the United
States. Nevertheless, most people mistakenly think of prescription drugs,
and even of specifically restricted drugs such as methadone, as “legal.”
Although it is a truism, it is perhaps necessary to repeat that the
uncorrupted concept of liberty implies no particular result, only the
proverbial level playing field where all can play—and win or lose—by the
same rules. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, no one is, or can be,
killed by an illegal drug. If a person dies as a result of using a drug, it is
because he chose to do something risky: The drug he chooses may be
cocaine or Cytoxan; the risk he chooses to incur may be motivated by the
pressure of peers or the pressure of cancer. In either case, the drug may kill
him. Some deaths attributed to illegal drug use may thus be accidents (for
example, inadvertent overdose); some may be indirect suicides (playing
Russian roulette with unknown drugs); and some may be direct suicides
(deliberate overdose).

Reforming Drug Policy: Deforming the Market

Because all criticisms of drug control policies are aimed at the way
particular drugs are distributed, proposals for reform correspond to the
categories described above. I shall summarize each posture vis-à-vis drug
controls by identifying the characteristic strategies of its proponents:
1. Criminalizers (“Do you want more crack babies?”): Keep type 3
substances in category 3; expand categories 3, 2b, and 2c, and
constrict categories 1 and 2a; drug offenders are both criminals and
patients, who should be punished as well as (coercively) treated.
2. Legalizers (“The war on drugs cannot be won.”): Remove certain
type 3 substances, such as heroin, from category 3 and transfer them
to category 2b or 2c (make the manufacture and sale of heretofore
prohibited substances a government monopoly); drug abusers are sick
and should be (coercively) treated in government-funded programs.
3. Free marketeers (“Self-medication is a right.”): Abolish categories 2b,
2c, and 3, and place all presently restricted substances in category 2a;
drug use is personal choice, neither crime nor illness.
I disagree with both the drug criminalizers and the drug legalizers: with
the former, because I believe that the criminal law ought to be used to
protect us from others, not from ourselves; with the latter, because I believe
that behavior, even if it is actually or potentially injurious or self-injurious,
is not a disease, and that no behavior should be regulated by sanctions
called “treatment.”28
As we have seen, there are three distinct drug markets in the United
States today: (1) the legal (free) market; (2) the medical (prescription)
market; and (3) the illegal (black) market. Because the cost of virtually all
of the services we call “drug treatment” is borne by parties other than the
so-called patient, and because most people submit to such treatment under
legal duress, there is virtually no free market at all in drug treatment. Try as
we might, we cannot escape the fact that the conception of a demand for
goods and services in the free market is totally different from the
conception we now employ in reference to drug use and drug treatment. In
the free market, a demand is what the customer wants; or as merchandising
magnate Marshall Field put it, “The customer is always right.” In the
prescription drug market, we seem to say, “The doctor is always right”: The
physician decides what drug the patient should “demand,” and that is all he
can legally get. Finally, in the psychiatric drug market, we as a society are
saying, “The patient is always wrong”: The psychiatrist decides what drug
the mental patient “needs” and compels him to consume it, by force if
necessary.
Merchants thus advertise—to create a demand for the goods they want to
sell. Tylenol, for example, is advertised to customers. Physicians prescribe
—to open a drug-market otherwise closed to persons and thus make specific
drugs available to them. Penicillin, say, is prescribed to patients. And
psychiatrists coerce—to force mental patients to be drugged as they, the
doctors, want them to be drugged. Haldol is forcibly injected into
psychotics.
However, the foregoing generalizations—valid until recently—no longer
hold. Drug manufacturers have begun to advertise prescription drugs to the
public. While this practice reveals the hitherto concealed hypocrisy of
prescription laws, it introduces increasingly serious distortions into the drug
market. For example, tobacco—a legal product—cannot be advertised on
television, but Nicorette—an illegal product—can be. (Nicorette is a
nicotine-containing chewing gum available by prescription only.) Here are
some other current examples of prescription drug advertisements aimed at
the public:
For Estraderm, an estrogen patch for women: “Now the change of life doesn’t have to
change yours.”29
For Minitran, a transdermal form of nitroglycerin: “Everything you asked for in a patch …
for less.”30
For Seldane, an antihistamine: “You’ve tried just about everything for your hay fever….
Have you tried your doctor?”31
 For Rogaine, an anti-baldness drug: “The earlier you use Rogaine, the better your chances
of growing hair.”32

The advertisement for Rogaine goes beyond simply alerting the

customer to the availability of a prescription drug about which he might not
be aware: It offers him cash for going to see a doctor and demanding the
drug. In a coupon at the bottom of the page, a smaller caption tells the
reader: “Fill this in now. Then, start to fill in your hair loss.” The coupon is
worth $10 “as an incentive” to see a doctor. Because many of the
prescription drugs advertised to the public are very expensive, the logic of
this practice suggests that drug companies may be tempted to offer
increasingly large sums to would-be patients, in effect to bribe them to
solicit a prescription from their physician.
Naturally, drug companies defend the practice. “The ads,” they say,
“help educate patients and give consumers a chance to become more
involved in choosing the medication they want.”33 But that laudable goal
could be better served by a free market in drugs. In my opinion, the practice
of advertising prescription drugs to the public fulfills a more odious
function, namely, to further infantilize the layman and, at the same time,
undermine the physician’s medical authority. The policy puts physicians in
an obvious bind. Prescription laws give doctors monopolistic privilege to
provide certain drugs to certain persons, or withhold such drugs from them.
However, the advertising of prescription drugs encourages people to
pressure their physicians to prescribe the drugs they want, rather than the
drugs the physicians believe they need. If a doctor does not comply, the
patient is likely to take his business elsewhere. A professor of medicine at
Columbia University tells Time magazine, “There is no question that certain
physicians are being influenced to issue prescriptions that they would not
otherwise write.”34 Missing is any recognition of the way this practice
reinforces the role of the patient as helpless child, and of the doctor as
providing/withholding parent. After all, we know why certain breakfast
food advertisements are aimed at young children: Because while they
cannot buy these foods for themselves, they can pressure their parents to
buy the advertised cereals for them. Similarly, the American people cannot
buy prescription drugs, but they can pressure their doctors to prescribe the
advertised drugs for them.
 The Fiction of Drug Abuse Services
American law, medicine, and public opinion regard not only involuntary
confinement in a mental hospital but also involuntary confinement in a drug
treatment program as bona fide medical treatments: “Civil commitment is
frequently used with addicts who are arrested for criminal activity; with
criminal charges pending, the addict can be coerced into treatment and
retained long enough to receive the benefits of a treatment program.”35
Thus, perhaps the most important function of our fashionable drug
treatment rhetoric is to distract us from the fact that the drug user wants the
drug of his choice, not the drug treatment the authorities choose for him.
We are flooded with news stories about addicts robbing people to get
money to pay for drugs. But who has ever heard of an addict robbing a
person to get money to pay for drug treatment? Q.E.D.
If we were to view the whole package of illegal drug use plus legally
coerced drug treatment from a free-market perspective, we would see the
drug abuser’s behavior as his existential and economic demand for the drug
of his choice—and the drug prohibitionist’s so-called services as deceptive
and coercive meddling deliberately mislabeled as “therapy.” Indeed, so long
as the drug counselor (or whatever he is called) acts as a paid agent of the
state (or some other third party in conflict with the self-defined interests of
the drug user), we would have to define his intervention as interference not
only in the life of his nominal client, but in the free market in drugs as well.
All this, and more, Frederic Bastiat had warned against in the early
ninteenth century. “To rob the public,” he observed, “it is necessary to
deceive it. To deceive it, it is necessary to persuade it that it is being robbed
for its own benefit, and to induce it to accept, in exchange for its property,
services that are fictitious or often even worse.”36
If ever there were services that are fictitious or even worse, they are our
current publicly financed drug treatment services. The wisdom of our
language reveals the truth and supports the cogency of these reflections. We
do not call convicts “consumers of prison services,” or conscripts
“consumers of military services”; but we call committed mental patients
“consumers of mental health services,” and paroled addicts “consumers of
drug treatment services.” We might as well call drug traffickers—
conscripted by the former drug czar William Bennett for beheading
—“consumers of guillotine services.” After all, Dr. Guillotin was a doctor,
and Mr. Bennett used to teach ethics.
To be sure, persons drafted as convicts, conscripts, and “chemically
dependent persons” all receive certain services, such as food, shelter,
clothing, and anti-drug propaganda. The provision of such “services” is
then used to mask the fact that the beneficiaries would prefer being left
alone by their benefactors. Like the mythologizing of personal problems as
mental diseases, so the mythologizing of illegal drug use as a disease has
been overwhelmingly successful. In 1991, the federal government will
spend more than $1 billion on drug treatment research. Enthusiasm for such
“research” is not diminished by the fact that, according to a General
Accounting Office report released in September 1990, “researchers know
little more about the best way to treat various drug addictions than they did
10 years ago.”37

THE WAR ON DRUGS AS A WAR ON PROPERTY

Although it is obvious that the American drug market is now completely
state controlled, most people seem at once unaware of this fact and pleased
with it, except when they want a drug they cannot get. Then they complain
about the unavailability of that particular drug: For example, cancer patients
complain that they cannot get Laetrile; AIDS patients, that they cannot get
unapproved anti-AIDS drugs; women, that they cannot get unapproved
chemical abortifacients; terminally ill patients in pain, that they cannot get
heroin; and so on. It seems to me that just as the Soviet people must now
suffer the consequences of their war on private property, we shall have to
suffer still more wrenching personal and national tragedies as the
consequences of our War on Drugs.
Sadly, the very concept of a closure of the free market in drugs is likely
to ring vague and abstract to most people today. But the personal and social
consequences of a policy based on such a concept are anything but abstract
or vague. Every aspect of our life that brings us into contact with the
manufacture, sale, or use of substances of pharmacological interest to
people has been utterly corrupted. The result is that, in all the complex
human situations we call “drug abuse” and “drug abuse treatment,” the
voluntary coming together of honest and responsible citizens trading with
one another in mutual trust and respect has been replaced by the deceitful
and coercive manipulation of infantilized people by corrupt and
paternalistic authorities, and vice versa. The principal role of medical, and
especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcement
of this system of chemical statism is to act as double agents—helping
politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as
a disease, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them
with drugs. This is a major national tragedy whose very existence has so far
remained unrecognized.
The War on Drugs has many grave consequences, in this discussion I can
touch on only a few of them. Perhaps the most obvious consequences of
drug prohibition are the explosive increase in crimes against persons and
property and the corresponding increase in our prison population. Both
phenomena are typically attributed to “drugs,” a misleading locution for
which the media bears an especially heavy responsibility. I shall not belabor
the fact that drugs do not—indeed, cannot—cause crime. Suffice it to repeat
that crime is an act; that the criminal actor, like all actors, has motives; and
that drug prohibition provides powerful economic incentives for both the
trade in prohibited drugs and crimes against persons and property.

The United States vs. Drug-tainted Property

One of the most ominous and least publicized consequences of the War
on Drugs is the government’s use of the Internal Revenue Service and of the
international banking system to detect and apprehend persons engaged in
the drug trade, along with its practice of confiscating property from persons
accused of drug offenses even when they are innocent. These measures
illustrate that the War on Drugs is, literally, a war on property—waged by
the U.S. government with the enthusiastic support of the Supreme Court.
The leading Supreme Court decision supporting the charade of the so-called
civil forfeiture procedure—legitimizing the government’s seizure of the
property even of innocent persons connected to drug-related offenses—
merits brief mention.
In 1971, the Pearson Yacht Leasing Company of Puerto Rico (called the
“appellee” in the decision) rented a yacht to two Puerto Rican residents.
Subsequently, the police found one marijuana cigarette on board the yacht,
charged the lessees with violation of the Controlled Substances Act of
Puerto Rico, and seized the yacht.38 The lessor (the yacht-leasing company)
sued to recover its vessel. The case reached the Supreme Court, which held
that, even though the lessor was innocent, the seizure was legal. I will
briefly summarize how the Court reached this remarkable conclusion.
The Court acknowledged that the “appellee was in no way … involved
in the criminal enterprise carried on by [the] lessee and had no knowledge
that its property was being used in connection with or in violation of
[Puerto Rican law].”39 Nevertheless, the Court—led by Justice William
Brennan, one of its leading liberals—ruled against the yacht company,
holding that “statutory forfeiture schemes are not rendered unconstitutional
because of their applicability to the property interests of innocents, and here
the Puerto Rican statutes, which further punitive and deterrent purposes,
were validly applied to appellee’s yacht.”40
Justice William O. Douglas dissented—not on principle, but because he
felt the punishment was disproportionate to the (nonexisting) crime:
Only one marihuana cigarette was found on the yacht. We deal here with trivia where harsh
judge-made law should be tempered with justice. I realize that the ancient law is founded
on the fiction that the inanimate object itself is guilty of wrongdoing. But that traditional
forfeiture doctrine cannot at times be reconciled with the requirements of the Fifth
Amendment.41

Note that Justice Douglas cavalierly sidesteps the legitimacy of the core
issue, namely, the prohibition of marijuana. Instead of engaging in a
principled argument, he magnanimously offers to return the yacht to its
rightful owners.
A closely related case, in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously
that the government could dispossess a person of his property even after he
had been acquitted on a related criminal charge (of gun law, rather than
drug law, violation), deserves to be mentioned in this connection. In 1977,
Patrick Mulcahey was apprehended by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms and charged with dealing in firearms without a
license. Although Mulcahey had no license, a jury acquitted him, perhaps
because it felt that he had been entrapped. Following Mulcahey’s acquittal,
the United States moved to “forfeiture of the seized firearms.”42 The Court
held that
an acquittal on criminal charges does not prove that the defendant is innocent; it merely
proves the existence of reasonable doubt as to his guilt…. [T]he substantive criminal
 provision under which Mulcahey was prosecuted, does not render unlawful an intention to
engage in the business of dealing in firearms without a license; only the completed act of
engaging in the prohibited business is made a crime…. Because the par. 924(d) forfeiture
proceeding brought against Mulcahey’s firearms is not a criminal proceeding, it is not
barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause.43

The crux of the matter is Congress’s power to define punishment as a

“remedial act.” With the transforming of de facto punishments into
sanctions de jure “intended to be civil and remedial, rather than criminal
and punitive,”44 our rights to liberty and property vanish. Mental patients
have, of course, long been the beneficiaries of such remedial sanctions,
being incarcerated though innocent of crime. Civil commitment skirts the
prohibition against preventive detention by permitting “mental patients,”
accused of being “dangerous,” to be deprived of their liberty. This is
accomplished by calling the legal procedure for incarcerating the victim
“civil,” and the place of confinement a “hospital.”45 In the same way, the
federal forfeiture laws skirt the prohibition against punishing innocent
persons by permitting “drug criminals,” accused of “having used or
intending to use” their property to commit or facilitate a drug law violation,
to be deprived of their property.
The Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and
seizures is thus neatly nullified by calling the legal procedure for
confiscating the property “civil,” and the economic loss imposed on the
victim a “storage fee.” People suspected of drug-related offenses have thus
been deprived of their boats, cars, houses, and money, which they may or
may not be able to regain after they prove their innocence, by which time
the effort may be counterproductive. One victim of this civil deprivation-of-
property procedure, whose boat worth $7,600 was seized and kept for three
and a half months, got it back “upon payment of $4,000 in storage and
maintenance charges.”46 Another had his brand-new $140,000 fishing boat
seized after Customs Service agents found 1.7 grams of marijuana in a
crewman’s jacket pocket. “Customs officials admitted that Mr. Hogan [the
owner] knew nothing about the marijuana. But they held his boat long
enough for him to miss the halibut season (a $30,000 loss), and at first
demanded that he pay a $10,000 fine for failing to keep drugs off his
vessel.”47 Similar horror stories abound.48
During the past half-dozen years, civil forfeiture has become a huge
federal business, and a huge federal boondoggle. According to a 1991
report of the General Accounting Office, the inventory of property seized
by the Federal Marshalls Service “grew from 2,555 items at the start of the
1985 fiscal year, to 31,110 by December 31, 1990”—by which time the
service was “mismanaging more than $1.4 billion in commercial property
seized from drug dealers.”49 Although not offered in connection with the
drug laws and their enforcement, a remark made by Jefferson scholar
Forrest McDonald is apposite here: “The Government of the United States
[now] interferes on a level in ordinary people’s lives in a way they [the
Founding Fathers] would have regarded as the most vicious form of tyranny
imaginable. George the Third and all of his ministers could not have
imagined a government this big, this intrusive.”50

Every Man Has a Right to Eat as He Pleases

In 1884, protesting the arguments of (alcohol) prohibitionists, Dio Lewis
a physician and temperance reformer—declared, “Every man has a right to
eat and drink, dress and exercise as he pleases. I do not mean moral right,
but legal right.”51 The profound truth of this simple statement is reflected, I
believe, in an important inference that we ought to—but never do—draw
from the Prohibition Amendment.
The men who drafted the Volstead Act, which provided for enforcement
of the Eighteenth Amendment, wanted to prohibit the consumption of
alcohol; however, they did not outlaw it. They were not interested in
whether people transported bottles of chemicals from one place to another,
yet that is what they outlawed. I infer from this that, deep in their hearts,
they and their constituents realized that a competent adult in the Land of the
Free has an inalienable right to ingest whatever he wants. It should be
unnecessary to add (but our current drug scapegoating justifies my adding)
that there was no question, during Prohibition, of randomly testing people
to determine if there was any ethanol in their system, or of searching their
homes for alcohol, or of imprisoning them for possessing alcohol, or of
involuntarily treating them for the disease of unsanctioned alcohol use.

DRUG CONTROLS AS CHEMICAL STATISM

 The contemporary legal justification of drug controls rests heavily on the
traditional Judeo-Christian equation of murder and suicide as two species of
homicide, combined with the modern and peculiarly Western tendency to
view both as due to abnormal mental states. Although murder and suicide
both result in death (as do many other human behaviors), they are as
different from one another as rape and masturbation. The one someone else
does to you; the other you do for yourself. Drug abuse, like food or sex
abuse, can injure or kill only the abuser; and of course it rarely does that.
However, drug law abuse—the criminalization of the free market in drugs
—injures and kills users and so-called abusers alike. Many have already
been killed by impure drugs, the adulteration of a criminalized product
(“dope”); by bullets fired, in the course of gang wars, for instance, by
persons engaged in the illegal trade in drugs (“pushers”); and by AIDS,
owing to the absence of a free market in clean hypodermic syringes and
needles (“drug paraphernalia”). Many more will surely be killed in the
name of this holy war that promises to purify America and make it drug-
free.

The Fable of the Bees vs. the Medical Model

The close connection we now tend to draw between suicide and murder,
between drug abuse as harm to self and harm to others, is a manifestation of
what is often called the “medical model”: the viewing of behavior—
especially socially disturbing behavior—as if it were a disease or the
product of a disease. This absurd but nonetheless popular perspective on
bad habits—on which our drug controls and much else in our contemporary
struggle with lack of self-discipline and self-responsibility rest—is, in
effect, an inversion of our traditionally moral perspective on behavior. The
latter perspective Hobbes stated, simply and forcefully, when he declared,
“Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.”52
Indeed, what else could be their object? Yet it pains us now to acknowledge
this.
Try as we might to hide from ourselves the bitter truth about the
influence of our societal perspective on behavior in these matters, we shall
have to rediscover it or perish. Such painful learning by collective
experience seems to be a characteristic feature of the free market and of the
nearly reflexive human revolt, born out of an innate combination of
dependency and paternalism, against it. However, overcoming our
predicament with respect to the market in drugs will require just such
relearning.
In this connection, consider the illuminating title of Bernard de
Mandeville’s epoch-making work The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices,
Publick Benefits.53 By cannily characterizing the market as a mechanism
for turning private vices into public virtues—benefits, as he put it—
Mandeville (1670–1733), a Dutch-born British physician-satirist, succeeded
not only in giving a satisfactory account of its psychosocial underpinnings,
but also in making it socially acceptable. Mutatis mutandis, abolishing the
free market—in drugs or other goods or services deemed “dangerous” or
“sinful”—reverses the process Mandeville described. Replacing personal
efforts at self-control with impersonal laws coercing others, sumptuary laws
prohibiting private pleasures create a mechanism for turning private virtues
into public vices. This is precisely the lesson we draw from what
communism has wrought in the Soviet Union, and is the lesson we ought to
draw—but so far have stubbornly refused to draw—from what drug
controls have wrought in the United States.

The Case for Chemical and Economic Statisms

Our individualist-libertarian and collectivist-redemptionist impulses—
each robust in our political traditions—are, of course, at odds with one
another and need to be constantly reconciled. In 1917 this ambivalence
emerged as the principal ideological conflict of our age, pitting the United
States and the Soviet Union against one another in a bitter antagonism.
While the intensity of this conflict as an international struggle for power
now appears diminished, its future as a domestic conflict within the
American soul remains unpredictable. What is clear is that our justificatory
images for chemical statism (command pharmacology) and for economic
statism (command economy) are much the same, as the following schematic
syllogisms illustrate.
Under conditions of economic insecurity, inexorable under capitalist exploitation, freedom
is a meaningless concept. The precondition of true freedom is economic security, which
can be assured only by government ownership of the means of production and state control
of the market in goods and services. Ergo, only in a communist society, based on command
economy, can there be true freedom.
 Under conditions of chemical insecurity, inexorable under narcoterrorism, freedom is a
meaningless concept. The precondition of true freedom is pharmacological security, which
can be assured only by government ownership of pharmaceutical production and state
control of the market in drugs. Ergo, only in a therapeutic state, based on command
pharmacology, can there be true freedom.

These are marvelously persuasive arguments. If the first were not, fewer
people would accept it in communist countries as providing moral and
political legitimacy for the policy of state control of the market in goods
and services; and if the second were not, fewer would accept it in the
United States as providing legitimacy for the control of the market in
pharmaceutical goods and services. There is only one thing wrong with
these arguments, namely, that they are erroneous. Nothing can alter the fact
that, like disease and death, insecurity and risk are intrinsic to the human
condition. The state cannot protect us from any of them. The most the state
can do is provide us with a social environment in which we can protect
ourselves from the various risks that life poses. We, in turn, must learn to
protect ourselves and others we care for, by cultivating our intelligence,
prudence, and self-discipline.
Although the state cannot protect us from the risks of life, it can easily
create an economic and legal environment in which we are deprived of the
goods and drugs we crave. Perfect economic and pharmacological security
is not to be had in this world. However, states whose citizens acquiesce in
policies ostensibly aimed at protecting them from their own anti-social
and/or unhealthy dispositions can easily bring about crushing economic and
pharmacological deprivation for all but a corrupt elite.

Toward Politics qua Therapy

In recent years, there has been no shortage of critics of big government,
on both sides of the rusted Iron Curtain. But words are cheap. Mikhail
Gorbachev criticizes communism but continues to practice it where it
counts, maintaining state control of the means of production. Similarly,
George Bush criticizes opponents of the free market but continues to
practice state interventionism where it counts, maintaining and even
intensifying state control of medicine and especially the trade in drugs. And
sadly, there seems to be little recognition of this, even within the ranks of
anti-statists. Paul Johnson, for example, writes of the disenchantment with
messianic politics and asks, “Was it possible to hope that the ‘age of
politics,’ like the ‘age of religion’ before it, was now drawing to a close?”54
But so long as human nature remains what it is, neither religion nor
politics will disappear. Hence, Johnson’s question is poorly framed. We
might better ask, “Is it possible to hope that the ‘age of politics qua
nationalism,’ like the ‘age of politics qua religion’ before it, is now drawing
to a close?” To which I would answer, The “age of politics qua nationalism”
is already past, having been replaced by the “age of politics qua therapy.”
When all is said and done, what has made the United States a safe haven
for the weak and the oppressed? Due process—a lofty tradition of according
persons genuine legal protection against accusations of wrongdoing. But
the American political system accords no similar legal protection to drugs.
The state may call a person dangerous, but it cannot deprive him of liberty
unless it can prove him guilty of a crime (or incriminate him as mentally
ill). Similarly, the state may—and can—call a drug dangerous and remove it
from the market, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. Thus, all
that the therapeutic demagogues need to do is declare a particular drug to be
the embodiment of transcendent disease-producing evil and, presto, we
have the perfect modern medicomythological scapegoat. This pharmakos
(Greek for scapegoat) is not a person, so why should it have any rights? It is
an ominous threat, causing deadly dangerous diseases, so what rational
person would come to its defense?
In 1889, Emile Zola aroused the world when he cried, “J’accuse!” But
Dreyfus was a man, a human being for whom people could feel
compassion. Today, the orchestrators of universal sympathy feel
compassion for animals, plants, the ecosystem, the whole universe. But who
can feel compassion for “crack”?
 2

The American Ambivalence:

Liberty vs. Utopia

Mississippi will drink wet and vote dry so long as any citizen
can stagger to the polls.
—Will Rogers1

Ever since Colonial times, the American people have displayed two
powerful but contradictory existential dispositions: They looked inward,
seeking to perfect the self through a struggle for self-discipline; and
outward, seeking to perfect the world through the conquest of nature and
the moral reform of others. The result has been an unusually intense
ambivalence about a host of pleasure-producing acts (drug use being but
one) and an equally intense reluctance to confront this ambivalence,
embracing simultaneously both a magical-religious and rational-scientific
outlook on life. In his important work on the intellectual origins of the
Constitution, Forrest McDonald notes that the colonists displayed a Puritan
devotion to so-called sumptuary legislation, that is, to laws prohibiting
“excessive indulgence” in frivolous pleasures, such as gambling. Yet the
Framers also believed “that the protection of property was a (or the)
fundamental purpose for submitting to the authority of government.”2
McDonald does not acknowledge that these beliefs are mutually
irreconcilable.
As the nation grew more populous and powerful, this peculiar national
heritage of unresolved ambivalence became a veritable national treasure.
Combined with our historically unparalleled diversity as a people, the
mixture—not surprisingly—yields a uniquely vague and uncertain national
identity. What makes a person an American? Or, to put it in more precise
political-philosophical terms: What is the basis for our union as a people? It
cannot be the English language, because too many Americans do not speak
the language or speak it very badly, and because too many non-Americans
speak (more or less) the same language. It cannot be the Constitution,
because too many Americans do not know what it says and, if they did,
would repudiate it. I submit that, lacking the usual grounds on which people
congregate as a nation, we habitually fall back on the most primitive yet
most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating.3 Hence the
American passion for moral crusades, which, thanks to the modern
medicalization of morals, now appear as crusades against disease. This is
why so many Americans believe there is no real difference between the
effort required to combat the devastation caused by polio and that caused by
heroin.4
In short, we must not underestimate the demagogic appeal that the
prospect of stamping out evil by suitably dramatic means has always
exercised, and will continue to exercise, on the minds of men and women.
The Romans, barbarians that they were, had circuses where they watched
gladiators kill one another. Our circuses—splashed across the front pages of
newspapers and magazines, and flashed unceasingly on television screens—
entertain us with our own civilized, and of course scientific, spectacles. We
are shown how “bad” illicit drugs injure and kill their victims, and how
“good” psychiatric drugs cure them of their nonexistent mental illnesses.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FROM SIN

If a person prefers not to question a phenomenon, it is futile to answer
his nonexistent query. Such, precisely, is our situation today with respect to
drugs. Instead of pondering the so-called drug problem, people know—as
Josh Billings would say—“everything that ain’t so” about it.5 Accordingly,
they flit from one absurd explanation to another, without ever stopping long
enough to hear what they are saying and then, appalled, stop talking and
start thinking.

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan: “Any user of illicit drugs is an accomplice to murder.”6
Former drug czar William Bennett: “It [drug abuse] is a product of the Great Deceiver….
We need to bring to these people in need the God who heals.”7
 New York State Governor Mario Cuomo, described while visting a school: “Pupils and
teachers waving banners gathered at the school’s entrance and the band played the
national anthem as Governor Cuomo walked through the door. Cuomo praised the
children for taking a stand against drugs, which he called ‘the devil.’ … ‘Thank you
from the bottom of my heart,’ Cuomo said…. ‘Anybody who does not believe in the
devil, think about drugs.’”8

These remarks can easily be multiplied. I choose them because they

exemplify the nature of public discourse about drugs in the United States
today. Looking at the contemporary American drug scene, it is difficult to
escape the conclusion that, notwithstanding the contrary evidence of
impressive scientific and technological achievements, we stand once again
knee-deep in a popular delusion and crowd madness: the Great American
Drugcraze. As in the persecutory movements that preceded it, harmless
persons and inanimate objects are once again demonized as the enemy,
invested with magically dangerous powers, and thus turned into scapegoats
whose denunciation and destruction become self-evident civic duty.9
During the Middle Ages, Nancy Reagan’s “drug users” and Mario Cuomo’s
“devils” were witches and Jews—the former typically accused of abusing
children; the latter, of poisoning wells.

America: Redeemer Nation

To understand America’s protracted struggle against drugs, we must
situate the current anti-drug hysteria in the context of this nation’s historical
penchant for waging moral crusades. Since Colonial times, the New World
was perceived—by settlers and foreign observers alike—as a New
Promised Land, a place where man, corrupted in the Old World, was reborn,
uncorrupted. This vision inspired the colonists, informed the Founders,
burned brightly in the nineteenth century, was clearly exhibited during the
earlier decades of this century—first in a great war to make the world safe
for democracy, then in an even greater war to make it safe from German
and Japanese nationalism—and is now plainly manifest in the war to make
the world safe from dangerous drugs.10 Perhaps more than any recent
president, George Bush embodies our self-contradictory quest for a free
society and a utopian moral order. Giving his inaugural address in January
1989, Bush stressed two themes: the free market—and the war against it.
“We know,” declared the president, “how to secure a more just and
prosperous life for man on earth: through free markets … and the exercise
of free will unhampered by the state.” Then, hardly pausing, he declared
drugs to be the nation’s chief domestic problem, and pledged, “This scourge
will stop.”11
Formerly, the conviction that America’s manifest destiny was the moral
reformation of the world was couched in clerical terms, as a fight against
sin (drinking as “intemperance”); now, it is couched in clinical terms, as a
fight against disease (drug use as “chemical dependency”). The medieval
well-poisoning imagery, brought up to date, remains irresistible: General
Manuel Noriega is a “narco-terrorist” who sends us cocaine to infect our
children; we, in turn, launch Operation Just Cause, invade Panama, kidnap
its head of state, and bring him to the United States for a fair trial. Although
in his magisterial work, Redeemer Nation, Ernest Lee Tuveson does not
mention drugs or drug controls, his book can be read as a sustained
historical critique that pulls the rug of rationalizations from under the feet
of the drug warriors. “To assume,” Tuveson cautioned, “that what is good
for America is good for the world, that saving the United States is saving
mankind, is to open up a large area of temptation…. The danger in all this is
evident.”12

Comstockery: Setting the Stage for the War on Drugs

There was a time, not long ago, when America was at peace with drugs
—when the trade in drugs was as unregulated as the trade in diet books is
today; when people did not view drugs as presenting the sort of danger that
required the protection of the national government; and when, although
virtually all of the drugs of which we are now deathly afraid were freely
available, there was nothing even remotely resembling a “drug problem.” It
would be a mistake to assume, however, that in those good old days
Americans minded their own business. Far from it. Then they hounded
themselves and their fellows with the fear of another dangerous pollutant
threatening the nation, namely, pornographic books, magazines, and
pictures. Inasmuch as the turn-of-the-century war on obscenity preceded,
and in part paved the way for, the twentieth-century War on Drugs, let us
begin by taking a brief look at print controls or media censorship.
Censorship—that is, the prohibition of uttering or publishing
“dangerous,” “heretical,” “subversive,” or “obscene” ideas or images—is an
age-old social custom. In fact, appreciation of the moral merit of the free
trade in ideas and images is a very recent historical acquisition, limited to
secular societies that place a high value on individual liberty and private
property. In many parts of the world today, there is no press freedom and
the very idea of opposing the right of the church or of the state to control
information is considered to be subversive.
The reason for censorship is as obvious as the maxims celebrating the
power of ideas are numerous. If the pen is mightier than the sword, we can
expect sword-holders to want to sheath their adversaries’ swords. As Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., put it, censorship rests on the realization that
“every idea is an incitement.”13 Perhaps he should have specified “every
interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting
drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting,
whether it be dance, music, gambling, or sport. For a number of reasons,
among them an increasing tempo of immigration and population growth, in
the 1880s Americans began to feel besieged by a pitiless enemy determined
to destroy the very soul of their nation. The scriptural serpent surfaced once
again, put on the mask called “obscenity and pornography,” and suddenly
books like Fanny Hill and pictures of seminude women became dire threats
to the welfare of the nation. So the country declared war on obscenity and
soon had a censorship czar committed to stamping out smut. That czar was
Anthony Comstock, whose heroic exploits so amused George Bernard
Shaw that he made the czar’s last name a part of the vocabulary of
American English. A “comstock,” according to Webster’s, “is a ludicrous
prude, esp. in matters relating to morality in art,” and “comstockery [is]
prudery; specif.: prudish concern in hunting down immorality, esp. in
books, papers, and pictures.”14
I am not going to dwell on Comstock’s amazing achievements. The
following episode should suffice to illustrate the power he wielded and the
similarities between the war on obscenity at the beginning of this century
and the War on Drugs at the end of it. As William Bennett’s efforts were
hampered by drug pushers, Anthony Comstock’s were hampered by smut
pushers, among them Margaret Sanger, the pioneer feminist and birth
control advocate. Clearly, Comstock’s anti-obscenity crusade and Sanger’s
right-to-sex-information crusade were on a collision course.
To provide women with what we now call sex education, Sanger wrote a
series of articles for the socialist newspaper Call. The publication was
stopped, however, when Comstock “announced that an article on gonorrhea
violated the bounds of public taste.”15 This further inflamed Sanger, who
decided to confront Comstock by publishing all the then available
contraceptive information in a magazine appropriately titled The Woman
Rebel. Comstock was ready. The magazine was banned by the Post Office
and, on August 25, 1914, Sanger “was indicted by the federal government
on nine counts that could bring a jail sentence of 45 years.”16 Her lawyers
wanted to get her off on a technicality, but Sanger refused, preferring to flee
to England. In 1915 Comstock died, and the following year the government
dropped its charges against Mrs. Sanger.
Margaret Sanger had money, fame, and power, and survived the war on
obscenity essentially unscathed. Others were not so lucky. In 1913, two
years before his death, Comstock offered this catalog of his exploits: “In the
forty one years I have been here, I have convicted persons enough to fill a
passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty
passengers each and the sixty-first almost full. I have destroyed 160 tons of
obscene literature.”17
Comstock was at once a symbol and shaper of his age. Federal
prosecutor William P. Fiero’s declaration, in pleading for the conviction of
an obscenity trafficker, was a telling symptom of Comstock’s influence.
“The United States,” Fiero asserted, “is one great society for the
suppression of vice.”18 How prophetic was that plea! Vice, sin, sickness,
addiction, dependency, codependency—the United States is one great
society for the suppression of them all. Heywood Broun and Margaret
Leech, Comstock’s biographers, wrote perceptively of the disastrous legacy
that Comstockery conferred on the nation:
In a wide and growing curve, over the frenzied protests of the adherents of Jefferson, the
tendency toward centralization has grown. The lottery laws, the Mann Act, the Pure Food
Act, the Narcotics Act, the Prohibition Amendment—in these can it be suggested that the
obscure drygoods salesman who went crusading against impurity played any part?19

Note that the Comstock laws prohibited only “the transportation of

obscene matter in the mails.”20 Producing and possessing obscene materials
were perfectly legal. The distinction is crucial. Suppose that an artist
wanted to paint a picture of a nude woman. He could do so legally. He
could gaze at the picture to his heart’s content. He could overdose on
obscenity. He could show the picture to his friends. He could sell it to them,
and they could buy it from him. He could even take it across state lines to
show it or sell it. Today, a person cannot do any of these things with any
controlled substance grown in his own garden or synthesized in his own
laboratory.
Deplorable though they were, the Comstockian anti-obscenity statutes
were intended to protect the public only from the (ostensibly) harmful acts
of others. The extension of the reach of the interventionist state from
protecting people from moral self-harm or vice (by means of print
censorship) to protecting them from medical self-harm or illness (by means
of drug censorship) is a momentous transformation that has not received the
critical scrutiny it deserves. On the contrary, academics and intellectuals
now speak and write as if providing such protection has always been within
the province of state intervention. Drug prohibitionists thus proudly
proclaim that protecting people from themselves is just as legitimate a goal
for criminal as well as civil law as protecting people from others.
Accordingly, trying to save people from their own drug-using proclivities is
considered to be ample warrant for depriving individuals of life, liberty,
property, and any or all constitutional protections that obstruct this lofty
goal.

THE WAR ON DRUGS

After the turn of the century, having enjoyed the blessings of two
centuries of free trade in medical care, America succumbed to the lure of
European “progress,” a/k/a government regulation.21 Ever since then, the
United States has waged a War on Drugs. The hostilities began with minor
skirmishes before World War I, grew into guerilla warfare after it, and now
affect the daily lives of people not only in the United States but in foreign
countries as well.

The Food and Drugs Act of 1906

Before 1907, all drugs could be sold and bought like any other consumer
good. The manufacturer did not even have to disclose the contents of his
concoction. Hence the name patent medicine, the adjective alluding to the
fact that the composition was a trade secret, protected by a patented name.
 Although there is no evidence that the American consumer ever
complained about the free market in drugs, there is plenty of evidence that
his self-appointed protectors complained bitterly and loudly. The first
landmark event in the federal regulation of drugs (and foods) was the Food
and Drugs Act of 1906.22 What did Congress intend to achieve with this
seemingly laudable legislation? To protect people from the sale of
“adulterated” or “misbranded” foods or drugs, that is, “assur[ing] the
customer of the identity of the article purchased, not of its usefulness.”23
I say Congress’s aim in enacting this legislation was seemingly laudable
because, while it is desirable that people know what drugs they buy, forcing
manufacturers by law to list the ingredients of their products is an
unnecessary infringement on the free market—the foot in the door of
paternalistic-statist protectionism. If Great American Drugs, Inc., wants to
market a mystery product, there is no reason why the government should
prevent it from doing so. And if I want to buy such a pig in a poke, why
should the government prevent me from making that choice? People who
want to be informed about the drugs they buy and use would abstain from
purchasing mystery products, and market forces would then create a supply
of truthfully labeled drugs. In short, there is no need to prohibit the non-
disclosure of the contents of medicinal (or other) products. It is enough to
prohibit false disclosure and to punish it, as fraud, by both criminal and
civil penalties. As for nondisclosure, it would be “punished” by the
invisible hand of the market.24
The truth is that behind Congress’s ostensible aim of combating drug
misbranding lay its growing antagonism to the habit of pharmacological
self-pleasuring, manifested by the act’s specifically mandating the listing on
the label of what were then the main ingredients of Americans’ favorite
nostrums: alcohol, hypnotics, and sedatives. The relevant lines of the Food
and Drugs Act read as follows:
That for the purposes of this Act an article shall also be deemed misbranded: … if the
package fails to bear a statement on the label of the quantity or proportion of any alcohol,
morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, alpha or beta eucaine, chloroform, cannabis, chloral
hydrate, or acetanilide.25

It is implicit in this sentence that, back then, Congress took for granted
the legality of a free market in drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, heroin,
and morphine. Accordingly, Congress did not intend to abridge the drug
manufacturer’s right to freedom of speech (including his right to make
exaggerated or false therapeutic claims for his product) or the consumer’s
right to economic freedom (including his right to buy any medicinal product
he might choose and enjoy the benefits, or suffer the harms, of his choice).
Thus, the government had no authority to prosecute the drug manufacturer
for making “misleading claims” about his product. Making such claims was
then still considered to fall within the realm of the seller’s free speech and
the buyer’s responsibility to heed the warning of caveat emptor.26
Correlatively, the buyer could not sue the drug manufacturer for damages
when the product he decided to buy and ingest disagreed with him.
Although in some respects the Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was a
salutary piece of legislation because it increased the consumer’s power to
make an informed choice in the market, its enactment enabled the federal
government to enter an arena where the utmost vigilance was required to
contain its power. However, such a paranoid posture toward therapeutic
state paternalism was by that time quite unfashionable.

United States v. Johnson, 1911

In 1911 the Supreme Court decided to hear the case of United States v.
Johnson, brought on the basis of the 1906 Food and Drugs Act. The opinion
of the Court in this matter is one of the most important and most interesting
documents in the annals of American drug laws. The facts were briefly as
follows.
The defendant, Dr. O. A. Johnson, was charged with the interstate
shipment of allegedly “misbranded medicines,” specifically, of articles
“labeled respectively ‘Cancerine tablets,’ ‘Antiseptic tablets,’ ‘Blood
purifier,’ ‘Dr. Johnson’s Mild Combination Treatment for Cancer,’” and
others. The labels made extravagant therapeutic claims for the products—
for example, that Dr. Johnson’s Blood Purifier was “an effective tonic …
utterly destroying and removing impurities from the blood.”
These claims were patent nonsense. Most people knew, or should have
known, that they were hyperbole to sell the product. Nevertheless, three
members of the Court wanted to uphold Mr. Johnson’s conviction, on the
grounds that the product he was selling was worthless and that he knew it
was worthless. “Why,” asked some of the justices, “should not worthless
stuff, purveyed under false labels as cures, be made contraband of interstate
commerce—as well as lottery tickets?” What a deliciously ironic analogy!
In 1911 our Supreme Court justices recognized that advertisements for
medicines and for lottery tickets were equally misleading. Today, selling
misbranded lottery tickets is perfectly legal: For “a dollar and a dream,” the
New York State lottery system promises the buyer the chance to win
millions. But selling (or buying) truthfully labeled (illegal) drugs is not:
Cough syrup, truthfully labeled as containing one-eighth of a grain of
codeine per teaspoon, is an illegal product (unless both patient and
pharmacist receive permission from a licensed physician for effecting the
transaction).
Why did a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court hold, as recently as 1911,
that not only is selling cocaine, heroin, and other “dangerous drugs” a
constitutionally protected right, but so is making false claims about their
therapeutic efficacy? Because the Court presumably believed that property
rights and personal rights cannot endure without a marketplace governed by
the principle of caveat emptor. According to this principle, the government
is required to protect buyers only from products that are mislabeled in the
sense that the contents are falsely identified. If a person wants to buy a
bottle of aspirin, the government must protect him from vendors who might
sell him a bottle labeled “aspirin” but containing arsenic. By the same
token, this principle requires the government to leave the buyer alone to
make his own decision. If you claim that vitamin C cures cancer or the
common cold, and if I choose to believe you and want to buy vitamin C, I
ought to be left free by the government to believe or disbelieve you and act
accordingly. It is not the duty of the drug manufacturer, the pharmacist, the
physician, or the state to protect people from the consequences of acting on
false beliefs. If it were, where would that leave religions and those who
teach religious beliefs?
In its ruling in the Johnson case, the Court reemphasized the rationale
that animated Congress to enact the Food and Drugs Act of 1906. “The
purpose of the statute,” declared Justice Holmes, “is to secure pure food and
drugs…. [The statute does not] refer to claims for curative properties of
such drugs.” He then added this significant comment: “[The] claim that a
beneficial result will follow the use of a prescribed drug [cannot be] an
existing fact, but is a forecast concerning a future event and is in the nature
of things an expression of an opinion.” In addition, concerning the
manufacturer’s or seller’s right to make claims about the therapeutic
efficacy of his product, Holmes stated, “It is a postulate, as the case comes
before us, that in a certain sense the statement on the label was false, or, at
least, misleading.”27 Of course. Is not the art of salesmanship that of
promising hope? Does it not invariably entail claiming more merit for the
good or service advertised than it “actually” (as if that could be objectively
ascertained) possesses? Is there an advertisement for a car or a cosmetic
that, in this sense, does not represent a form of mislabeling? However, this
type of misbranding had nothing to do with the 1906 Food and Drugs Act.
“We are of the opinion,” wrote Justice Holmes, “that the phrase is aimed
not at all possible false statements, but only at such as determine the
identity of the article, possibly including its strength, quality and purity.”
In short, the purpose of the Food and Drugs Act was to guarantee
truthful information about what is in the bottle, not about what will happen
to the user who ingests its contents.

The Harrison Act (1914) and Its Aftermath

In 1914, Congress enacted another landmark piece of anti-drug
legislation: the Harrison Narcotic Act.28 Originally passed as a record-
keeping law, it quickly became a prohibition statute. In the course of the
next seven years, by a curious coincidence of history—if, indeed, it is
coincidence—in Russia the Soviet Union replaced the czarist empire, while
in the United States the free market in drugs was replaced by federal drug
prohibition possessing unchallengeable authority. Excerpts from two key
Supreme Court decisions quickly tell the story.
In 1915, in a test of the Harrison Act, the Court upheld it but expressed
doubts about its constitutionality: “While the Opium Registration Act of
December 17, 1914, may have a moral end, as well as revenue, in view, this
court, in view of the grave doubt as to its constitutionality except as a
revenue measure, construes it as such.”29 Yet, only six years later the Court
considered objection to federal drug prohibition a taboo. In Whipple v.
Martinson the justices declared,
There can be no question of the authority of the State in the exercise of its police power to
regulate the administration, sale, prescription, and use of dangerous and habit-forming
drugs…. The right to exercise this power is so manifest in the interest of public health and
welfare, that it is unnecessary to enter upon a discussion of it beyond saying that it is too
firmly established to be successfully called in question.30
 In 1914, trading in and using drugs was a right. In 1915, limited federal
drug controls were a constitutionally questionable tax revenue measure. By
1921, the federal government had gained not only complete control over so-
called dangerous drugs, but also a quasi-papal immunity to legal challenge
of its authority. Thus has the rejection of one of our most basic
constitutional rights become transformed into reverence for one of our most
baneful therapeutic-religious dogmas.
Once ignited, the fire of “progressive” drug protectionism spread and
soon enveloped the whole country, transforming the Harrison Act into the
legislative embodiment of the “moral principle that taking narcotics for
other than medicinal purposes was harmful and should be prevented.”31
That threw the monkey wrench medicinal purpose into the machinery of the
trade in drugs; this undefined and undefinable concept has haunted us ever
since. In 1920, drug prohibitionists won another major victory: America
was, at last, alcohol-free—if not de facto, then at least de jure. Since 1924,
when Congress made it illegal to manufacture, possess, or sell heroin,
America has been free from heroin as well-if not in practice, then at least in
theory.
The prohibition of heroin even for medical uses was, and has remained, a
uniquely American phenomenon. In 1925 at the Third Opium Convention
in Geneva, the manufacture of heroin, approved for sale only as a cough
medicine, was restricted to European and Japanese firms. (This convention
represents a truly bizarre moment in the annals of international trade
agreements, the United States in effect requesting other nations to prohibit it
from manufacturing a medicinal product widely used throughout the
civilized world. In my opinion, this unilateral heroin-disarmament policy—
like Prohibition—symbolized America’s delusive commitment to playing
the role of the drug-pure nation.) In 1926 the famed Bayer Company—then
a part of the German giant, I.G. Farben Works—produced 1.6 tons of
heroin.32
In retelling this tale, it is impossible to overemphasize that, although
initially the drug laws were intended to protect people from being “abused”
by drugs others wanted to sell them, this aim was soon replaced by that of
protecting them from “abusing” drugs they wanted to buy. The government
thus succeeded in depriving us not only of our basic right to ingest whatever
we choose, but also of our right to grow, manufacture, sell, and buy
agricultural products used by man since antiquity.
 The Dual Aims of Drug Controls
The initial aim of prescription laws was to protect uninformed patients
from using powerful (“dangerous”) drugs. The laws were not intended to
protect the drug user from his own desire to use a particular drug (opiates
becoming the first exceptions). Thus, until the 1940s, lay persons could
obtain most prescription drugs (except opiates) without a prescription; and
pharmacists and physicians, who had unlimited access to prescription drugs,
could use such drugs to medicate themselves as they saw fit. Today,
politicians and drug experts mouth the platitude that the solution to the drug
problem lies in drug education and job training. But the former can yield
only a better informed person, and the latter a more employable one. Surely,
doctors know enough about drugs and have enough employment. Yet we
now view a physician who prescribes a controlled substance for his own
personal use not as an educated person exercising autonomous choice, but
as a hapless victim of the disease of drug abuse—and as a criminal, to boot.
The distinction I draw here—between the government’s using force
against others to protect us from being harmed by them, and its using force
against us to protect us from harming ourselves—goes to the heart of both
the evil and the failure of drug prohibition. The following hypothetical
scenario illustrates this point. Suppose that in 1907 a dairy farmer
discovered that one of his cows had tuberculosis. In compliance with the
Food and Drugs Act, he would have been forbidden to sell its milk or meat;
however, there was nothing in the law to prevent him from drinking the
milk or eating the meat. Change the date from 1907 to 1987, replace the
milk with marijuana, and the farmer becomes a criminal for the mere
possession of the targeted substance.
This, in brief, is the story of how the government succeeded in depriving
us of our right to drugs. To be sure, the government did not simply do this
to us. We did it to ourselves, too. Fearful of the responsibility of having free
choice in a free pharmaceutical market, we colluded with physicians and
politicians to have the state put us under its medical-tutelary protection. The
cost of this protection, in rights as well as dollars—although negligible at
first—quickly became oppressive. The results of a Washington Post/ABC
News poll taken in September 1989 are illustrative:
62 percent of the respondents were willing to give up “a few” freedoms in order to curb
drug use; 67 percent would allow police to stop cars at random to search for drugs; 52
 percent would allow the police to search without court order the homes of people suspected
of selling drugs, even if some homes were searched by mistake; 71 percent would make it
against the law to show the use of illegal drugs in the movies.33

These responses show us the unadorned visage of the current American

zeitgeist, and not merely with respect to drugs.34 Note that most of the
respondents “would make it against the law to show the use of illegal drugs
in the movies.” This is a truly remarkable preference in view of the fact that
nearly every American movie shows the use of guns, legal and illegal. The
result is that we live in a society in which people have legal access to
loaded guns but not to sterile syringes—an incongruity I interpret as
signifying that the American people fear yielding to their own temptations
more than they fear being victimized by those who would prey on them, as
predators or as protectors.

TEMPERANCE VS. PROHIBITION

We have long regarded our two most popular psychoactive drugs—
alcohol and tobacco—with the utmost ambivalence. Throughout the
nineteenth century, the prohibition of alcohol (though not of tobacco) was
often advocated and occasionally practiced on a local level. However, there
was no question of the federal government’s involvement in such an effort
—it would have been seen as incompatible with the spirit and letter of the
Constitution. Unlike today, most people then still appreciated the difference
between temperance and prohibition, that is, between controls from within
and controls from without, between self-discipline and coercion by the
criminal law.

Vices Are Not Crimes

Lysander Spooner’s Vices Are Not Crimes, his memorable cri de coeur,
rests on his using the words vice and crime in their literal senses. “Vices,”
he declared, “are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.
Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of
another.”35 However, nothing is easier than interchanging these terms
metaphorically in order to persuade people that such figures of speech
represent truth, and to create social policy based on and justified by such
officially sanctioned falsehoods. Thus, in 1906 it was illegal to operate a
lottery, but it was legal to sell and buy heroin; today it is the other way
around. Formerly, gambling was considered to be both a vice and a crime;
now, operating a lottery is considered to be a public service (indeed, it is a
state monopoly, like the postal service), and playing the lottery is regarded
as neither a vice nor a crime. (It is regarded as a disease only if the player
loses too much money; then he suffers from “pathological gambling.”) My
point is simply that neither participating in the drug trade nor using drugs
(legal or illegal) need be interpreted as constituting vice, crime, or disease.
Although we now shamefully neglect and obscure the differences
between vice and crime—and hence the differences between peaceful
persuasion and government coercion—these differences form the pillars on
which a free society rests. Conversely, denying these distinctions (by
metaphorical bombast, sloppy thinking, or political propaganda making use
of both) is the decisive step in transforming self-restraint into the restraint
of others, temperance into prohibition, persuasion into persecution, the
moral ideals of individuals into the immoral madness of crowds. All this
Spooner saw clearly and described eloquently:
No one ever practices a vice with any … criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own
happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction
between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no
such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to
the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and co-equal rights of
another man to the control of his own person and property.36

This view—neither novel nor radical prior to the twentieth century—was

consistent with the fact that, in those days, the only way a person could
protect and preserve his health was by self-discipline. If he debauched his
body, neither the medical profession nor the state could be of much help to
him. Only in post-World War II America can people drink, smoke, and use
drugs to their hearts’ content; claim to be suffering from alcoholism,
tobacco dependence, and drug addiction; demand treatment from the state
and damages from the companies that sold them the substances they craved;
and enjoy the approval of a society eager to authenticate their excuses as the
valid complaints of victim-patients, and their expectations as the rightful
demand for “health care rights.”
Lest the reader think the distinction between vice and crime is
elementary, and that it is an exaggeration to say we have lost not only our
right to drugs but also our language for expressing the idea clearly, consider
the following example. In a report revealingly titled “Temperance: An Old
Cycle Repeats Itself,” the New York Times uses the word temperance to
describe behavior that is no more than compliance with our draconian drug
laws. After being informed that middle-class drug use is diminishing, we
are warned that, “if such temperance takes hold and drug use falls to very
low levels in the middle class, some experts fear politicians will turn their
backs on poor people who may still desperately need publicly financed drug
treatment services.”37 When middle-class (white) persons obey the drug
laws, they are “temperate”; when lower-class (black) persons violate them,
they need “drug treatment services.” This misuse of language illustrates that
we no longer even care to distinguish between temperance, a personal
virtue, and law-abiding behavior, a civic duty.
Not surprisingly, this progressive-protective kind of covert racism
packaged as sophisticated medical-social science is supported by a
respected drug expert. David Musto declares that our current drug policies
represent “the third temperance movement in American history” and
predicts its demise in ten or twenty years “with a wild backlash.” But Musto
is mistaken: Ours is a prohibition movement, not a temperance movement.
Moreover, for the first time in our history of waging war on drugs, we now
call avoiding prolonged incarceration in prison “temperance.” This is a
moral tragedy, and here is why.
A person does not feel virtuous for performing a particular act when the
alternative is forbidden by law. For example, a person with a tendency to
obesity who successfully diets feels proud of his achievement, which serves
as a continuous reminder of his powers of self-discipline. If obesity (“food
addiction”) were treated as a criminal offense, like drug addiction, then
non-obese persons would simply be law-abiding rather than self-
disciplined. Obscuring this distinction is like throwing sand into the gears
of self-discipline. Herein lies one of the many undesirable consequences of
prohibiting sumptuary behavior on the ground that it is necessary to protect
people from making themselves ill.
Regarding the delayed consequences of indulging in bad habits, Spooner
wisely observed, “Vices are usually pleasurable, at least for the time being,
and often do not disclose themselves as vices, by their effects, until after
they have been practiced for many years; perhaps for a lifetime.”38 This
familiar fact points to the drug prohibitionist’s hidden agenda, namely, that
under the guise of trying to protect others from self-harm, he is trying to
protect himself from others’ becoming a burden on him. Although Spooner
wrote long ago and addressed himself only to the social problems posed by
alcohol, his remarks fit our present situation perfectly:
But it will be said, again, that the use of spirituous liquors tends to poverty, and thus to
make men paupers, and burdensome to the tax-payers; and that this be sufficient reason
why the sale of them should be prohibited…. [But] if the fact that the use of liquors tends
to poverty and pauperism, be a sufficient reason for prohibiting the sale of them, it is
equally a sufficient reason for prohibiting the use of them; for it is the use, and not the sale,
that tends to poverty. The seller is, at most, merely an accomplice of the drinker. And it is a
rule of law, as well of reason, that if the principal in any act is not punishable, the
accomplice cannot be.39

Evidently, it never occurred to Spooner that Americans would actually

persecute their fellow citizens for what they eat or drink. But, then, neither
did he imagine that vices would be renamed diseases.

America Embraces Therapeutic Paternalism

During the first two decades of this century, several protectionist
programs—prohibiting alcohol, providing “pure” food and drugs, limiting
access to certain pharmaceuticals—converged and reinforced one another.
Each of these programs was, of course, defined as a “reform,” ruling out
opposition. And each was based on the belief, rapidly gaining ground in the
country, that the world was becoming too complicated for ordinary people
to manage without the active support of the protectionist state, whose duty
should be to safeguard people from the hazards of putting the wrong things
in their mouths or bodies. With this view firmly planted in the American
mind, an avalanche was loosened that no one could stop. It still has not hit
bottom.
As respect for the right to drugs diminished, enthusiasm for drug
controls increased. Both Right and Left embraced Prohibition. The Left,
intoxicated with anti-capitalism, discovered that alcoholism is a disease
caused by the free market. At its 1912 annual meeting, the American
Socialist Party endorsed a resolution concerning the “liquor question,”
affirming that “alcoholism is a disease of which capitalism is the chief
cause…. To abolish the wage system with all its evils is the surest way to
eliminate the evils of alcoholism and the traffic in intoxicating liquor.”40
The Right, intoxicated with religion, stuck to its theme that alcoholism is a
sin. Declared the Reverend Josiah Strong, coeditor of the magazine The
Gospel of the Kingdom, in 1914: “‘Personal Liberty’ is at last an
uncrowned, dethroned king, with no one to do him reverence…. We are no
longer frightened by that ancient bogey—‘paternalism in government.’ We
affirm boldly, it is the business of government to be just that—paternal.”41
This credo is now recited as if it were an irrefutable scientific (medical)
principle. Dr. Forest S. Tennant, medical adviser to the National Football
League, explains, “We use a strictly medical definition of drug addiction….
When human lives are at stake, a little totalitarianism is not such a bad
thing.”42 We have come a long way since the time when the government
was, in theory at least, our servant rather than our master.
Let us briefly reconsider our escalating effort, from 1914 to the present,
to curb personal choice vis-à-vis drugs. At the beginning of the century, our
principal drug problem was that people drank too much; the solution was
Prohibition. Then the banning of booze became the problem; the solution
was repealing Prohibition. Then the problem became that people bought
many drugs not because they needed them to become healthier, but because
they wanted to use them to feel better. This was defined as a medical
problem; the solution was giving physicians (and pharmacists) monopolistic
control over the trade in drugs—especially those drugs deemed to be
pleasure-producing. This led to the abuse of prescription drugs and then
efforts to combat it by fresh countermeasures such as triplicate prescriptions
for certain “controlled substances,” monitoring and prosecuting doctors for
“overprescribing,” and an orgy of escalating quasi-therapeutic repressions.
“Fanaticism,” George Santayana sagely observed, “consists in redoubling
your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” Exactly so: The more
hopeless our drug problem becomes, the more stubbornly we cling to the
myth that drugs pose a threat to every man, woman, and child in the world,
and the more certain we are of our duty to combat drug abuse by coerced
treatment and criminal penalties at home, and by armed intervention and
economic sanctions abroad. Truly, we are the redeemer nation, our
centuries-old ambivalence toward alcohol seemingly entitling us to assume
the role of moral savior not merely of our own people, but of people
everywhere.
Once the United States entered World War I, victor for national
prohibition was assured. Although the fighting stopped on November 11,
1918, Congress—having set in motion the War Prohibition Act—outlawed
the manufacture and sale of beer and wine after May 1, 1919, and of all
intoxicating beverages after June 30, 1919. As a result, America actually
went dry under the War Prohibition Act on July 1, 1919, rather than on
January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment took effect. With the
triumph of national prohibition finally assured, the Anti-saloon League
raised its sights even higher. Prohibition in America was just the beginning.
The United States’s mission was to lead the world to worldwide prohibition.
“Redeemed by prohibition,” declared the Reverend A. C. Bane, “America
will ‘go over the top’ in humanity’s greatest battle…. [S]truggling with the
same age-long foe, we will go forth with the spirit of the missionary and the
crusader to help drive the demon of drink from all civilization.”43
In retrospect, it is hard to know what to marvel at more: the arrogance or
the naiveté displayed by these enthusiasts. In an address to the Anti-saloon
League’s convention in Washington, D.C., in 1917, the Reverend Sam
Small predicted that national prohibition would usher in the day when “you
and I may proudly expect to see this America of ours, victorious and
Christianized, become not only the savior but the model and the monitor of
the reconstructed civilization of the world in the future.”44
This role of universal religious-therapeutic saviorship seems to fit
America’s collective spirit so perfectly that we have preserved the play
intact, merely modernizing it. We have replaced the actors: liquor with
cocaine, Christianity with Medicine. And we have intensified the struggle
by equipping the combatants with more powerful weapons: temptations
more irresistible than man has ever known (“crack”), and treatments more
effective than man has ever dreamed of (“programs” for chemical
dependency). All this took time, of course—almost threescore years and
ten.
From 1906 when the first anti-drug legislation was enacted, until 1933
when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated, federal agencies
inspected food and ensured proper drug labeling. During Prohibition,
bootleggers gave back to the American people what Congress had taken
away from them. And, throughout it all, prescription laws remained
permissive rather than prohibitory, physicians needing to fear no penalties
for prescribing whatever analgesics, hypnotics, or sedatives their patients
wanted or asked for (except opiates).
DRUG REGULATION DURING THE NEW DEAL
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is usually credited with two major
achievements: (1) saving the country from its domestic enemy, big
business, during the Depression; and (2) saving it from its foreign enemies,
the Germans and the Japanese, during World War II. To fight big business,
Roosevelt gave America big government; to fight the war, he gave it the
atomic bomb. Overshadowed by these dramatic events, Roosevelt’s role in
the War on Drugs is all but forgotten.45 Yet the first business he set out to
bust was the “monkey business” of merchandising medically “worthless”
drugs. Of course, he failed to get rid of such drugs; but he succeeded in
socializing the pharmaceutical market and undermining the legitimacy of
self-medication.

FDR as Anti-drug Warrior

Although libertarians and conservatives are well aware of Roosevelt’s
efforts to undermine America’s free-market economy, they seem to be
unaware of how far-reaching his success was in laying the groundwork for
abolishing the free market in drugs. The various drug-regulatory measures
enacted during the prewar years of Roosevelt’s presidency—especially the
Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938—led inexorably to the present
situation of virtually complete state control of the drug economy, which I
call “chemical statism” (drug socialism).
Moreover, while free marketeers generally believe that “it was President
Franklin D. Roosevelt who was directly responsible for the abandonment of
most of the principles of economic liberty on which this nation was
founded,”46 there is no agreement on why this happened, only on when it
happened. Among the explanations usually advanced are the Depression
and Roosevelt’s personality—both no doubt relevant. I would add another
reason that is closely related to our present concerns, namely, the
Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition failed to prevent Americans from
drinking, but succeeded in accustoming a whole generation to the
criminalization of what, prior to 1920, had been an important and legitimate
free-market enterprise. Although Prohibition, the law, was repealed, the
idea of drug prohibition remained imprinted on the national consciousness
and henceforth found expression in the progressive criminalization of self-
medication. Generation after generation of Americans thus became inured
to state supervision of their drug use, much as generation after generation of
Soviet citizens became inured, after 1917, to state supervision of their
economic affairs. Indeed, perhaps the most important (and certainly the
most invisible) cost of the War on Drugs has been the indoctrination,
through chemical statism, of the American people into socialism as the
correct system for regulating the market in drugs.
What rankled Roosevelt and his rationalist advisers—fittingly called
“brain trusters”—was that, despite the drug-labeling laws, the American
people continued to “waste” millions of dollars on “worthless” patent
medicines. From a free-market point of view, these medicines were not
worthless; if they had been, people would not have spent their hard-earned
money on them. Moreover, from the consumer’s point of view, these
medicines were self-evidently useful; most of them contained generous
portions of alcohol, providing a legal source of liquor during a period when
the government criminalized liquor truthfully labeled as such. To
Roosevelt’s chagrin, the FDA was powerless to interfere, its authority being
limited to ensuring truthful labeling.
Once again in American history, under the guise of protecting the
American people, muckraking journalists—though jealous of their own
precious freedom to say and publish what they will—instigated the
government to divest people of their freedom to sell, buy, and advertise
products as they saw fit. With unemployment rampant at home and the
alleged virtues of socialism touted abroad, pharmaceutical “exploiters” of
the sick became convenient targets of social criticism.47 In his study on
drug legislation during the New Deal, Charles Jackson notes, “Almost
invariably each [muckraking] book found in the advertising industry the
ultimate villain” for the supposedly pernicious free market in drugs.48
Ironically, it was a mishap connected with the first effective modern
antibiotic, sulfanilamide—a toxic solvent used in its preparation having
caused the deaths of nearly one hundred persons—that lent popular support
to further tightening state regulation of the drug market.49

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938

James Harvey Young—the author of two major texts on twentieth-
century American quack medicines, and an enthusiastic supporter of
chemical statism—notes the “deficiencies” of the 1906 law and then
observes that with Roosevelt’s election “there was a dramatic change,”
making the imposition of far-reaching drug-regulatory measures feasible.50
Young correctly attributes much of the impetus behind these changes to the
Roosevelt brain trusters—especially Rexford Tugwell, a professor of
economics at Columbia University whom Roosevelt appointed assistant
secretary of agriculture:
[Tugwell] was frank to say that he believed in a planned economy. He had spent two
months in Russia…. In a book published in May 1933, Tugwell had stated, “it is doubtful
whether nine-tenths of our sales effort and expenses serve any good social purpose.” He
was soon to assert that “property rights and financial rights will be subordinated to human
rights.”51

As the brain trusters saw it, among all of the articles lacking a “good
social purpose” that Americans were eager to buy, patent medicines stood
near the top. This was understandable. After all, the brain trusters were
academics and intellectuals who believed in scientific medicine and had no
use for quackery. Tugwell was determined to implement his rationalist-
messianic vision: “Whole categories of proprietary products which Dr.
Wiley’s law [of 1906] had not touched were covered in the Tugwell bill….
[They were to be banned as adulterated if they were] dangerous to health
when used according to directions on the label.”52 Who can be for drugs
that are dangerous to health? Thus was still another “uncontested term” (as
Richard M. Weaver called words that brook no disagreement) added to our
lexicon of drug controls.
In 1938, Tugwell’s brainchild—the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act—became law.53 In effect, this act disqualified both patients and doctors
as legitimate judges of what should count as “therapeutic.” Instead, what
mattered was statist medical science: Government bureaucrats became the
final arbiters of what counted as a therapeutic drug and as legitimate
medical treatment in general. As a result, the patient lost his right to drugs
traditionally available in the free market; the doctor lost his freedom to
medicate his patient as he saw fit, subject only to his patient’s consent; and
the medical profession lost its integrity as an organization independent of
the political vagaries of populist politics. At the same time, by expanding
the list of prescription drugs and augmenting the physicians’ prerogatives to
grant or deny the public access to drugs, the government enhanced the
power of the medical profession as a state-licensed monopoly.
Remarkably, some prophetic pessimists foresaw that Roosevelt’s drug
control laws—ostensibly aimed at protecting the public—were, in fact,
“aimed at abridging the ‘sacred right’ of self-medication…. People would
have to visit a physician to get medicine they could otherwise purchase
without a professional fee, at the local drugstore.”54 Alarmed, a poor
woman in North Carolina wrote to her senator, “If any one has a sick
headache would it be a violation of the law to make a cup of thyme tea for
relief? The poor can’t have a Doctor for every minor scratch.”55 But even
the worst pessimists could not have anticipated that possessing and
ingesting marijuana, which grew wild like mushrooms, would become both
a disease and a crime. Clearly, the common people did not want drug
controls and were never consulted. Who were the people who pushed for
chemical statism and who were consulted? In addition to the muckraking
journalists, support for federal drug controls came mainly from women’s
groups, the American Medical Association, and influential physicians such
as famed Harvard neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who was a personal
friend of the Roosevelts.56
The irony about Roosevelt’s War on Drugs is that people did not think of
it then, and do not think of it now, as a war on drugs and seemingly forgot
that the federal government had no legitimate authority to control our drug
use. To be sure, people knew and generally approved of Roosevelt’s
determination to diminish the power of the states and increase the power of
the federal government; however, they did not realize he was replacing
federal alcohol prohibition with federal drug prohibition—without the
blessing of a constitutional amendment. In vain did Rufus King protest, in
the 1970s, that “ultimately, it must be recognized that the federal
government has no rightful place in the drug-use picture at all…. The U.S.
system is, after all, a federal system.”57

From Patent Medicine to Official Medicine: Legitimizing Quackery

It is all but forgotten today that the early prescription laws were not used
to punish physicians for prescribing, or patients for taking, “too many”
drugs. In fact, before the enactment of the Federal Food, Drug, and
Cosmetic Act in 1938, a consumer could buy any nonnarcotic
“prescription” drug he wanted, without a prescription.58 Of course, if a
person did not know what drug to use and wanted to get a prescription, he
could consult a physician for his advice and obtain a prescription; but he did
not need the doctor’s permission to purchase the drug he wanted.
Although the 1938 revisions of the FDA regulations were drafted by
brain trusters, their aim was anything but making the consumer more brainy
vis-à-vis drugs: The new regulations mandated that indications for
prescription drugs “appear only in such medical terms as are not likely to be
understood by the ordinary individual.”59 The prohibition of misbranding
patent medicines was thus replaced by the requirement of mythicizing
prescription drugs. As a result, virtually all effective medicines were placed
beyond the reach of the consumer; the physician, entrusted with the keys to
the pharmacopoeia, was interposed between the patient as drug buyer and
the pharmacist as drug seller; and the patient was encouraged to distrust his
own judgment regarding drugs, deprecate his self-responsibility for the
drugs he took, and view the mere act of self-medication as a sort of medical
sin. Rationalist academics, physicians given monopolistic control over
drugs, the progressive press, and the public reeling from the Depression all
welcomed the government’s paternalistic concern for the health and welfare
of the public. Anyone who dared to object to these reforms was dismissed
as a defender of quackery.
But what is quackery? Webster’s defines it, not very helpfully, as “acts,
arts, or pretensions of a quack; charlatanry”; and it defines quack (in the
sense relevant here) as “a boastful pretender to medical skill; hence a
charlatan.” These definitions remain discreetly silent about who judges
whether the actor pretends to medical skills or actually possesses them. A
better definition of quackery is that it is the name we attach to any method
of healing deemed ineffective or invalid by an official medicine whose
judgment is supported by the power of the state. In short, quackery is
medical heresy. If the U.S. government refused to recognize any particular
system of medical healing as scientifically valid (and all others as not real
medicine), just as it refuses to recognize any particular system of religious
beliefs as divinely true (and all others as false), then quackery would and
could be no more of a problem than is heresy. The formal recognition of a
single system of medical healing creates a state-sanctioned monomedicine
similar to the state-sanctioned monotheisms with which we are only too
familiar.
 The fact is that quackery is not only here to stay, but is the hallmark of
our modern therapeutic states. So long as there are people who want to
believe in a “scientific” medicine legitimized and supported by the state,
there will be quackery—just as so long as there are people who want to
believe in a “true” religion legitimized and supported by the state, there will
be heresy. The best we can hope for is avoiding, as much as possible, the
politicization of religion and medicine. With respect to religion, we have
deliberately sought this goal. With respect to medicine, we have
deliberately evaded it. Today, after almost a century of struggle against
quackery, we have more quackery than ever. A congressional committee on
health fraud found “that Americans spend 9 billion dollars a year on
fraudulent cures for arthritis and cancer alone.”60 Other examples abound.
In a cover story on the weight-loss industry, the reporter for Newsweek
asks, “Where does science stop and snake oil begin?” A silly question. If a
person consumes more calories than his body burns, he gains weight; and if
he consumes fewer, he loses weight. All the rest is “snake oil.” Anyone
with minimal education ought to know that. So what? The punch line in the
story, so far as our present interest is concerned, is this: “Federal law
prohibits the Food and Drug Administration from policing the $3 billion-a-
year food-supplement industry.”61 This conclusion leaves Newsweek
unhappy that the government tolerates a free market in the medical-magical
absurdities of weight reduction. But medical-magical absurdities are all
around us. Which ones should be targeted for prohibition? For example,
should the government let “cryonics firms,” for a mere $100,000, freeze
your corpse, while your dead body waits for medical science to discover the
secret of eternal life?62
The foregoing examples of quackery may be sensational, but are trivial.
Their significance—economic, legal, and political—pales in comparison
with the significance of the quackeries that now count as bona fide medical
practices.63 I submit that the War on Drugs itself is a gigantic quackery. In
its name, pharmacological information is falsified and then called “drug
abuse treatment”; morphine is withheld from dying patients willing to pay
for it, and yet methadone is provided gratis to “addicts”; “demand
reduction” of illegal drugs is urged, and overprescribing of neuroleptic
drugs is encouraged (especially for psychiatric patients and old people in
nursing homes);64 giving condoms to teenagers is touted as a means of
combating the AIDS epidemic, but sterile hypodermic syringes and needles
are banned, furthering the spread of AIDS.65 (Consider that 20 percent of
hospital admissions of elderly patients are for complications resulting from
drug interactions; and more than 50 percent of fresh AIDS cases in the
United States are attributable to contaminated needles.)

Sovietizing the Drug Market

In 1939, emboldened by Tugwell’s successful efforts to increase the
government’s powers to restrict access to drugs, the FDA proposed banning
saccharin. This gave rise to an amusing episode in the otherwise bleak and
baneful progression of the politicization of drug controls. What the FDA
did not count on was that Roosevelt was a regular user of saccharin, which
was then the only noncaloric sweetener. “Anybody who says saccharin is
injurious to health is an idiot,” declared the commander in chief of the
therapeutic state; and saccharin was safe.66 Today, the Food and Drug
Administration is no longer so hamstrung by presidential preferences. In a
single month (November 1990), the agency proposed to ban more than a
hundred ingredients in nonprescription diet drugs. Why? Because it
“question[ed] the ingredients’ effectiveness.” One of the agency’s targets
was guar gum, a harmless high-fiber plant extract used in many low-calorie
products. The FDA wants to ban guar gum because, it claims, the gum
presents a “choking hazard.” What is a choking hazard? It is a scare term
coined by the FDA to report that, among millions of persons who use
products containing guar gum every day, there have been “17 nonfatal
choking cases.”67 The FDA is also eyeing popular laxatives, such as
Metamucil, as possible choking hazards.
Although Young—who is in complete sympathy with Roosevelt’s
“progressive” drug reformers—ridicules the opponents of therapeutic
statism, he deserves credit for reminding us of the crucial issues that were
then so fatefully decided:
The enactment of this [Tugwell 1938] bill … meant nothing less than the end of the
“constitutional right” of self-medication, which, along with freedom of religion and the
press, had been “jealously guarded” since the foundation of the republic. And this tolled the
death of proprietary medicines…. Drug stores would be “sovietized.” … [There was heard]
the oft-repeated cry of imminent czarism.68
 The “reactionaries’” predictions were prophetic, down to the reference to
“czarism.” The Roosevelt-Tugwell team’s battle against self-medication
proved to be a decisive victory in the battle to turn America into a bona fide
therapeutic state. Unlike for liquor during Prohibition, no prominent
American came to the defense of self-medication. Mark Twain was dead.
Mencken was growing old and evidently had no interest in this issue. In
vain did the producers of pills and potions protest that their remedies were
not a whit less effective than the physicians’ officially legitimized
interventions: “‘Why not,’ inquired the attorney for the United Medicine
Manufacturers, ‘require that a sign be put over all doctors’ doors saying, ‘I
do not cure’?”69 It was too late. Roosevelt was at the helm of the ship of
state, and the fervor of his therapeutic bureaucrats carried the day. Young
concludes, “To demonstrate that self-medication was not yet [sic] safe,
[FDA chief Walter G.] Campbell showed the Senators a series of graphic
posters, with bottles, labels, advertisements, death certificates attached.”70
During the late 1930s, law after law was enacted giving ever more power
to the FDA to tighten the noose around the necks of drug manufacturers,
drug distributors, and drug users. True to type, the reformers insisted that
the purpose of their prohibitions was “to make self-medication safer and
more effective … [and] to protect the vast multitude which includes the
ignorant, the unthinking, and the credulous who, when making a purchase,
do not stop to analyze.”71 For liberal consumer advocates, these changes
were and continue to be a necessary and welcome adaptation to an
increasingly complex world, with which the average citizen—with plenty of
money in his pockets but not enough brains in his head to make his own
choices—is no longer able to cope without the assistance of a corps of self-
appointed Ralph Naders. Mary Bennett Peterson hits the nail on the head
when she writes, “Consumerism looks upon the consumer as largely
unprotected and upon the very quantity and variety of available goods and
services as complicating choice.”72 Indeed, the devout consumer-advocate
sees his “client” as a child or mental patient who needs paternalistic
protectors to make decisions for him, in his own “best interest.” This
explains why Ralph Nader and the whole American consumer protection
movement have been so supportive of organized psychiatry, endorsing the
most intrusive and injurious involuntary psychiatric interventions as bona
fide medical treatments.73
 Thus, in America today the principle of caveat emptor, especially with
respect to substances labeled “drugs,” is a despised anachronism. Instead of
cherishing this principle as the emblem of the consumer’s autonomy, we
disdain it as no longer socially appropriate, preferring instead to view
certain personal choices as the symptoms of mental diseases. Recalling the
mood of the Great Depression and the momentum of the Roosevelt-Tugwell
anti-drug legislative program, Charles Jackson—though wholly supportive
of drug controls—cogently remarks, “It was inadequate to growl
indignantly about the ‘right of self-medication.’ ‘The phrase itself sounds
synthetic,’ commented Printer’s Ink. ‘The man who buys a box of pills
seldom feels that he is … a crusader in the cause of human liberty.’”74
In 1939 war broke out in Europe, and in 1941 the United States formally
entered the struggle, keeping the government as well as the people busy
struggling against military rather than medical dangers. However, once that
interruption was over, the war for chemical statism could reassume its
rightful place on the American political scene. Henceforth, the war to make
the World safe from dangerous drugs was used unashamedly as a pretext for
enlarging the scope and power of the centralized national government. The
aim of this struggle soon became the complete destruction of the right to
self-medication, correctly perceived as the emblem of heretical
independence from the warm embrace of the therapeutic state. The post-
World War II phase of the War on Drugs has now raged for more than four
decades, longer than World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the
War in the Gulf combined; its proud victories are scattered all around us,
there for anyone to see who cares to look.

THE MIRAGE OF A HOLY/HEALTHY UTOPIA

The War on Drugs is a moral crusade wearing a medical mask. Our
previous moral crusades targeted people who were giving themselves
sexual relief and pleasure (the drives against pornography and
masturbation). Our current moral crusade targets people who are giving
themselves pharmaceutical relief and pleasure (the drive against illicit drugs
and self-medication). Although the term drug abuse is vague and its
definition variable, by and large it is the name we give to self-medication
with virtually any interesting and socially disapproved substance. Why is
self-medication a problem? Because, for the reasons discussed above, we
view it as both immoral and unhealthy.
And so we arrive back at our point of departure: the essentially religious,
redemptive nature of the American dream of a world free from dangerous
drugs. This aspiration arose, as Tuveson suggested, from a peculiarly
American mix of devotion to both religious and secular utopianism.
The real importance of the elements of secular progress is that they have stirred up and
made possible the militancy of Christianity in this world, which is to produce the holy
utopia…. The new “benevolent and reformatory” movements [are] designed to bring
human conduct and institutions into conformity with the idea of right.75

It is this longing for a holy utopia that leads to the fateful obliteration of
the distinction between vice and crime, and the tragic transformation of the
virtue of temperance into the vice of prohibition. In a society such as ours—
religious by tradition, secular by law, and forever striving toward a free
political order—this is a terrible folly, for reasons Lysander Spooner
articulated perhaps better than anyone else:
[E]verybody wishes to be protected, in his person and property, against the aggressions of
other men. But nobody wishes to be protected, either in his person or property, against
himself; because it is contrary to the fundamental laws of human nature itself, that any one
should wish to harm himself. He only wishes to promote his own happiness, and to be his
own judge as to what will promote, and does promote, his own happiness. This is what
every one wants, and has a right to, as a human being.76

However, what Tuveson termed our collective striving for a “holy

utopia” is the superglue that reconciles and unites in an intoxicating
embrace of intolerance the diverse personalities and politics of Nancy
Reagan and Jesse Jackson, George Bush and Charles Rangel, William
Bennett and Ralph Nader. If our love of the Constitution and gratitude for
our heritage cannot keep us united as a nation, then hatred of “dangerous
drugs” must do the job.
 3

The Fear We Favor:

Drugs as Scapegoats

Be wary then; best safety lies in fear.

—William Shakespeare1

Timeo ergo sum. [I fear, therefore I am.]

—Maurice Vienne2

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear
is fear itself,”3 he uttered an inspired piece of political rhetoric, reassuring a
depressed nation in the classic tradition of a Platonic philosopher-king.
More wisely, Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, offered exactly the
opposite advice: “If you wish to fear nothing, consider that everything is to
be feared.”4 Christianity carried this counsel further still, exalting the
sinfulness of the world into justification for a pervasive contemptus mundi,
or contempt for the world. Once the aim of life became the avoidance of
perpetual torment in hell, fearing temptations—and hence oneself—became
the central preoccupation of the devout believer. Jean Delumeau speaks of
medieval Christians as “haunted by truly metaphysical fear … [the] most
saintly individuals [being] often those who most deeply feared
themselves.”5
However, it would be naive to attribute a fearful attitude toward life to
religion. It is the other way around: Religion is one of its products. To be
sure, for millennia, the talent to be afraid—a fundamental feature of human
nature, with obvious protective functions—was exploited by religion. Now
it is exploited by many other institutions as well, especially by medicine,
and especially with the threat of harm from allegedly dangerous drugs, such
as cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and peyote.
Yet, as any educated person ought to know, coca, hemp (marijuana),
psychedelic mushrooms, and the opium poppy are naturally occurring
plants whose products have been used, safely and beneficially, since ancient
times—marijuana and opium, for analgesia and sedation; coca, for
enhancing endurance; peyote, for inducing unusual experiences. Moreover,
people have always been allowed to use these substances by and for
themselves, making self-medication (like feeding oneself) the most
elementary human right. The question we ought to ask is this: Why has the
use of these ancient drugs become a matter of special social and political
concern only in the twentieth century, and why especially in the United
States?
As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky aptly observe, “Plenty of real
dangers are always present. No doubt the water in fourteenth century
Europe was a persistent health hazard, but … it became a public
preoccupation only when it seemed plausible to accuse Jews of poisoning
the wells.”6 Similarly, drugs became a public preoccupation only when it
seemed plausible to accuse them of poisoning people—especially “kids.” In
1937 Harry J. Anslinger, the nation’s first “drug czar” (the term had not yet
been invented), declared, “How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal
assaults, hold-ups, burglaries, and deeds of maniacal insanity it [marijuana]
causes each year, especially among the young, can only be conjectured.”7
Only a few years earlier, such a statement would have been dismissed with
scorn and ridicule.

THE “DANGEROUS DRUG” AS SCAPEGOAT

Suppose a social historian in the days when it was popular to accuse
Jews of poisoning wells decided to study that phenomenon. Surely, it would
have been a mistake for him to assume that the wells were, in fact,
poisoned; that the culprits were invariably Jews; and that, in order to advise
the authorities about how best to reform Jew-control policies, he would
have to examine the “physiological and psychological effects” of the
poisoned waters. In fact, until modern times, water was a notoriously unsafe
beverage, the source of water-borne infections. (Water is still unsafe in
many parts of the world.) This is why Jesus turned water into wine—not
vice versa—and why people drank much beer and wine, gave alcoholic
beverages to children, and often avoided drinking water altogether.8
The point is that—just as, in medieval Europe, drinking water from any
source was dangerous, and the matter had nothing to do with Jews—so,
now the use of any drug is dangerous, and the matter has nothing to do with
drug traffickers. Obviously, no drug is dangerous so long as it remains
outside the body; and every drug—even the seemingly most innocuous,
such as aspirin or vitamin A—is potentially dangerous, for certain persons,
in certain doses. This simple fact is ignored by virtually all contemporary
scholars and commentators addressing the subject of drug controls. For
example, David Musto makes the very prejudgment I have just described
when he declares, “Reasonable regulation of drug use requires knowledge
of physiological and psychological effects.”9 Not necessarily. To be sure,
the person who intends to use a particular drug needs to be familiar with its
effects. But do politicians (qua politicians) need to know pharmacology?
Not really. After all, they must know by now that tobacco is more harmful
than marijuana.10 Nevertheless, marijuana is prohibited, but tobacco is not.
Musto does not acknowledge, or does not believe, that “drugs” are
scapegoats. Instead, donning the mantle of the value-free, academic
historian-psychiatrist, he validates the objective reality of “dangerous
drugs,” lends legitimacy to the view that the truthful labeling of drugs is
insufficient protection for the consumer, and supports the prevailing statist
prejudice that every civilized nation must criminalize the trade in
“narcotics.”
Musto’s views exemplify the currently “correct” position on drugs: All
drug law reformers share Musto’s basic prejudice, namely, the belief that
while the customary protections of criminal and civil law, combined with
the principle of caveat emptor, may suffice to protect people from making
stupid choices with respect to cars and cosmetics, they do not suffice to
protect them from making stupid choices with respect to cannabis or
cocaine. I reject this view and the arrogant claim that goes with it, namely,
that every piece of meddling into our drug use by the coercive medical
apparatus of the interventionist state constitutes “drug reform.”11 It is rather
the other way around: The claims that “recreational” drug use is dangerous
and that coercive state interventions in the drug market are “remedial” are,
as Edmund Burke remarked in a very different context, only pretexts for
creating “great public evils.” Deeply aware of the versatility of evil, he
warned,
Wise men will apply their remedies to … the causes of evil, which are permanent, not to
the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear….
Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief.
Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is
gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body.12

I maintain that drug abuse and the War on Drugs are both transitory
modes—pretexts for scapegoating deviants and strengthening the state. Our
official understanding of the drug problem rests on a fallacious scapegoat-
type imagery and a correspondingly erroneous approach to remedying it.
For example, we conceptualize self-medication—say, with marijuana—as
self-poisoning rather than as self-pleasuring, and then rely on this image of
the drug as poison to justify using state power to punish people who possess
marijuana. Although in his important study, The Scapegoat, René Girard
does not refer to drugs as scapegoats, he remarks—apropos of our scientific
progress from the Middle Ages to the present—that “frequent references to
poisons” has remained a constant feature of the imagery and rhetoric of
scapegoating. “Chemistry,” he concludes, “takes over from purely
demoniac influence.”13 The chemistry, that takes over, I would add, is not
pharmacological chemistry, but ceremonial chemistry.

Drug Abuse as Profanation

Prior to 1914, the main ingredients of American patent medicines, in
addition to alcohol, were cocaine and morphine. Now, these drugs are our
favorite scapegoats. In Ceremonial Chemistry I tried to show that we cannot
understand the War on Drugs without taking seriously the scapegoat
function of so-called dangerous drugs—a suggestion that, because it
presents an obstacle to the arguments of both the opponents and the
supporters of drug prohibition, both have ignored. I contend, however, that
without recognizing the importance of this theme for drug prohibition, there
can be no informed discussion of drug controls, much less an end to the
War on Drugs.14
The scapegoat’s social function of saving the group by its victimization
is clearly articulated in the Gospels. The scene is as follows. Jewish society
feels itself to be in mortal danger: “The Romans will come and destroy both
our holy place and our nation.” What is there to do? How can the
community save itself? By sacrificing one of its members. Caiaphas, the
high priest, addresses the congregation: “You know nothing at all; you do
not understand that it is expedient that one man should die for the people,
and that the whole nation should not perish.”15
Like a Jew defiling the Torah, or a Christian the Host, an American
using an illicit drug is guilty of the mystical crime of profanation—a
transgression of the strictest and most feared taboo. The drug abuser
pollutes himself as well as his community, endangering both. This is why,
while to the secular libertarian the drug abuser commits a “victimless
crime” (that is, no crime at all), to the normally socialized person he is a
dangerous defiler of the sacred. Hence, his incapacitation is amply justified.
After all, what greater good is there than saving the family, the clan, the
nation, indeed the whole world from certain destruction?
Caiaphas, Girard remarks, “is the incarnation of politics at its best, not
its worst…. [He] is the perfect sacrificer who puts victims to death to save
those who live…. [E]very real cultural decision has a sacrificial
character.”16 The etymology is thought-provoking: The English word
decide comes from the Latin decidere, which originally meant to cut the
victim’s throat.17

Risk Management by Scapegoating

Life is full of risks. Faced with risks, we must make decisions. When the
danger is great and imminent, we must stop thinking and start acting.
Suppose you are driving down a divided highway and see a driver, confused
or drunk, coming straight at you. You must try to pass him on the right or
the left or drive off the road. Whichever you do, you must do it quickly. The
longer you hesitate, the greater the chances that you will collide head-on
with the approaching vehicle and die.
On the collective level, a danger so acute precludes individual initiative
and puts us at the mercy of those who hold the levers of power in their
hands. But this is not the sort of danger that the temptation to use a
particular drug poses. Being tempted by drugs is precisely the sort of danger
that is amenable to—and indeed requires—personal choice and action. Yet
it is precisely this sort of danger that the modern scapegoater deliberately
miscasts as a threat not only imminent and immense, but aimed at the group
rather than the individual: We are faced with nothing less than a “drug
epidemic.” Perishing in an epidemic of, say, the plague has assuredly
nothing to do with temptation. Neither, in this imagery, is becoming a
victim of the drug epidemic a matter of temptation. Accordingly, the
scapegoater’s advice for the individual is to avoid the scapegoat like a
tabooed object; and his recommendation for the politician is to commit the
state to waging a holy war against it. In the War on Drugs, the grand themes
of taboo, scapegoating, and redeemership—traditionally religious, now
medical—thus recombine and reemerge in a novel pseudo-therapeutic form.
A recent decision of the Supreme Court illustrates this thesis.
In 1989, two members of the Native American Church in Oregon were
fired from their jobs and denied unemployment benefits because they
participated in the sacramental rite of ingesting peyote. They sued their
employer for reinstatement and benefits, arguing that their dismissal
violated their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The
Oregon courts held that ingesting peyote violated the criminal laws, whose
observance took precedence over the Indians’ religious rights. The case
went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that “prohibiting Native
Americans from using peyote in their religious rituals does not violate their
constitutional right to free exercise of religion.”18 Although this case
received a good deal of press coverage, to my knowledge not a single
commentator connected the prohibition of this particular religious practice
—at this particular time in our history—with the War on Drugs. Instead, the
critics simply repeated the cliché that the ruling is “disastrous for the free
exercise of religion.”19 The irony that these “drug offenders” had been
working as “drug rehabilitation counselors” apparently was also lost on the
pundits as well as the public.

The Method in the Drug-War Madness

The irrationality of the War on Drugs—by which I mean its rationality as
scapegoat persecution—is so pervasive that it may be invisible for that very
reason. The virtuousness or wickedness of the scapegoat is unimportant:
Empty syringes are taboo, but loaded guns are not. What is important is
whether the person or object is authoritatively defined as a “drug-related
danger.” The following drug law policy allows no other explanation.
 Although law enforcement authorities complain that drug offenders clog
the criminal justice system—and although persons arrested for drug
offenses constitute a minuscule part of those who are de facto guilty of drug
law violations—nevertheless, the government literally imports innocent
foreigners for the sole purpose of turning them into drug criminals. I do not
refer here to celebrity scapegoats such as Manuel Noriega, or to the
extradition of so-called drug lords. Instead, I refer to a practice that has
received virtually no press coverage.
Commercial airline flights between South America and Europe often
make unscheduled refueling stops in San Juan, Puerto Rico. When this sort
of thing happens in international aviation, passengers either stay on board
or are taken to a transit lounge to await reboarding their flight. However, the
U.S. Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
have seized this opportunity to search the passengers and their baggage.
Sometimes they find illegal drugs. The “guilty” passenger is then taken off
the plane, charged with drug smuggling, and given a long prison sentence
(often as much as twelve to fifteen years). This exercise “costs the U.S.
taxpayer approximately $20,000 per year for the imprisonment, plus the
cost of the trial which could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.”20
Mr. Jorge Aguilar-Pena, a Colombian citizen, was caught in such an
unscheduled stop on a Lufthansa flight from Bogotá to Zurich. He was
carrying a few ounces of cocaine. For this he received a four-year prison
sentence—almost double the sentence recommended by the U.S.
Sentencing Commission. The judge gave the extra time “because he wanted
to deter future smugglers”—a wholly ridiculous notion since Aguilar wasn’t
even trying to come to the U.S., much less smuggle here.”21
The view that the prohibited drug is a scapegoat also helps to account for
the paradox that, with respect to drug controls, the conservative antidrug
warrior and the liberal consumer advocate are in complete agreement. The
former, exemplified by William Bennett, insists on miscasting the mere
possession of an allegedly dangerous drug as a threat to the entire society;
the latter, exemplified by Ralph Nader, insists on miscasting the entire adult
population as children needing parental protection. Because neither can
support his position with reasoned argument, both rely on paternalistic
coercion, buttressed by semantic flag waving: Who can be for children
using cocaine? Who can be against consumer protection? While everyone
agrees on these platitudes, there is no agreement at all among Americans on
what counts as a dangerous drug or what constitutes the consumer’s best
interest.
The most obvious option is to accept the subject’s own definition of a
dangerous drug and his best interest. However, when we are confronted
with deviant behavior, we no longer do that; instead, we impose our
definitions of reality on the deviant. In view of this, the honest thing to do
would be to acknowledge that our (conventional) values exert a paramount
influence on our perception of the risks from which (in our opinion) the
drug user or the endangered consumer needs protection. Some people do
that. Most prefer to scapegoat the nonconformist, making risk, as Douglas
and Wildavsky observe, “an ideal target for criticism. It is immeasurable
and its unacceptability is unlimited…. There can never be sufficient
holiness or safety.”22
That such an alarmist posture toward (certain) drugs is a useful tactic for
anyone who wants to use drug controls to strengthen the therapeutic state is
obvious. The alleged dangerousness of drugs justifies the medical-political
persecution of both drug sellers and drug users—of the former, in terms of
law enforcement, of the latter, in terms of drug treatment. All this requires
the coercive apparatus of the state, which costs money that must be
confiscated from the people. Yet even if the most wildly inflated estimates
of illegal drug use in the United States are true, the fact remains that the
overwhelming majority of Americans do not use illegal drugs at all; and of
those who do, most use marijuana in a way that endangers neither them nor
others. Nevertheless, most Americans support the War on Drugs,
confirming Randolph Bourne’s insight that “war is the health of the State. It
automatically sets in motion throughout society those forces for uniformity,
for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience
the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”23

WHO SHALL GUARD THE MEDICAL GUARDIANS?

Like all public health measures, drug controls tend to be regarded as
unselfish, public-spirited legislation, their sole aim being the improvement
of the health of the population. However, because self-interest is intrinsic to
the human condition, this is, prima facie, an absurd assumption. It is also
totally inconsistent with the historical evidence.24 For example, the 1906
Food and Drugs Act was actively supported by large food and drug
producers—not because they were interested in promoting public health,
but because they wanted to restrict competition by cartelizing their
industries. The story of margarine regulation is illustrative.
Margarine, an artificial product made from processed vegetable fats, was
invented in 1869 as a substitute for butter. It was (or could have been)
cheaper than butter, tasted good, and gained immediate consumer
acceptance. To protect their dairy industries, states with dairy interests
undertook to counteract free and informed consumer choice: They imposed
special taxes on margarine and banned coloring it yellow. By 1902, thirty-
two states had banned coloring margarine, “the phrasing of the statutes
convey[ing] the clear impression that margarine was an unhealthy, low-
quality imitation of butter.”25 Discriminatory taxes on margarine remained
in effect until the 1950s.

The Guardians’ Hopeless Task

Long ago, we decided that our collective hands were unfit to handle
drugs, and thus we entrusted the regulation of the drug market to a corps of
increasingly numerous guardians. I contend that the guardians against
dangerous drugs cause more harm than good, not only because that is a
talent all guardians possess by nature or acquire by practice, but also
because we expect them to satisfy mutually contradictory needs, namely,
the needs of both a market-oriented system of individual rights and a
health-oriented system of medical obligations. Although this particular
conflict weighs especially heavily on guardians entrusted with protecting
public health, similar inconsistencies are familiar to legal scholars—for
example, the conflict between the market-generated rights morality of
capitalism and the compassion-generated mercy morality of Christianity.26
A few examples will help to illustrate our dilemma of the conflicting
demands of individual rights and duties anchored in the economic-legal
matrix of the market, and the demands of medical needs and obligations
anchored in the collectivist-compassionate matrix of theology-therapy.
The laws that deny healthy people “recreational” drugs also deny sick
people “therapeutic” drugs. This is partly because some of the same drugs
—including our favorite scapegoat drugs, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana—
have both recreational and therapeutic uses, and partly because certain
drugs believed to be therapeutic for serious diseases (and sometimes
available abroad) have not (yet) been approved by the FDA as both
effective and safe, the two basic criteria drugs must meet under present U.S.
law. However, with enough political clout, special interest groups often
prevail and determine both diagnostic and therapeutic policy. The ability of
gay activists to influence psychiatric nosology as well as FDA policy is an
example.
In 1973, under pressure from homosexuals, the American Psychiatric
Association declared that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
Similarly, in May 1990, the Food and Drug Administration approved—
under the policy known as “expanded access” or “parallel track”—the use
of certain anti-AIDS drugs, even though they had not met “the same criteria
that drugs used for other diseases have to meet.”27 Drug regulations thus
selectively reward and punish people on the basis of sexual preference. This
inequality before the law—clearly a political and constitutional issue of the
first rank—is nevertheless not so regarded. Instead, it is disguised as an
ethical-therapeutic method of drug distribution, called a “compassionate
release system.” But a bureaucratic system that can “compassionately
release” a drug can also cruelly withhold it.28 This illegality and injustice
deserves the name affirmative drug action—an appropriate emblem for the
American therapeutic state today.
The collision between the demands of our new health-oriented morality
and our traditional rights-oriented legality leads to especially ironic results
when we mix our drug laws with the ethical perplexities posed by
pregnancy. No one would deny that, other things being equal, it is healthier
for a fetus to be gestated by a woman who does not drink or have diabetes
than by one who drinks or has diabetes. It is also healthier for a fetus to be
born alive as a baby than dead as an abortus. However, we do not punish a
diabetic woman for having a child (even if both she and her husband have
juvenile diabetes), because we judge her behavior on the basis of our rights-
based system of law and morality; but we do punish a pregnant woman for
“using drugs” (as a drug trafficker), because we judge her behavior on the
basis of our health-based system of law and morality. Thus, in Kentucky a
woman was convicted “of abusing her unborn child by taking drugs during
pregnancy”;29 in Florida a woman “was sentenced to 14 years’ probation
and participation in a drug treatment program” because she delivered
cocaine to her baby through the umbilical cord, and her conviction was
upheld by the Fifth District Florida Court of Appeals;30 and in Minnesota
the state “has amended its definition of criminal child neglect to include
prenatal exposure to controlled substances.”31 By May 1990, “at least 50
women have been charged with crimes for their behavior during
pregnancy…. [The women were arrested] for a new and independent crime:
continuing their pregnancy while addicted to drugs.”32 Only twenty-odd
years ago, abortion was illegal; now a pregnant woman who uses a
prescription drug may be prosecuted and punished if she does not get an
abortion.

When Protections Fail

Many modern medical interventions—initially hailed as sensationally
beneficial—proved to be disastrously harmful. These tragic episodes offer
dramatic proof, if any were needed, that reliance on the protection of the
medical profession and of the state is a dangerous substitute for reliance on
oneself and the principle of caveat emptor. Horrifying examples abound:
oxygen for premature infants, causing them to go blind; X-ray irradiation of
the thymuses of “sickly” children, giving them cancer of the thyroid;
radioactive waters for tired and impotent adults, resulting in their being
poisoned with radioactivity; severing the healthy frontal lobes of
“schizophrenics,” making them permanently brain-injured.
The belief that it is the duty of a state-controlled and state-funded
medicine to discover and provide effective treatment for every disease that
affects human beings (and animals and plants as well) is relatively recent. It
would probably surprise most people to learn that not one cent of public
money was spent on developing the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Fifty years
ago, neither the American people nor their government viewed the battle
against diseases—even against a contagious disease such as polio—as the
state’s job. The research that led to the development of the polio vaccines
was supported by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a private
health organization founded by FDR in 1938, and was financed by funds
from the March of Dimes.33
However, after World War II, the belief that it is the duty of the state to
fund every aspect of medicine—research, education, health care delivery—
quickly hardened into dogma, unquestioned even by conservatives. The
result is a characteristically American crowd madness, comprised of a self-
contradictory combination of pharmacological phobia and pharmacological
hubris. The phobia, which we mistake for a real threat, makes us believe
that “dangerous drugs” cause “epidemics” and “plagues”; while the hubris,
which we confuse with real science, makes us believe that a narcotic
prescribed by a doctor (methadone) is a cure for addiction to a narcotic
purchased on the black market (heroin)—and that as-yet-to-be-discovered
drugs will cure every human malady, from AIDS to mental illness.
Our pharmacological arrogance has engendered two specific types of
blunders, both on a gigantic scale. One blunder is the belief that the
tragedies of human existence are diseases, susceptible to treatment—
specifically, psychiatric treatment. The other is the belief that every
discovery in chemistry and physics must have therapeutic applications,
even though many of the cures so generated are nothing more than
sophisticated-sounding con jobs. Radium cures are a classic example.
In 1898 the Curies discovered radium—and, presto, doctors hailed
radium as a miracle cure for a variety of ailments, among them
“rheumatism, gout, syphilis, anemia, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, …
hypertension, and metabolic disorders.”34 In 1912 Harvard Medical School
opened its Huntington Memorial Radium Hospital and began to advertise
“radium ward beds for $3 a day.” A year later, “radium therapy was a well-
established medical subspecialty,” its practitioners supposedly interested in
(what they thought were) radium’s physiological powers (rather than its
anti-tumor effects). Radithor, a mixture of radium 226 and radium 228 in
distilled water, “was advertised as an effective treatment for over 150
‘endocrinologic’ diseases, especially lassitude and sexual impotence.”35
Most of the people who took Radithor developed radium poisoning: They
became chronically ill, were horribly disfigured, and died a few years after
having given testimonials of miraculous re-coveries. This story is important
because doctors hailed Radithor, the press praised it, and the public loved it.
The moral to be drawn from all this, therefore, is that eliminating the
public’s faith in miracle cures, and the health professionals’ self-interested
willingness to exploit that faith, is nothing but a pipe dream.

Merchandising Fear
In their cross-cultural study of risk, Douglas and Wildavsky ask, “What
are Americans afraid of?” They answer, “Nothing much, really, except the
food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live
on, and the energy they use.”36 The authors forgot to add that we are also
afraid of AIDS, drugs, suicide, and mental illness. In fact, dangerous drugs
constitute one of the fear industry’s best-selling products. (The other is
mental illness, the two being typically yoked together as cause and effect.)
There are some good reasons for our collective hypochondriasis. Thanks
to advances in medicine and public health, we are now healthier than we
have ever been. Hence, like the person who fears poverty more after he has
made some money than when he had none, we fear illness more now that
we are healthy and live a long life than we did when life was beset by
illness and death came at an early age.
Obviously, fear of the unknown is part of the human condition. Hence,
people have always been afraid of something; and arousing and allaying
fears has always been a profitable enterprise. When life was short and
uncertain, which was the case until recent times, merchandising fear was a
priestly monopoly: It was the clergyman’s job to arouse and allay people’s
fears about their lives in the hereafter. After the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution, when everyday existence became a little more secure
and death came a little later, the politician entered the fear business: It
became his job to arouse and allay people’s fears about their prospects here
on earth. In the nineteenth century, with the advent of modern medicine, the
physician joined the team: Charged with provoking and pacifying people’s
fears about diseases, he quickly rose to be the dominant player in the fear
market.37 Finally, in our own day, the consumer advocate and the
psychiatrist have joined the flourishing fear business: the consumer
advocate’s job being to alarm and reassure the masses; the psychiatrist’s, to
cater to the fears of individuals. Conducting these symphonies of fear and
reassurance is the media—especially television. The whole thing makes
Roosevelt’s famous slogan about our having nothing to fear but fear itself
look like a classic case of whistling past the graveyard.

Risks: Assumed vs. Imposed

Since mid-century, we have become more knowledgeable than we have
ever been about how our environment—both human and inanimate—can
protect as well as imperil our health. Thus, our very consciousness of health
risks and health protections has become a fresh source of anxiety, the more
so because the government has systematically misled and confused people
about two altogether different types of drug-related dangers: (1) those we
assume by choosing to ingest drugs (recreational or therapeutic); and (2)
those that are imposed on us, against our will or without our knowledge, by
the introduction of toxic chemicals into the environment (by private
industry or the state).38 For their part, the people let themselves be blinded
by a paternal state—because they are infantile and are encouraged to
believe that they can master the chemical dangers they face by means of
some simple individual or collective action. Anti-drug slogans such as “Just
say no!”; anti-drug ads such as the TV spot showing an egg frying in a pan,
accompanied by the legend, “This is your brain on drugs”; anti-drug laws
such as those against hemp, renamed “marijuana”; and prohibitions of
sterile syringes, renamed “drug paraphernalia”—these are just some of the
glaring examples of such misguided efforts at risk management.
In addition, we are endangered by state-supported health education
programs that, instead of providing accurate information, are a bottomless
source of deception and misinformation. To be sure, the state has always
been a source of grave danger to its own people—traditionally, by getting
them maimed and killed in wars. While the danger of war as by no means
disappeared, armed conflict is less popular than it used to be. The principal
danger to our health to which the state now subjects us is probably
environmental pollution, especially by radioactive wastes produced by the
nuclear weapons industries. In short, concern about chemicals that might
get into our bodies is well justified. But the War on Drugs misdirects our
attention from what we should fear and what we should do about it.
There are some 45,000 chemicals in commercial use today.39 The air we
breathe, the liquids we drink, the meat, fruit, and vegetables we eat are full
of chemicals, most of which we cannot see or smell. In addition, we are
exposed to radioactive and other chemical wastes produced by our
government and placed in American waters and soil by our government—
the same government that tells us that Peruvian peasants endanger us by
growing coca.40 But coca does not endanger the Peruvians or befoul their
land, whereas radioactivity endangers us and befouls our land where
just 50 years ago several Indian tribes wandered and foraged … and 6,000 farmers from the
towns of Hanford, Richland, and White Bluffs [Washington] grew fruit in orchards
irrigated from the Columbia. But after the Manhattan Project expropriated 570 square miles
of land in 1943, plutonium and its lasting legacy, nuclear waste, became Hanford’s crop.41
 The Hanford reprocessing plants were deadly polluters on a vast scale:
By 1985, “the cumulative volume of liquid wastes discharged to the
environment from [this plant alone] … surpassed 200 billion gallons-
enough fluid to cover the isle of Manhattan to a depth of over 40 feet.”42
At the very moment when our government proclaims “zero tolerance” of
drugs, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposes that “mild radioactive
waste [be disposed] … in municipal dumps or ordinary incinerators or even
recycled into consumer products.” If adopted, the policy could result in the
recycling of radioactive waste “into toys, jewelry, and other common
objects…. The commission said that an activity that increases the risk of
death by one in 100,000 would be ‘of little concern to most members of
society.’”43 Extrapolated to the population of the United States, that would
come to 2,500 extra deaths, plus 2,500 cases of protracted painful illnesses
per year—all directly attributable to the government’s policy of imposing
risks on us against which, unlike the risks of illegal drugs, we cannot
protect ourselves by means of personal self-discipline.
From a moral point of view, perhaps the most scandalous aspect of our
drug control policies is that while we protest against poor foreign farmers’
growing crops smuggled into our country, we send them—with the approval
of our government—American-made chemicals so toxic that they cannot be
sold in the United States. Chemical manufacturers export “up to 150 million
pounds of these blacklisted products worth more than $800 million, about
one fourth of U.S. pesticide production.”44 The World Health Organization
estimates that, as a result, “agricultural workers in developing countries
suffer 3 million cases of acute pesticide poisoning annually.”
In short, although it is true that, in a certain sense, cocaine and heroin are
dangerous drugs, this truth has been so radically wrenched from its proper
pharmacological and social context that it has become a big lie. I say this
because of all the potentially dangerous chemicals in our environment, none
is more difficult to avoid than a radioactive element in the air, water, or soil
—and none is easier to avoid than cocaine or heroin.

The Perils of the Preventive Function of Government

Calvin Coolidge is remembered mainly for his legendary taciturnity. As
one story about him has it, the first lady feeling indisposed, the president
went to church without her. Back in the White House, Mrs. Coolidge
inquired what the minister spoke about. “Sin,” replied Coolidge. “What did
he have to say about it?” his wife pressed. “He said he was against it,”
explained the president.45
In a fundamental sense, that is what the War on Drugs is about. And that
is what makes it so revolting morally and so risky politically. It is one thing
for President Coolidge to say that a minister delivered a sermon against sin
—a laconic redundancy rendering the statement humorous. It is quite
another thing to arm the priest with the power of the state and let him wage
war on sin and sinners. Seemingly anticipating the medical-remedial
ambitions of the modern secular state, John Stuart Mill warned against this
very danger in his classic essay On Liberty:
The preventive function of government, however, is far more liable to be abused, to the
prejudice of liberty, than the punitory function; for there is hardly any part of the legitimate
freedom of action of a human being which would not admit of being represented, and fairly
too, as increasing the facilities for some form or other of delinquency.46

Mill could not have put it better were he addressing our freedom of
action with respect to drugs. It is self-evident that free access to a particular
drug, like free access to any object, increases our opportunities for abusing
it. But again the statement is redundant, for “freedom of action” means the
freedom to act wisely or unwisely, to do right or wrong.
In some ways, we were better off in the old days, when sin was sin and
the sinner was punished qua sinner. To be sure, the consequences were
usually unpleasant, but the business was at least on the up-and-up. Now, sin
is secular and medical. It is sickness, especially sickness considered to be
self-inflicted—exemplified by the deleterious consequences of drug abuse.
As a result, terms such as illness and treatment have become elasticized and
politicized. Although it is perfectly apparent that this is the case in the
definition of what counts as the disease of drug abuse, it makes no
difference: Doctors, judges, journalists, civil libertarians, everyone accepts
that deviant drug use is disease. Do I exaggerate? Consider the sorts of
drug-using behaviors the World Health Organization classifies as drug
abuse:
Unsanctioned Use—Use of a drug that is not approved by a society or a group within that
society … e.g., certain psychedelics.
Hazardous Use—Use of a drug that will probably lead to harmful consequences for the
user…. This category includes the idea of risky behavior, e.g., smoking 1 pack of
 cigarettes a day.47

Prohibiting the use of “not approved” drugs and classifying the defiance
of the ban as a disease is, of course, politically indistinguishable from
prohibiting the reading or writing of “not approved” books and classifying
the defiance of the ban as a disease. I have said enough about this
pernicious nonsense elsewhere and merely note it here. But consider some
tragicomic conundrums to which the prohibition of medically unsanctioned
use of prescription drugs logically leads.
Suppose that a man injures his back, visits his physician, and receives a
prescription for thirty Valium tablets to ease his muscle spasm. He takes the
pills for a few days, feels better, and stops the medication. He has fifteen
Valium tablets left. Six months later, he has a fight with his wife, cannot go
to sleep, and takes Valium as a sleeping pill. He has no prescription for
Valium as a hypnotic, making this an instance of “medically unsanctioned
drug use.” Or suppose that six months later, just for the fun of it, he takes a
drink and a Valium. Is such a person a drug criminal and a drug abuser?48 In
the United States, in 1991, the answer is yes. In April 1988, a nurse-captain
in the Air Force had her wisdom teeth removed and, to relieve the pain,
received a prescription for Tylox (which contains oxycodone and
acetaminophen). On September 26, 1990, pregnant and suffering from an
infected hematoma, “she took the last two Tylox pills from the 1988
prescription.” As a result, she was court-martialled and sentenced to six
months in jail plus dismissal from the Air Force and forfeiture “of all pay
and allowances, which could amount to $35,000 to $40,000 annually.”49
Still, the view that the concept of disease is now a political category as
much as it is a medical category continues to be considered heretical. My
point is simple, but runs counter to contemporary conventional wisdom. It
is that some illnesses are medical (for example, cancer of the prostate),
some are legal and political (for example, criminal insanity, unsanctioned
drug use), and some are mental (for example, agoraphobia).50 Luckily, the
physician who espouses this modern heresy is no longer murdered, he is
only marginalized. However, eliminating legitimate opposition to the
modern coercive-therapeutic ethic makes it easy to mask the War on Drugs
as, de jure, a combined public health and criminal law measure, while, de
facto, allowing it to flourish as a holy war of scapegoat persecution and
collective self-purification. Such an enterprise, as we know from history, is
not only of great ideological and economic value to the scapegoaters, but is
also practically unopposable, effective resistance to it requiring precisely
the sorts of political checks and balances that are lacking against the
therapeutic state. Indeed, the very existence of checks and balances against
the alliance of medicine and the state—similar to those created by the
Founders against the alliance of church and state—are now regarded as
“unscientific,” and hence irrational and inappropriate.
 4

Drug Education:
The Cult of Drug Disinformation

Everything has a slogan, and of all the bunk in America, the

slogan is the champ…. Congress even has slogans: “Why sleep
at home, when you can sleep in Congress?” “Be a Politician—
no training necessary!”… “Join the Senate and investigate
something.”
—Will Rogers1

Nancy Reagan’s slogan, “Just say no to drugs,” is not as funny as Will

Rogers’ coinages; but then, a sense of humor is not a virtue anyone would
dare attribute to this former first lady. Actually, as a slogan, “Just say no to
drugs” is simply witless, in both senses of that word: It is at once humorless
and stupid, leaving unsaid to what drugs, in what doses, and under what
circumstances one ought to say no. But that is just the point. The meaning
of this message does not lie in its words alone; instead, it lies in its value as
a ritual incantation that might as well be set to music, such as typically
accompanies the text of a national anthem or religious hymn.

THE MISCHIEF OF THE IMMORAL DRUG MAJORITY

In 1979 when Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, he did so as a
Conservative, with a capital C. The liberals were hippies who smoked
marijuana, got abortions for their girlfriends, and neglected their children.
Such, at least, was the image into which conservative Republicans cast
liberal Democrats. In contrast, Conservatives—exemplified by Ronald and
Nancy Reagan—stood for morality, tradition, and family values. Those
claims will, in my opinion, go down in history as the most transparent
hypocrisies of the Reagan presidency. For whatever ugliness was
committed in the name of drugs by President Reagan’s predecessors, it was
the Reagans who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan,
taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the
police.
President Reagan claimed that he stood not only for family values, but
also for less government. As an abstract proposition, he surely would have
agreed that a person’s loyalty to his family is more important and should be
more enduring than his loyalty to a temporarily expedient government
policy. But talk is cheap. When the Reagans’ vaunted family values were
put to the test of practical politics, when old-fashioned allegiances came in
conflict with the pursuit of personal self-aggrandizement, their noble
professions were brutally belied by their ignoble policies. They embraced
one of the most characteristic and most despicable practices of the great
socialist states of the twentieth century: turning children against their
parents in a holy war against enemies of the state. The identity of the enemy
who justifies this contemptible tactic has varied from one totalitarian
ideology to another. In national socialism, the enemy was the Jew; in
international socialism, it was and still is the profiteer; in medical
socialism, it is the drug trafficker. The true nature and behavior of these
scapegoats are unimportant. What is important is that the state be able to
persuade people the threat is so serious that all efforts at self-defense are
justified; in our present case, this translates to the danger of drugs justifying
the destruction of parental authority and its replacement by the state as
parent.

Drugs: A Pretext for Subverting Family Loyalties

In August 1986, after listening to an anti-drug lecture, Deanna Young, a
“blonde, blue-eyed junior high school student [in California] walked into
the police station carrying a trash can bag containing an ounce of cocaine
… [and] small amounts of marijuana and pills. By sunrise, her father and
mother had been arrested and jailed.”2 Mrs. Reagan rushed to congratulate
Ms. Young. “She must have loved her parents a great deal,” she told the
press.
 Ms. Young’s patriotism was rewarded by Hollywood as well. Nine major
production companies were vying to acquire the rights to her story. One
film producer attributed the high interest in the story to its being the reverse
of the usual scenario: “The normal situation is parents trying to keep young
people off drugs.”3 Thanks to Nancy Reagan, parents denouncing their
children to the police was already normal in the American family in the
1980s.
The Bush administration endorsed and intensified the effort to enlist
“kids” in the War on Drugs. Betraying one’s own parents was not enough;
better to betray one’s friends as well. In May 1989, “federal drug chief
[William Bennett] instructed students [in a high school in Miami] … to tell
on their friends…. ‘It isn’t snitching or betrayal to tell an adult that a friend
of yours is using drugs and needs help. It’s an act of true loyalty—of true
friendship.’”4 Bennett is untroubled about the moral implications of such a
practice or the potentialities for its abuse. He told the New York Times “he
was not worried that students would make false allegations about their
peers’ drug use.”5
Although children denouncing their parents for illegal drug possession
has become commonplace, no one seems disturbed about it. In fact, as the
War on Drugs escalates, ever younger children are turning their “sick”
mothers and fathers over to a kinder and gentler American state for “help.”
After a twelve-year-old girl in Fremont, California, turned her parents in to
the police for growing marijuana and using cocaine, a spokesman for the
Fremont police declared, “She did the right thing. We don’t see this as
turning in parents. We would rather view this as someone requesting help
for their parents and for themselves.”6 The media report this as if it were as
ordinary as a weather forecast for a sunny summer day: “Parents used to
turn their children in to authorities when they caught them using drugs.
Today, the tables have turned—children are blowing the whistle on their
parents. In California, seven children in the last three months [August–
October 1986] have informed on their parents for drug abuse.”7 In
September 1989 an eight-year-old Illinois boy turned in his mother and her
friend. They were promptly arrested on cocaine and marijuana charges.
“‘My mom’s selling and using coke and marijuana,’ the boy told [the
police]. ‘It ain’t right.’ The boy’s father said the boy had listened to Bush’s
talk on drugs last week.”8
 President Bush’s self-advertisement as the “(drug) education president”
has required certain sacrifices, but not on his part, of course. In September
1989 (a year before Saddam Hussein offered a more challenging
opportunity for President Bush to posture as the savior of mankind), the
president’s entourage decided on staging a photo opportunity to dramatize
his heroic struggle against drugs. DEA agents lured an eighteen-yea-old
high school senior to Lafayette Square, across the street from the White
House, and used him “as a prop in an anti-drug speech [by Bush] … to
dramatize how easy it is to buy drugs in the nation’s capital.”9 Bush’s
popularity rose to a new high. The teenager was arrested and sentenced to
ten years in prison.

Casualties of the Children’s Drug Crusade

As illegal drug use becomes equated with illness, and its coercive control
with treatment, the people caught up in this crowd madness—as anyone
familiar with linguistics might expect—lose not only their common sense
but their sense of humor as well. An eight-year-old girl takes an unopened
can of beer to her third-grade classroom in Richmond, Virginia, for “show
and tell.” She is promptly suspended and ordered to “undergo counseling
for illegal possession of alcohol. It was a can of Billy Beer … and was kept
at home, unopened, as a collector’s item.”10
This sort of drug education is not merely asinine; it is positively
subversive of the values we ought to instill in children. Instead of teaching
young people to be self-reliant, we encourage them to rely on corrupt
authorities; instead of teaching them to be grateful to their parents and
supportive of their friends, we incite them to betray parents and friends and
disdain ordinary human decencies. A sixteen-year-old high school
sophomore gives her friend two Midol tablets to ease her menstrual
discomfort. A teacher sees them and reports them to the principal, who
publicly humiliates the “drug trafficker” by suspending her “for five days
for carrying over-the-counter medication in her purse.”11 Note that the
newspaper report describes the guilty student’s behavior as “dispensing
over-the-counter medication”—a remarkable choice of words in these
1990s when talk-show hostesses routinely refer to every shameless act of
exhibitionism as “sharing.” But no, this gift of two Midol tablets was not an
act of one young woman sharing a drug useful for menstrual cramps with
another. It was the violation of “the district’s drug policy [which forbade]
carrying medications of any kind.” The suspended teenager complained to
the press that “she has carried Midol in her purse for two years and never
knew she was breaking the rules.” Her mother complained that “the district
is overreacting…. ‘The punishment should fit the crime. And in any event,
this wasn’t a crime.’”12 Quite the contrary. This is a perfect example of the
type of ordinary human decency that the bureaucrats who run our public
schools now classify and punish as a crime.
Consider, for a moment, where our ad hoc, unprincipled approach to
rights and wrongs has gotten us. Intoxicated with the rhetoric of drug
wrongs, we deny a sixteen-year-old woman the right to have Midol in her
purse at school and share it with a friend. But, intoxicated with the rhetoric
of abortion rights, feminists and liberal Americans insist that, should she
become pregnant and want an abortion, she should have a right to it—free
(paid by the taxpayer) and without the knowledge or consent of her parents.
Also, contrast the Midol episode with the fact that, because they are imbued
with the mythology that inner-city youths need self-esteem rather than self-
discipline, the educational bureaucrats look the other way when children
carry knives and guns to school.
Lest the critical reader dismiss all this as too absurd to be really believed
by Americans, let us recall that Mrs. Reagan believes in astrology, and Mr.
Reagan in the medical mythology of personal nonresponsibility for
premeditated crime. Indeed, former President Reagan has made it clear that
he believes in responsibility for good deeds only. For bad deeds, someone
or something other than the actor is responsible. Did he ever blame a
specific Soviet leader for the misfortunes of the people in the Soviet Union
and the Eastern bloc? Never. He blamed an abstract “evil empire.” I believe
this explains why Ronald Reagan comes across as such an amiable person:
He never blames anyone. Two brief examples illustrate this point.
In his autobiography, Mr. Reagan relates how, when he was a child, his
mother explained to him that his father was not simply a man who liked to
drink, but “had a disease called alcoholism.” He also tells us that he still
prays for his would-be assassin, John Hinckley.13 The idea that Hinckley is
not responsible for his crime is not a passing fancy of Mr. Reagan’s. It is his
carefully considered and firmly held belief. As soon as the president
recovered from his acute chest wound—long before Hinckley’s (non)trial—
Mr. Reagan hurried to tell the American people that “He [Hinckley] is a
very disturbed young man…. I hope he’ll get well, too.”14 Like the
president with a bullet wound in his chest, Hinckley was “sick” and needed
to “get well.”
These vignettes—together with our reflexive rejection of personal
responsibility for alcoholism, drug use, crime, and similar misbehaviors—
are ominous signs that we have let our concern about drug abuse displace
our concern about matters of elementary morality. The merchandising of a
new drug-detection device is illustrative. The kit, called DrugAlert, consists
of three aerosol cans with which a parent can detect whether his child is “on
drugs.” To use this tool, the parent need only “wipe a piece of paper on a
surface that drugs might have touched, then spray the paper with the
chemicals,” and—presto—cocaine turns the paper turquoise; marijuana,
reddish brown.15 Does this kind of parental behavior invade the child’s
privacy? “Sure, it’s an invasion of privacy,” the manufacturer
acknowledges, “but so is a thermometer…. [P]arents need any tool they can
get to protect their kids from drugs.”16 Unfortunately, the test is far from
foolproof: It picks up over-the-counter antihistamines as cocaine. Too bad.
But better safe than sorry.

THE SCANDAL OF DRUG EDUCATION

The belief that our drug regulations rest on a rational, scientific basis is
one of the root causes of our drug problem. On the contrary, they rest on
pseudoscience, create pseudomedical diagnoses, and employ
pseudotherapeutic interventions. As the theological state formerly was a
bottomless source of disinformation about everything from cosmology to
medicine, so now the therapeutic state is a rich source of disinformation
about sex, drugs, and AIDS. Thus, sex education is a campaign of religious
and medical disinformation in the service of promoting the acceptance of
traditionally stigmatized sexual practices and justifying a war on sexual
differences. Drug education is a campaign of pharmacological
disinformation in the service of justifying the government’s War on Drugs.
And AIDS education is a campaign of epidemiological and economic
disinformation in the service of justifying the expenditure of virtually
unlimited government funds on activities ostensibly aimed at combating
AIDS. The results are monumental boondoggles. After $450 million of
federal funds had been squandered on so-called AIDS education, a survey
of the residents of the nation’s capital revealed that “33% did not know that
blood transfusion can transmit AIDS, 39% did not know that sharing
needles can transmit AIDS, 16% thought toilet seats can transmit AIDS,
and 28% thought drinking glasses can carry AIDS.”17
The truth is that we have simply exchanged one puritanical-
prohibitionist posture for another. In 1890, an unmarried female high-school
student who became pregnant would have been so cruelly ostracized that
she would have been driven to the brink of suicide, but she enjoyed legally
unrestricted access to cocaine (in Coca-Cola). Today, the situation is
reversed. A high school student caught with crack is so cruelly punished
that he may be driven to the brink of suicide, but his or her nonmarital
sexual and procreative behavior is accepted and even rewarded (with free
condoms, and financial support for mother and baby).

The Fruits of Pharmacological Disinformation

After decades of carpet bombing the American consciousness with drug
laws and drug lies, the people are showing unmistakable signs that they
have learned their lessons. According to a 1990 USA Today poll, about 25
percent of Americans surveyed said they would report their child to the
police if he were found selling cocaine; 56 percent believed that “addicts
are victims”; 34 percent called for increased drug education; and 62 percent
said they would approve a tax increase for drug education.18
From parents denouncing their children, children denouncing their
parents, and students denouncing each other, it is only a small step to
people denouncing neighbors and even strangers they suspect of using
illegal drugs. This public-spirited act is now encouraged in many American
communities. In 1990, Chattooga (Georgia) County’s major newspaper, The
Summerville News, added “drug coupons” to its pages, inviting readers “to
fill in the names of suspected drug users and send them to the sheriff.”19 In
Anderson County, South Carolina, the sheriff put up billboards that read:
“Need cash? Turn in a drug dealer.” Informers were promised 25 percent of
the assets seized from any dealer they helped arrest.20
Although it is ridiculous to call our now fashionable anti-drug
propaganda “drug education,” syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen is
virtually the only public figure to question the practice of treating children
as if they could, or ought to, know what drugs adults should or should not
use. “They are the children,” she writes, mocking one of the popular anti-
drug advertisements, “who come into the kitchen, look at an egg frying, and
say with certainty, ‘That’s your brain on drugs.’”21 To encourage children to
use language so mindlessly is a depraved thing for adults to do because, as
Quindlen sagely observes, “some [of these children] will discover that
people use drugs and booze because they seem to make you feel better,”
and the children will then “reject the message but remember the permission
—even the invitation—to be intolerant of human weakness.”
Under the pretext of protecting our children from poisonous drugs, we
thus systematically fill their minds with poisonous ideas and call it
“education.” The slogan “Just say no to drugs” does not educate by
imparting information; it commands by reiterating a catch phrase. Of
course, children should not go around using crack. They also should not go
around killing people, but we do not call communicating that command
“murder education.” To be worthy of the name, drug education would have
to be premised on taking drugs seriously and treating children honestly. In
turn, this would require that we acknowledge the obvious similarities
between eating and drug taking, “food use” and “drug use.” In fact, the
same agency of the federal government—the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA)—monitors the purity and safety of the foods we eat
and of the drugs we take. Accordingly, if we treated children with respect,
we would recognize that telling them “Just say no to drugs” makes about as
much sense as telling them “Just say no to food”—a phrase that sounds
more like an incitement to anorexia nervosa than an encouragement of good
eating habits. In short, the aim of real drug education ought to be to
encourage not drug avoidance, but good drug-using habits, that is, using
drugs knowledgeably, responsibly, and with self-discipline.
We cannot, as the title of a popular Broadway play proposed, stop the
world and get off. Hence, everything we do, or do not do, is a statement we
make about ourselves, a clue to our role—real or pretended—in the game of
life. Eating or not eating meat, drinking or not drinking alcohol, smoking or
not smoking marijuana, each is a statement people make about themselves.
This fact explains the important role food and drug taboos play in religions.
In this light, consider the following remarkable feature of the 1988
presidential race.
 Presidential Politics: Pushing Anorexia Pharmaceutica
On March 18, 1988, under the heading “Candidates’ Survival Guide,”
Newsweek magazine presented a tabular summary of “How they make it to
the next photo opportunity.”22 Listing Democrats and Republicans in
alphabetical order, the table supplied information about eight items of
behavior, among them, “Medication.” The following is the list of entries in
that category, exactly as printed:
Michael Dukakis: “a glass of white wine, as often as once a week.”
Richard Gephardt: “occasional beer.”
Albert Gore: “none.”
Jesse Jackson: “doesn’t smoke or drink; occasional aspirin.”
Paul Simon: “none.”
George Bush: “occasional Margarita or vodka Martini at end of day.”
Bob Dole: “occasional half glass of white wine.”

Pat Robertson: “none.”23

This list is prima facie evidence of the pharmacological crowd madness

affecting contemporary American society. To appreciate the sanctimonious
absurdity of our leading politicians’ aversion to recreational drugs
(especially alcohol), consider the views of two of our greatest presidents.
“Were I to commence my administration again,” said Thomas Jefferson,
“the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, ‘Does he
use ardent spirits?’”24 More afraid of the teetotaler than of the alcoholic,
Jefferson—a connoisseur of wine—suggested this drug test to avoid the
threat posed by the moral meddler. Lincoln was similarly afraid of and
opposed to the anti-alcohol fanatic. In 1842, in an address to a temperance
society in Springfield, Illinois, he declared, “I believe, if we take habitual
drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous
comparison with those of any other class.”25 On the basis of their responses
summarized above, none of the presidential candidates would have passed
the Jefferson-Lincoln drug test.
All of the candidates treat beer and wine (beverages ordinarily
consumed during a meal) as “medication.”
 Jesse Jackson believes that not drinking and not smoking are
instances of not taking medication.
Three out of eight candidates claim to use no drugs whatever.
None of the candidates smokes or admits to smoking.
Only George Bush acknowledges drinking hard liquor, and he
qualifies it by emphasizing that he does so only “occasionally” and
only “at the end of the day.”
Only Jesse Jackson acknowledges using an over-the-counter
medication.

THE ANTI-DRUG CRUSADERS: A CAST OF

CHARACTERS
The propaganda campaign we call “drug education” consists, for the
most part, of simplistic slogans urging complete—and, if taken literally,
impossible and senseless—drug avoidance. What sorts of persons stoop so
low as to endorse and expound such wretched pseudoscientific pieties and
outright lies? Here we can observe the operation of another of Edmund
Burke’s maxims. He wrote, “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity
to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and
for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base.”26 Indeed, the
defective character of our drug educational program attracts drug warriors
with defective characters to match.

Father Bruce Ritter

During the 1980s, no one in America was more venerated for saving
“kids” from drugs than Father Bruce Ritter, founder of New York’s famed
Covenant House. So high did Father Ritter rise in the pantheon of child
protectors that, in his 1984 state of the union address, President Ronald
Reagan paid special tribute to him as an “unsung hero.”27 In fact, Father
Ritter was neither unsung nor a hero.
Father Ritter’s entry into the drug war should have served as a warning,
but the authorities looked the other way. “I became involved with the kids
of the neighborhood quite by accident, and, quite frankly, against my will,”
he writes in his autobiography, which reeks both of his prurient interest in
the sex lives of the “children on the street” and of his conceit as their
savior.28 One of the things that made Father Ritter a celebrity was his
method of securing housing for his “kids”: He stole the apartments of
alleged drug abusers. “To get the space I needed was simple,” he writes. “I
just kept taking over more and more of the apartments in my tenement.
Most of them, as I mentioned, were occupied by junkies, dealers, and speed
freaks…. It was kind of, if you will, muscular Christianity. The Holy Spirit
made me do it.”29
With this divinity defense as his shield, and with his resolve to fight
drugs as his spear, Father Ritter rode forth and, for two decades, preyed on
male children as the objects of his sexual desire. In December 1989 a young
male prostitute finally succeeded in exposing Father Ritter for the fraud he
was. After the whole sordid mess became public, John Cardinal O’Connor
acknowledged that “he and other board members … had been derelict in
carrying out their duties. ‘Obviously, we failed,’ he said. ‘What we don’t
know is monumental.’”30
That was not true. The board members of Covenant House knew—or
could have known—a good deal about Father Ritter, inasmuch as he had
boasted of dispossessing people of their apartments. But the victims were
dehumanized as “drug abusers,” and those charged with guarding the
guardians tacitly approved. The final unmasking of America’s most
celebrated priest-drug warrior was sensibly summed up by syndicated
columnist John McLaughlin. “For those who admired Father Ritter,”
McLaughlin wrote, “the hypocrisy of the sanctimoniousness” comes as a
particularly bitter betrayal, because “Ritter was uncompromising in his
denunciation of those who treat children as sexual prey.”31

President John F. Kennedy

It is not hypocrisy, however, that distinguishes Father Ritter from his
unsavory fellow anti-drug warriors. Most prominent anti-drug figures have
preached water but drunk wine. However, few prominent persons were
more accomplished drug hypocrites than President John F. Kennedy, whose
use of controlled and other questionable chemicals goes back to his Senate
days when he secured the services of the eminent quack Max Jacobson.32
Jacobson’s specialty was injecting drug cocktails of his own secret formula
into celebrities who wanted to enhance their sexual prowess. Jack
Kennedy’s involvement with “Max,” as he was known among his clients,
became public only after President Kennedy was dead; and Jacobson,
having lost his patron, was quickly targeted for investigation of his shady
medical practices and stripped of his license.33
Recent Kennedy biographies tell us a good deal more about the drug
habits of the president and various members of the Kennedy family. For
example, C. David Heymann relates, “On his [Jacobson’s] second day at the
White House, he was confronted by an agitated Jackie Kennedy. She had
discovered a vial of Demerol in the President’s bathroom. Further
investigation revealed that a Secret Service man had supplied her husband
with the unauthorized drug.”34 Another episode, at once hilarious and
sinister, was told to Heymann by Mary Meyer, sister-in-law of Washington
Post publisher Ben Bradley:
In July, 1962, while visiting the White House, Mary took Kennedy into one of the White
House bedrooms and she produced a small box with six joints in it. They shared one and
Kennedy laughingly told her that they were having a White House conference on narcotics
in a couple of weeks. They smoked two more joints…. He [Kennedy] admitted to having
done cocaine and hashish, thanks to Peter Lawford.35

Betty Ford
One of our most famous drug educators, of course, is Betty Ford. Her
career as a chemical dependency expert began in 1978, when she was
hospitalized for what was first described as a “problem with medication.”
That story was soon changed to her having become addicted to “certain
prescription drugs.” The final revision, which she disclosed to the press on
April 21, 1978, was this: “I’m addicted to alcohol.”36 That confession
transformed her, virtually overnight, from addict to expert on addiction.
Soon, Mrs. Ford was the famed founder of the prestigious Betty Ford
Center, a lofty perch from which, at last, she could look down on people as
sickos. “I’m almost sorry,” she writes in her autobiography, “for people who
haven’t been alcoholic, because I know things a person who’s never been
sick doesn’t know.”37 Mrs. Ford is no mere figurehead at her clinic, either.
She herself “counsels patients.” What are her and her colleagues’
qualifications? Being repentant sinners, a/k/a recovering addicts: “Two-
thirds of the staff and five of the center’s seven board members, is
recovering from addiction.”38
 Kitty Dukakis
A more recent but less successful entrant in the Great American Drug
Derby is Kitty Dukakis. Her story is too pathetic to parody, though it cries
out for it.
Mrs. Dukakis began taking amphetamines in 1956, when she was
nineteen years old. In 1963, she married Michael Dukakis and lived with
him for eleven years without his suspecting that she was “on drugs.” When
he discovered that she was, it was not because her behavior was in any way
abnormal; on the contrary, her behavior became abnormal only after she
was deprived of the drug. What happened in 1974 was that Mr. Dukakis
accidentally “stumbled on her cache of pills.” Then, according to Time
magazine, Mrs. Dukakis “told him the truth: I was chemically
dependent.”39 Three months later, having switched doctors, she was back
on amphetamines and continued “the charade for eight more years until her
husband noticed a stray bill from the doctor who was writing her
prescriptions.”40 But Kitty Dukakis’s tale of double deception—deceiving
her husband about both her using drugs and telling the truth—dragged on.
In 1987, when Mr. Dukakis was running for the presidency and when no
one suspected Mrs. Dukakis of “drug abuse,” she suddenly decided to come
out of the closet. Why? Because, she told Time magazine,
“I’ve had a long enough period of recovery…. I feel strongly about my recovery, and one
of the tenets of recovery is to help other people.” There were no rumors about Kitty
Dukakis and no apparent political need to go public…. Her bravery should not be
minimized, nor should the extent of her former drug problem be exaggerated.41

Subsequent events proved the untruth of Mrs. Dukakis’s statement and

the naiveté of Time magazine’s flattering characterization of her behavior.
Having anointed herself as a “recovered drug addict,” Mrs. Dukakis began
her short-lived new career as lecturer on drug abuse, modestly accepting
five-figure fees for sharing her wisdom with her audience.42 What she
delivered for the money was, according to People magazine, not much,
except to let people see her chain-smoking and pity her. For example, it did
not go unnoticed that before lecturing, Mrs. Dukakis made it a condition of
her appearance “that she would not take any questions of a personal nature
—an odd ground rule for a lecture on the very personal problem of
alcoholism.”43
 Before long, Mrs. Dukakis was addicted to the delusion that she was an
expert whose views were very much in demand. “Wrapping up a frenetic
schedule that included 13 appearances in 22 days, she plaintively asked an
aide: ‘Are you sure there aren’t any more speeches?’”44 Being paid more
than $150,000 in a few weeks for knowing nothing about drugs and saying
everything about them that was false is likely to intoxicate the subject, and
is sure to produce a hangover. For Mrs. Dukakis, it did both. Even before
she broke down again—it doesn’t seem to me that she ever “recovered”
from anything, so that term is misleading—she was described as chain-
smoking and looking tense. No wonder. A mere “eight days out of rehab,”
she began lecturing again and signed a book contract with a prestigious
publisher for which she collected a $175,000 advance. But she could not
escape from the truth. “I’m afraid,” she told a reporter, “that deep down I’m
nothing.”45 That is much too harsh. Mrs. Dukakis is something. Everyone
is. I am quite certain, however, that she is neither of the two things she most
passionately believed she was and wanted to be, namely, drug addict and
expert on drug addiction. But how could she know this as long as Mr.
Dukakis kept reinforcing her false belief in the reality of these mythical
conditions and her special calling for them? And why should he not do just
that, when—poor codependent that he is—he needs to believe this Santa
Claus story even more than his wife does? “As she has now discovered,”
explained the then governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to the
press in February 1989, “whether it comes in a bottle or is a solid, if you are
chemically dependent, you are chemically dependent.”46
There is a melancholy footnote to the story. During the summer of 1990,
Kitty Dukakis’s book was published and she was a celebrity again.47 Aptly
dubbed the “icon of America’s addiction to addictions” by Maureen Dowd
of the New York Times, Mrs. Dukakis now offered further proof of her
Olympian stature as a drug abuser and all-purpose addict. During her
supposed recovery from addictions, she had consumed (if she is to be
believed) not only ethyl alcohol, but also rubbing alcohol, hair spray,
vanilla extract, nail polish remover, aftershave, and mouthwash.48 She also
tells us that she has made “suicide attempts … [but] never meant to kill
herself.”49
Evidently, Mrs. Dukakis has acquired still another addiction, namely, to
truth telling—provided the truth she tells is different from year to year and
sordid enough to get her on television talk shows. Predictably, once again
the talk-show hosts and hostesses loved (or pretended to love) her valiant
struggle against the dread disease of addiction, and especially her hard-won
insight into the correct diagnosis of her chronic illness, its true cause, and
its scientific cure. The latest diagnosis: manic-depression. Its cause: “her
imperious mother … herself addicted to diet pills,” and her discovery that
her mother was an adopted illegitimate child. The cure: lithium.50

THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF DRUG EDUCATION

It is time that we asked ourselves what, in truth, is the enterprise we call
“drug education”? I submit it is the name we give to the state-sponsored
effort to inflame people’s hatred and intolerance of other people’s drug
habits, which is as indecent as it would be to inflame people’s hatred and
intolerance of other people’s religious habits and call it “religion
education.” While this unspeakable ugliness has failed to stem our
collective appetite for psychoactive drugs, legal and illegal, it has
succeeded in thoroughly misinforming us about the pharmacology of drugs,
the nature of drug use, our own drug history, and the drug-using customs of
other people.

Drug Abuse: What Disease? What Treatment?

Other people’s bad habits have long been the psychiatrist’s and
psychoanalyst’s favorite disease. Accordingly, when I first addressed the
subject of drug abuse, I suggested that we keep in mind that “bad habits are
not diseases.”51 To illustrate what happens if we forget that warning, let us
briefly consider an amusing example of the drug expert’s enormous, yet
typically unrecognized, cultural blind spot about drugs.
The classic psychoanalytic contribution to our subject—entitled “The
Psychoanalysis of Pharmacothymia (Drug Addiction)”—was published in
1933. Its author, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Rado, devoted more
than twenty pages to an exposition of the severe “psychopathology” of the
person suffering from the disease of “pharmacothymia,” to reach this
conclusion: “By easy transitions we arrive at the normal person who makes
daily use of stimulants in the form of coffee, tea, tobacco, and the like.”52
Today, nicotine abuse is considered to be our number-one public health
problem.
Regarding the treatment of drug abuse, it is easy to cite an equally
authoritative and amusing example. In a 1991 interview in Psychiatric
Times, Yale professor of psychiatry Herbert D. Kleber, M.D., deputy
director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, was asked what he
considered to be the major accomplishments of the federal government’s
drug program. He answered, “When President Bush took office, the federal
budget [for drug control] was $5.5 billion; it is now in excess of $11
billion…. The federal treatment budget, for example, has been increased
from $850 million to more than $1.6 billion over the past three years.”53
The reporter for Psychiatric Times then inquired if the treatment
—“inpatient drug abuse treatment in particular”—is effective. Kleber’s
response: “In terms of the question of effectiveness, there is an inadequate
data base. When we have met with the people who operate these facilities, I
have told them that it’s difficult to come out in support of their programs
because they have not documented their efficacy.”54 Kleber also admitted
that for “the pharmacologic treatments for drug abuse … there is no hard
evidence yet,” and reassured the reporter that “in the past few years, we
have increased the [drug abuse] treatment budget for the Bureau of Prisons
from $2 million to $22 million.”55 In short, nondiseases—especially if their
victims can be incarcerated and treated against their will—are at once easily
treatable and untreatable, which makes them especially attractive to
politicians and psychiatrists.

The Problem of the Drug Abuse Problem

Most Americans are ignorant of the fact that the maniacal pursuit of
“good drugs”—expected to make us healthy and live forever—and the
maniacal persecution of “bad drugs”—the cause of crime, disease, and
every other evil known to man—are peculiarly American social
phenomena. Although, in this book, I am not concerned with the attitudes of
other peoples toward drugs and drug prohibitions, I think it is important to
note that the image of America as a nation of drug abusers is false.
Actually, we are less given to self-medication (which we call “drug abuse”)
than people in many other countries. It is France that has apparently earned
the dubious sobriquet of “the most tranquilized country on earth,” making
the French media ponder “the question … how the French can get hold of
3.5 billion mood-changing pills a year, or about 80 pills for every adult.”56
Actually, the answer is simple: The French get their drugs by prescription,
from doctors who are not persecuted by their government for prescribing all
the Valium and Librium their patients want.
These cultural differences bring to mind the adage “Germans eat to live;
the French live to eat.” Mutatis mutandis, Americans feel it is morally
justifiable to take pills to make oneself healthy, but not to make oneself
happy; the French do not feel the urge for a sharp distinction between these
justifications. As a result, “young people use relatively few street drugs….
Students find it normal to take sedatives and stimulants [prescribed by
physicians], and one out of two medical students said they do so before
each exam.”57
Undoubtedly, some Americans “abuse” drugs. However, such a
statement asserts an utterly trivial truth. As John Stuart Mill emphasized,
“Almost every article which is bought or sold may be used in excess, and
sellers have a pecuniary interest in encouraging that excess; but no
argument can be found in this, in favor, for instance, of the Maine law
[prohibiting alcohol].”58 Neither can an argument be found in American
drug (ab)use for the American laws prohibiting drugs. A brief look at the
history of hemp (marijuana) merits our attention in this connection.

Hemp, Cannabis, or Marijuana?

The mischief the American therapeutic state has perpetrated vis-à-vis our
relationship to this “drug” begins with its name, which used to be “hemp.” I
suspect not many Americans know that hemp, cannabis, and marijuana (or
marihuana) are three names for the same plant—much as six, half-dozen,
and twice-three are three names for the same number. The entry under
“hemp” in the 1973 Encyclopaedia Britannica begins as follows: “HEMP, a
common name for Cannabis sativa, a herbaceous plant of the family
Cannabinaceae, which yields fiber, oil, and a crude narcotic drug.”59 The
article then goes on to describe the plant along with its history and various
uses, discusses “hemp as a drug plant” only briefly, and does not even
mention that growing hemp is now (and was in 1973) prohibited by law. To
learn that fact we must turn to the entry for “marijuana,” where we are
referred to the entry for “cannabis,” which begins as follows: “CANNABIS,
a genus of herbaceous plants, including, preeminently, the true hemp plant
(Cannabis sativa). The crude drug cannabis was obtained originally from
the flowering tops of hemp.”60 Most of the entry is devoted to a review of
the various international treaties, American laws, and World Health
Organization resolutions against hemp, now always referred to as
“cannabis.”
The hemp-cannabis-marijuana permutation should alert us that
underlying our attitudes toward this plant is a powerful name game such as
we encounter in many spheres of life, from immigrants being renamed or
renaming themselves, to psychiatrists and mental patients renaming human
follies and tragedies as diseases.61 As there are “good” economic and
professional reasons for renaming sadness “clinical depression,” so there
are good reasons for renaming hemp “marijuana.” The fact is that hemp qua
hemp is one of the most useful plants known to man. During the period
between the American Colonies’ becoming the United States and the
United States’ becoming a centralized therapeutic state, hemp was widely
used for the manufacture of rope, clothing, and paper, as a source of oil, and
as a sedative drug.62

The State as Liar: Who Is Fooling Whom?

“Hypocrisy,” said La Rochefoucauld, in one of the finest French
aphorisms, “is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Like most such pithy
phrases capturing a facet of human nature in a few words, this remark can
be easily amplified. Not all vices invite hypocritical concealment equally.
For example, gluttony and miserliness are vices, but their practitioners are
rarely, if ever, hypocrites. They do not make careers out of preaching
against overeating and squandering money, while secretly gorging
themselves with food and dissipating their assets. Persons who make
careers out of preaching against drugs, however, often engage secretly in
the very activities they rail against in public.
While hypocrisy pervades the human condition, it thrives best where we
find laws whose ostensible aim is to protect individuals from themselves
rather than from other people, and where the lawmakers claim they want to
provide treatment for patients who get diagnosed by being arrested. Thus,
formerly, hypocrisy was most flagrant where the authorities set out to
protect people from sexual misbehavior. In this century, hypocrisy has been
rampant in both communist and capitalist societies, the duplicity
characteristic of each system reflecting the dominant ideology’s phobic-
prohibited target: self-employment and private property in communism;
self-medication and private drug trade in capitalist therapeutism.
In Soviet society (to date), hypocrisy pervades economic life and
relations: If the state employs you and pays you, you are a patriotic worker
—a member of the proletariat—who deserves his income, regardless of how
unproductive or useless you are; whereas if you are self-employed and
people pay you out of their own pockets because you give them something
they want, then you are an unpatriotic profiteer who deserves to be
punished by the state for your “obscene profits.”63 This outlook on life and
the policy it engenders rest on a Marxist imagery that idolizes the
communist state as benevolent parent, and demonizes the individual
entrepreneur as a selfish, antisocial person whose sole interest in life is to
enrich himself and impoverish everyone else. The result is the politicization
of access to goods and services—the political elite living in luxury, and
everyone else effectively deprived of ordinary goods and services cheaply
and legally for sale in noncommunist countries.
In American society, hypocrisy pervades pharmaceutical life and
relations. If the state (official medicine) certifies you as sick and gives you
drugs—regardless of whether you need them or not, whether they help you
or not, even whether you want them or not—then you are a patient
receiving treatment; but if you buy your own drugs and take them on your
own initiative—because you feel you need them or, worse, because you
want to give yourself peace of mind or pleasure—then you are an addict
engaged in drug abuse. This outlook on life and the policy it engenders rest
on a medical imagery that idolizes the therapeutic state as benevolent
doctor, and demonizes the autonomous individual as a person who is both a
criminal and a patient and whose sole aim in life is to be high on drugs and
low on economic productivity. The result is the medicalization of drug use
—the political elite assured access to the drugs they want from their
physician-suppliers, the rest of the people denied drugs cheaply and legally
for sale in Third World countries.
 5

The Debate on Drugs:

The Lie of Legalization

The government offers to cure all the ills of mankind…. All that
is needed is to create some new government agencies and to
pay a few more bureaucrats. In a word, the tactic consists in
initiating, in the guise of actual services, what are nothing but
restrictions; thereafter, the nation pays, not for being served,
but for being disserved.
—Frederic Bastiat (1845)1

Less than a hundred years ago, Americans regarded the production,

distribution, and consumption of drugs as a fundamental right. Since then,
justices of the Supreme Court have added to our previously existing rights a
new one: the right to privacy. Remarkably, this right does not apply to
ingesting or even possessing, in the privacy of one’s own home, a drug the
government dislikes. In addition to the right to privacy, our government has
given us women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, ethnic rights, Native
American rights, prisoners’ rights, rights of the ill and disabled, the mental
patient’s right to treatment, the mental patient’s right to reject treatment, the
mental patient’s right to confinement in the least restrictive setting, and the
right to die—none of which existed before 1914.2 Then, however,
Americans had the right to buy and ingest, inhale, or inject any drug they
wanted. Clearly, the eagerness of the government to give us fake “rights” is
directly proportional to its enthusiasm for depriving us of real rights, in our
own best interest.
Why do we now lack a right we possessed in the past? Why did the
Founders take the right to drugs so much for granted that they saw no
reason even to mention it? No one asks these questions. Yet, the
pharmacological properties of drugs have not changed since the eighteenth
century; neither has the physiological reactivity of the human organism; nor
has the Constitution—which was never amended with respect to drugs, as it
had been with respect to alcohol. Why, then, does the federal government
control our access to some of mankind’s most ancient and medically most
valuable agricultural products and the drugs derived from them?
These are some of the basic questions not discussed in debates on drugs.
Why not? Because admission into the closed circle of officially recognized
drug-law experts is contingent on shunning such rude behavior. Instead, the
would-be debater of the drug problem is expected to accept, as a premise,
that it is the duty of the federal government to limit the free trade in drugs.
All that can be debated is which drugs should be controlled and how they
should be controlled.3
Like all governments, the U.S. government has always had far-reaching
powers to prohibit certain behaviors. However, at least in principle, it has
had and still has only limited legitimacy to do so. This is because the
government of the United States is supposed to be our servant, not our
master; because it is expected to treat us as adult moral agents, not as
irresponsible children or incompetent mental patients; and because we
possess our inalienable rights as persons, not as the beneficiaries of a
magnanimous state. Because the state owns no rights, it cannot give us any
rights or “legalize” any acts, whether it be practicing a deviant religion or
using a dangerous drug. In other words, American lawmakers can enact
prohibitions (“illegalize”) and can repeal prohibitions, but they cannot
legislate permissions (“legalize”).
Nevertheless, the current debate on drugs is premised on the opposite
image and vocabulary—reflecting a paternalistic, medical-statist concept of
the government. The upshot is that the supporters and critics of the War on
Drugs vie with each other in championing state control of the market in
drugs. Since we call state control of the production and distribution of
goods and services “socialism” (or “communism”), I suggest we call state
control of the production and distribution of drugs “chemical socialism (or
communism).”
Our ardent embrace of chemical communism seems to me particularly
ironic because never before in history has the issue of the market economy
versus the command economy been more sharply polarized than today;
because the ideals of the market are being betrayed not only by statist
liberals but also by conservatives, who claim to be zealous advocates of the
free market; and because the items of commerce with which the virtue of
trade is being shamelessly transformed into the wickedness of trafficking
are ordinary plants (or substances derived from them) that have been used
throughout human history. A more obvious or more stupid attempt to
reverse mankind’s greatest leap forward—symbolized by the legend of the
Fall—would be hard to imagine.
God, the Scriptures tell us, expelled Man (Adam) from the Garden. We
must grow up or suffer the consequences. This, it seems to me, is our fate as
human beings. The Drug-free Garden Nancy Reagan and William Bennett
want us to reenter is either an infantile illusion or a concentration camp of
the mind. Hitler, let us recall, neither drank nor smoked, while Churchill
spent most of his adult life with ethanol coursing through his veins, and
Roosevelt rarely posed for a photograph without a cigarette (or, more
precisely, a jauntily positioned cigarette holder) between his lips.

DRUG LAWS AND DRUG LIES

As I noted above, the current debate on drugs is premised on the
unquestioning acceptance of the legitimacy of drug laws whose avowed aim
is to protect legally competent adults from their own decisions to use
certain drugs. Supporting the repeal of such drug laws is not a legitimate
option. Drug legalization is. But what exactly do we mean by this term?

What Is a Legal Commodity?

Because we are the products of nearly a century of medical-statist
infantilization and tyrannization, our language in reference to drugs reflects
our drug control history. When bracketed with the term drug, the meaning
of the word legal has undergone the same sort of metamorphosis as has the
meaning of the word liberal.
In the nineteenth century, a liberal was a person who championed
individual liberty in a context of laissez-faire economics, who defined
liberty as the absence of coercion, and who regarded the state as an
everpresent threat to personal freedom and responsibility. Today, a liberal is
a person who champions social justice in a context of socialist economics,
who defines liberty as access to the means for a good life, and who regards
the state as a benevolent provider whose duty is to protect people from
poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs.
Similarly, in the nineteenth century, a legal object or service was
something one could purchase on the free market (for example, opium, or a
week’s stay in a hospital room), whereas an illegal object was something
one could purchase on the black market or not at all (for example,
pornographic pictures, or an abortion). Also, as I noted earlier, only selling
illegal goods and services was prohibited and punished; buying and using
them were not. Strictly speaking, then, a legal object is one we can purchase
without having to offer a reason for wanting it, and without having to obtain
permission from government bureaucrats or medical nannies for buying it.
Apricots and aspirin are legal, but amphetamines and antibiotics are not.
What do the “drug legalizers” propose? As we shall presently see, they
propose one or another scheme of state-supervised, state-funded distribution
of presently prohibited drugs. (I deliberately ignore here, as irrelevant to my
present argument, regulations controlling access to weapons, whether guns
or tanks.) However, such measures are not methods of transforming an
illegal product into a legal one; they are methods of bureaucratizing,
medicalizing, and policing the market, not of freeing it. We do not call the
postal service a “legalized” enterprise; we call it a government monopoly.
It should be noted that many so-called legalizers frankly acknowledge
that they are “medicalizers,” and even use that term. For example,
Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke believes “that addiction—all addiction
—should lead to the clinic door, not to the jailhouse door”;4 and the Drug
Policy Foundation correctly characterizes his position as an “argument for
decriminalizing and medicalizing some drugs.”5 However, an important
part of my thesis in this book is that medicalization is the problem, not the
solution.

What Is Drug Legalization?

Whether used by physicians, lawyers, journalists, or lay persons, the
term drug legalization has come to mean a “more enlightened” form of
state control of the drug market. The following proposal—put forward by
an attorney, Frederick B. Campbell—captures the legalizers’ spirit
perfectly:
Legalization would not mean that addictive drugs would be legally available to everyone.
The purpose of legalization would be to place better controls on access to such drugs.
Addiction would be recognized as a disease or physical affliction…. For nonaddicts, the
substances would remain illegal in the same way that it is now criminal to sell or use
prescription drugs without a prescription.6

This is a candid recommendation to control and criminalize the trade in

drugs by medicalizing drug distribution. Indeed, Campbell goes so far as to
repeat the classic pseudomedical canard, “Curing addicts of addiction is a
medical problem, not a law enforcement one.” Professing that platitude
enables the prohibitionist to ignore the single most important fact about
addiction qua disease, namely, that while American medical practice
(except for pediatrics and psychiatry) rests on the patient’s giving informed
consent to the doctor for treating him, addicts are not interested in being
cured of a habit they do not want to break. In Orwell’s Newspeak, war was
peace. In ours, drug medicalization is drug legalization.
The persons now characterized as drug legalizers are, in fact,
medicalizers and thus, de facto, paternalistic prohibitionists. The difference
between the covert prohibitionist (“legalizer”) and the avowed
prohibitionist (drug war advocate) is that the former wants to prohibit
different substances and punish the drug law violators less severely than the
latter. The typical legalizer thus emphasizes that marijuana is less harmful
than tobacco or that it is effective for treating glaucoma, and then maintains
that therefore its use, at least for certain purposes, should be legal.7 The
position of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as articulated by
Ira Glasser, its executive director, is illustrative: “Legalize the use of
marijuana for medical purposes. Stop enforcing the law against marijuana
users. Repeal bans on providing intravenous drug users clean needles.”8
This posture—which is purely expedient, resting on no ethical or
political principle whatever—is morally repugnant as well as practically
self-defeating.9 Its advocates acknowledge the government’s right, and
perhaps even its duty, to prohibit drugs it deems dangerous or lacking
medically rational use (as if nonprohibited drugs were not also dangerous,
and as if the notion of “medically rational use” were not a hopelessly
politicized judgment).
THE DRUG DEBATERS SPEAK
Let us briefly consider some examples of the actual statements of the
experts now engaged in the drug legalization debate.

William F. Buckley, Jr., and the National Review

Although the National Review is an ardent supporter of the free market,
a major article in the magazine advocates drug legalization under the title
“The Federal Drugstore.” This conjoining of words illustrates the
catastrophic linguistic slippage epitomized by the now conventional
coupling of the verb legalize with the noun drug.10 In the article, drug
legalization is discussed as if the term were synonymous with the sale of
psychoactive drugs in federal drugstores—an odd premise for
conservatives. In the United States, a legal product is usually sold in stores
privately owned and operated. (There are exceptions to this rule, especially
with respect to alcohol. However, to refer to gambling in states other than
Nevada and New Jersey as “legal” is a tortured and fundamentally
misleading use of the term. Lottery gaming, now legal in most states, is a
monopoly. Not coincidentally, gambling abuse has become accepted as a
bona fide disease—indeed, an addiction.)
It is also fallacious to discuss this subject as if Americans were not
interested in buying and using illegal nonpsychoactive drugs—for example,
abortifacients, antibiotics, and steroids, just to mention some. To make
matters worse, the article proposes that “profits [from federal drugstores]
would go to the treatment centers and toward more advertising of the
dangers of drug abuse, and indeed of drug consumption.”11 When selling
condoms was legalized, were they sold in federal birth control stores? Did
the profits from the sale of condoms go to federal treatment centers for
curing people from the disease of practicing birth control?

The Wall Street Journal

Although the Wall Street Journal is also a staunch defender of the free
market, with respect to drugs it, too, adopts the language of medical statism.
In a long article on drug legalization, we learn that the supporters of
legalization maintain it “would be [far better] to let people who insist on
using banned drugs obtain them from the government in a regulated fashion
rather than from thugs on the black market…. Government would use the
proceeds for anti-drug education and treatment.”12 Again, nearly every
word carries the standard baggage of medical and statist presumptions.
Specifically, repeated references to “treatment” in the report betray an
astonishingly uncritical acceptance of the view that individuals who
purchase, possess, or use illegal drugs are sick. Even in the hypothetical
context of drug legalization, with drug users presumably paying for the
drugs of their choice, the Journal continues to adhere to a statist model of
treatment. Drug treatment is always identified as a government-sponsored
and tax-supported enterprise, as if nothing else were thinkable or possible.
Which, in a sense, is true: Addicts want drugs, not treatment.

The New York Times

Not surprisingly, in the pages of the New York Times too, the term drug
legalization means state control of drugs. In a report titled “On the Question
of Legal Drugs,” Nathan Glazer, professor of sociology at Harvard, ponders
this question: “Is it possible to reduce the intensity of the war against drugs
… by some degree of legalization?”13 This is very sloppy talk. It makes
sense to speak of various degrees of criminalization, but it makes no sense
to speak of various degrees of legalization. Murder is more severely
criminalized (that is, punished) than a traffic violation; but it would be
awkward and wrong to refer to speeding as “more legal” than murder (for
they are equally illegal). Like pregnancy, prohibition is a matter of all or
nothing. A legally unenforced prohibition is a dead-letter law or a broken
promise (indirectly injuring the law-abiding citizen).
So long as Harvard professors of sociology talk this way; so long as the
editors of the National Review equate drug legalization with the sale of
drugs in federal drugstores; so long as the editors of the Wall Street Journal
do not question that the desire for illegal drugs is a disease; and so long as
the former editor in chief of the New York Times lavishes praise on Jesse
Jackson because “nobody in the country speaks with more passion and
clarity [sic] about the drug disease [sic] than this man”14—so long as these
are the representative views of our leading opinion-makers, the real
legalization of drugs in the United States (like the real legalization of farms
and factories in the Soviet Union) will remain nothing more than a foolish
fantasy fabricated by people who refuse to take seriously ideas, and the
language we use to talk about them.

Congressman Charles B. Rangel

Ostensibly opposing the legalizers, whom they accuse of being “soft on
drugs,” are the prohibitionists who pledge to stamp out the “drug plague.”
Congressman Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York and chairman of
the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, is an
exemplary drug prohibitionist. He owes much of his public visibility to his
demagogic posturings against drugs. As a professional anti-drug crusader,
Congressman Rangel has good reasons to fear a drug peace replacing his
beloved War on Drugs. Still, as a prominent black lawmaker, one might
expect him to respect the distinction between legal and illegal objects and
acts. After all, we now preach the sermon of the free market to the people of
formerly communist nations. Against that background, consider Rangel’s
use of language:
Just the thought of legalization brings up more problems and concerns than already exist….
Has anybody ever considered which narcotic and psychotropic drugs would be legalized?
… What would the market price be and who would set it? Would private industry be
allowed to have a stake in any of this? … Will the Government establish tax-supported
facilities to sell these drugs?15

Congressman Rangel has populist support and power, and those are the
things that count most in demagogic politics. Why should he know that in a
market economy there is no “who” to set prices? But if Rangel does not
understand this, or does not want to understand it, can we expect people
who vote for him to understand it? Moreover, Rangel has access to the
media, where he can explain to people that when the state does not prohibit
a substance, then its use is, ipso facto, “sanctioned by the government” and
this sends “the message that drugs are O.K.” Rangel thus maintains that we
should not criticize or debate drug prohibition, because doing so is
fundamentally subversive. “If we really want to do something about drug
abuse,” he concludes, “let’s end this nonsensical talk about legalization
right now.”16 Not for naught did Mark Twain opine that “there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”17
 Despite such warnings, William F. Buckley, Jr., invited Congressman
Rangel to participate in a television debate on “whether the United States
would be better off decriminalizing drugs.”18 With great gusto, Rangel
disposed of the question and his opponents by pointing out to the
nationwide audience that the United States could not legalize drugs even if
it wanted to, because “we are bound to honor our drug treaties.” Buckley—
who acted (or pretended to act) as if his opponent were a debater, not a
demagogue—conceded that he was unfamiliar with any such treaty and
queried, “Er, Congressman Rangel, what treaties are you referring to?”
Unflappably, Rangel replied that “there were quite a few of them,” offering
“the Psychotropic Drug Treaty of 1987” as an example. That treaty, he
patiently explained, “denies its signatories the right to market drugs except
for the public health.” After the debate was over, Buckley tells us, Rangel
was munching a sandwich when a “guest accosted him. ‘What about this
Psychotropic Drug Treaty of 1987? I never heard of it.’ Charles Rangel
leaned his head back and laughed uproariously. ‘He demanded a treaty,
didn’t he?’”19
Actually, Rangel’s memory was better than he realized. In 1988 at
Vienna, under the auspices of the United Nations, the United States was
indeed one of the signatories of a psychotropic drug treaty.20 The signing of
international drug treaties is a ceremonial affair, however, with virtually no
impact on actual policy.21 The fact that none of the debate panelists except
Rangel seemed to know anything about drug treaties, and that Rangel
himself thought he had invented a drug treaty when in fact he was citing a
real one, is indicative of the level of public discourse on what is supposedly
the most important domestic issue of the moment.

THE CASE AGAINST DRUG LEGALIZATION

As their pronouncements show, the drug legalizers’ opposition to the
drug prohibitionists is so unprincipled that it makes the differences between
the two parties illusory. Both groups accept that drugs denominated as
dangerous are dangerous, and that “drug use” is “bad.” An article in Parade
magazine, sloppily titled “Should We Legalize the Illegal?” (as if something
legal could be legalized), is illustrative. Largely devoted to a sympathetic
expounding of the confused coercive-psychiatric proposals of U.S. District
Judge Robert Sweet, the article begins with the statement that Sweet
“contends that such drugs as cocaine and heroin should be legalized and
taxed by the government…. The government also would control prices and
distribution.”22 Although Judge Sweet identifies himself as a “drug
legalizer” and is proudly paraded by the legalizers as one of their own, what
he means by legalization is even more lawless than what the prohibitionists
mean by criminalization.
My earlier observation that the aim of drug laws has undergone a
fundamental change, from protecting people from others to protecting them
from themselves, is dramatically supported by Judge Sweet’s wretched
caveat. He proposes not only that “the state set the prices of the legalized
drugs and the amounts that could be sold” and not only that “no one without
a doctor’s prescription would be able to buy a lethal dosage at one time,”23
but also that “civil-court proceedings [be used] with chronic addicts … [to
control] this conduct going to extremes.”24 It is ironic that conservative
drug legalizers should now naively hail the antilibertarian proposal to
medicalize illegal drug use championed thirty years ago by archliberal
Justice William O. Douglas. In a ringing opinion in Robinson v. California,
Douglas declared, “The addict is a sick person. He may, of course, be
confined for treatment or for the protection of society. Cruel and unusual
punishment results not from confinement, but from convicting the addict of
a crime.”25 This is how and where the support for drug legalization qua
medicalization dovetails with the support for involuntary mental
hospitalization and the deplorable psychiatric coercions that go with it.
Judge Sweet neither defines nor illustrates what sort of conduct would
justify the legal drug user’s psychiatric confinement. That exhibited by
Betty Ford? By Kitty Dukakis? By Marion Barry? Or does Judge Sweet
intend to reserve the benefits of “civil-court proceedings”—a euphemism
for psychiatric incarceration—to poor blacks and women, the favorite
beneficiaries of judges for such compassionate treatment? Evidently so, as
he asserts that “drug abuse has become an escape for those without a stake
in society”26—a demarcation that excludes VIP drug abusers such as John
F. Kennedy and Betty Ford. Revealingly, in a two-hour-long debate where
Judge Sweet proposed psychiatric imprisonment of “addicts” as his idea of
drug legalization, not a single panelist challenged him.27
 Drug Legalization: A Fresh Attack on the Market
As I have shown, professional pundits and journalists now use the term
drug legalization to mean the statist-medical control of drugs and drug
users. “The concept,” explains a reporter for U.S. News & World Report,
“goes by different names—legalization, decriminalization, or narcotics-by-
regulation. Whatever it is called, growing numbers of thinkers from both
left and right are embracing the idea that the fight against drugs should
become a treatment-based effort.”28 But how can the act of choosing to take
a drug, legal or illegal, be a disease? How can a person’s voluntarily taking
an illegal narcotic be a disease (say, “heroin addiction”), and his being
ordered by a judge or his deciding on his own to take another illegal
narcotic be a treatment (“methadone maintenance”)? (Methadone is a
strictly “controlled substance,” and hence illegal. For a discussion of the
illegality of prescription drugs, see Chapter 1.) Characteristically, Judge
Sweet recommends “making methadone available to all heroin users who
now seek it … [and] residential treatment available for anyone who meets a
certain defined level of addiction.”29 Such authoritative references to
diseases and treatments may sound as if they were facts, and we may
pretend they are facts—but they are fictions.
Legal fictions are often important facts of life. Today, we recognize that
an individual is either a five-fifths person or not a person at all. However, in
1778, when lawmakers created the fiction of three-fifths persons and
inscribed it into the Constitution, people behaved (when it suited their
purposes) as if they believed in the reality of such fractional human beings.
Now, our lawmakers create the fiction of drug
(abuse/addiction/dependency) treatment, and the phrase does yeoman
service coercing both drug law offenders and drug law obeyers—the
former, to submit to medically sanctioned deprivations of liberty, called
“treatment”; the latter, to submit to therapeutically sanctioned expropriation
of their labor, called “taxation.” During the past ten years alone, federal
expenditures on the War on Drugs have grown from about $1 billion to
more than $10 billion, “enabling 200,000 more people to be treated.”30 It
matters not that “drug treatment” is a fakery compared to which Prince
Potemkin’s villages were real. We cling more stubbornly to the belief that
the drug market must be under state control than the Soviets cling to the
belief that the housing market must be under such control. The following
plea by public radio storyteller Garrison Keillor is illustrative:
Tobacco is an obscene branch of capitalism, and so is liquor, and our society would be well
served if Congress made the private production of tobacco and liquor illegal and the
government bought the distilleries and factories for book value and manufactured these
goods as a public service…. If you ever visit the Stalinist keep of East Germany [this was
written in December 1989], you’ll find that the buildings are dreadful, the shops forlorn,
the clothing shabby … but the cigarettes and alcohol are really okay, about as good as
anywhere else…. In the field of information and ideas, a free enterprise system seems to
work, but it’s terrible in the field of addictive substances. Nationalize Philip Morris.31

Where Garrison Keillor—who enjoyed smoking cigarettes (I assume

American cigarettes) for twenty-three years—gets his facts is a mystery. It
is common knowledge that, in the Soviet Union, American cigarettes are a
more useful currency than rubles. The claim that cigarettes in the Soviet
bloc are “about as good as anywhere else” is every bit as silly as the pre-
Gorbachev claim that the communist economic system is superior to the
capitalist market system.
The sobering truth is that, although socialism has been discredited in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we still look to it for our salvation
from what we call “drugs”—or, for special effect, “crack.” Declares
Jefferson Morley, a respected journalist: “Crack is a nightmare microcosm
of capitalist society.”32 Such remarks, soberly made by thoughtful persons,
indicate how profoundly we in America have lost faith in ourselves and
look to a therapeutic state to protect us from our own inclinations.

Ethan Nadelmann: Legalization as Taxation

The views of the mainline drug legalizers generally conform to the
pattern I have described. For example, Ethan Nadelmann—assistant
professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a
vigorous spokesman for “drug legalization”—candidly acknowledges that
he uses this term to describe a program of more, not less, government
control over drugs. In an interview in Mother Jones magazine, Nadelmann
explains,
But one thing we can’t afford is to have tobacco companies come to dominate the
marijuana business. We can’t afford to have pharmaceutical companies come to dominate
 the cocaine business…. Look at alcohol advertising. That’s pushing…. I’d like to see the
federal tax on tobacco and alcohol doubled or tripled.33

As if he feared that his statist credentials might be endangered by his

nominal advocacy of “legalization,” Nadelmann never tires of emphasizing
that he wants to expand, not reduce, the government’s powers to control
drug use. Still responding to the question “How to legalize?” he explains,
Let’s say we decide, okay, we’re not going to legalize crack; what we will do is legalize 15-
percent cocaine…. Yes, some people are still going to want to go to the black market …
and buy crack. You won’t be able to prevent that. But let’s say 70 percent of the market will
be using the legal, less potent substance. That’s good, because the government taxes it,
regulates it…. The object is to undercut the criminal element.34

Undercutting the criminal element is a far cry from seriously engaging

the problem of drug controls, including especially prescription laws—a
subject Nadelmann conveniently avoids.35

Eric Sterling: Chemical Statism Über Alles

Another prominent drug legalizer, Eric Sterling—president of the
Washington-based Criminal Justice Policy Foundation—is interested in
enriching Big Brother, not in empowering “little brother.” Conceptualizing
the legalization of outlawed drugs as “harm management,” Sterling favors
“a ban on all drug advertisements, ranging from illegal narcotics to alcohol,
tobacco, and even everyday household drugs such as aspirin.”36 This puts
the differences between the legalizer and the libertarian squarely before us.
The former is interested in the person who wants to make a profit by
advertising a legal product; the latter is interested in the free and
responsible individual who wants to be in control of his own drug use. The
former seeks to curtail the economic opportunities of black-market
entrepreneurs by expanding the scope and power of the state; the latter
seeks to expand the liberty and responsibility of the individual qua actual or
potential drug user. It is unfortunate, but not unexpected, that drug
prohibitionists of all types now couch their arguments and conceal their
positions in deceitful euphemisms. But, then, these are the 1990s. In Eastern
Europe, communists call themselves democratic socialists; in the United
States, chemical communists call themselves drug legalizers.
 Lester Grinspoon: Taxing Harmfulness
Americans now fear drugs, their children, and even themselves, and look
to doctors for protection. Official drug prohibitionists and liberal drug
legalizers alike have seized on these weaknesses and have exploited them,
their not-so-hidden agenda being to gain political influence. The
psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, a leading advocate of drug legalization,
pursues political respectability by packaging drug legalization as a program
for combating other people’s bad habits.
Donning the mantle of the commander in chief of a command drug-
economy, Grinspoon proposes that the government legalize drugs and
impose a “harmfulness tax” on them: “[Each drug] would be taxed at a rate
that reflects its cost to society, such as direct health care costs and loss in
productivity…. The ‘harmfulness tax’ could be established in phases,
beginning with alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana.”37 The message is clear:
Control marijuana less, and tobacco more. What also remains unmentioned
in debates on drug legalization is that all loyal liberal-despotic psychiatrists
—Grinspoon among them—believe in forcing some of the most toxic drugs
in our pharmacopoeia down the throats of the most helpless people in the
country, rationalizing coercive drugging as the “drug treatment of
psychotics.”38 Grinspoon never suggests a harmfulness tax for Haldol.
Blind to the pervasive—public as well as professional—ambivalence
toward recreational drug use, and unwilling to see politicians as corrupt
rather than caring, Grinspoon has a near-perfect record of mistaken social
diagnoses and erroneous prognoses of drug policies. For example, in 1977
he stated,
Now that marihuana has become so popular among middle-class youth, we are more
willing to investigate its therapeutic value seriously; recreational use is spurring medical
interest instead of medical hostility. If the trend continues, it is likely that within a decade
marihuana will be sold in the United States as a legal intoxicant. Even before that,
cannabis-derived compounds … will be available to physicians as prescription drugs.39

We are now well past 1987; marijuana is more strictly prohibited than
when Grinspoon offered his prediction; and, in general, the recreational
drug scene is the exact opposite of what he predicted.40 On February 12,
1990, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates repealed its
eighteen-year-old policy endorsing the decriminalization of simple
possession of marijuana by users, noting that “marijuana and other harmful
drugs … have become one of the nation’s most serious and growing public
health problems.”41
Lastly, Grinspoon’s intense anti-capitalist bias makes him completely
misinterpret my own continuing critique of drug controls. Unable or
unwilling to understand argument based on principle rather than on
circumstance, he attributes the motivation of my views to “a general loss of
respect for established institutions,” and criticizes Ceremonial Chemistry’s
advocacy of a free market in drugs as “socially ineffectual because of its
purely negative content. It defines no positive social function or role for
drugs and therefore will probably gain no political constituency.”42

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Legalizers

Astute defenders of our drug laws have quickly seized on the fatal
weaknesses in the legalizers’ proposals. The counter-critics have focused
attention on three specific issues on which the legalizers’ position is
hopelessly flawed: (1) the inconsistency in permitting the sale of illicit
drugs while continuing the prohibition of prescription drugs; (2) the
dilemma of the drug manufacturers’ liability for the behavior of drug users
who injure themselves or others, ostensibly as a result of their drug use; and
(3) the problem of suicide, facilitated by access to hitherto illegal drugs.
“Could heroin, cocaine, and speed be sold over the counter like alcohol
and cigarettes,” asks James B. Jacobs, “while Valium, sleeping pills, some
cough medicines, and antibiotics remain available only on doctor’s
prescription?”43 Posed rhetorically, his question demonstrates the
mindlessness of the legalizers, not the moral legitimacy of drug prohibitions
generally or of prescription drug laws in particular.
“Exempting hard drugs from regulation,” David C. Anderson cogently
points out, “would also increase, perhaps prohibitively, the manufacturer’s
liability for suicides, overdoses, and any injuries traceable to drug abuse.”44
This, too, is true. However, it illustrates only the absurdities to which our
stubborn adherence to the medical model of drug abuse and suicide has led
us. There is no more reason to hold Eli Lilly responsible for a person’s
abusing Seconal or killing himself with it, than there is to hold Exxon liable
for a person’s abusing gasoline by using it to start a fire for his barbecue or
his immolating himself with it. The reason why Lilly is more vulnerable
than Exxon is because there is no free market in Seconal as there is in
gasoline, and because we regard a sleeping pill as a therapeutic drug rather
than as an ordinary commercial product. It is also true, as Anderson adds,
that “warning labels probably would not sufficiently protect the
producers.”45 Again, this illustrates the enormous power of our anti-drug,
anti-responsibility, pro-psychiatry social climate, and proves only that the
so-called drug problem cannot be wrenched out of its cultural and legal
context. As the Soviets cannot have a free market in goods and services
without popular support for the right to private property and without legal
respect for contract, so we cannot have a free market in drugs without
popular support for the right to drugs as property and without legal respect
for contractual relations among consenting adults engaged in the trade in
drugs.
Arguing from consequence rather than from principle, the drug
legalizers’ trump card is the claim that drug prohibition does not work. But
if we argue from principle, then it is moot whether drug prohibition works,
because it is problematic what should count as its “working.” The very
existence and popularity of such a mass movement of scapegoating—
uniting a diverse people in a common hatred—may be regarded as evidence
that, simply put, it is working.
Finally, I object to a person’s defining himself as a “drug legalizer” or a
“drug anti-prohibitionist” and then inventing and proposing fresh schemes
to “deal with” drug users as deviant Others. The moral essence of the drug
anti-prohibitionist program, as I would interpret it, must be the elimination
of the legal distinction between the rights and duties of those who use legal
drugs, such as coffee, and those who use illegal drugs, such as cocaine.
Unlike the current crop of self-styled drug anti-prohibitionists, the real anti-
prohibitionists of yore—the men and women who fought against the
prohibition of the self-ownership of blacks, called “slavery”—kept their
eyes on the ball. Convinced that slavery was wrong, their aim was to free
the slaves, not to find new justifications for imposing unwanted “help” on
them.
All this is contrary to the drug legalizers’ view. Declares the National
Drug Policy Network, an organization formally dedicated to drug
legalization:
This war is doomed to fail. We need a comprehensive public health approach to drug policy
that incorporates the abuse of alcohol and tobacco—the real drug killers in our society—
and focuses tax dollars on proven education and prevention strategies…. The President’s
 drug strategy is silent on the AIDS crisis among injecting addicts. It is silent on the need to
build healthy children and healthy families in our inner cities. It is silent about the
desperate need for prenatal and early childhood development programs, literacy and job-
training opportunities.46

Whether this socialist program is a gospel of salvation or damnation is

beside the point; the point is that it has nothing to do with the effort to
repeal drug prohibition. Let us remember that the Twenty-first Amendment
did not set out to help (much less treat) alcoholics—not because helping
alcoholics is not a laudable enterprise, but because it is not pertinent to the
repeal of a criminal law. Forging a link between the repeal of a criminal
statute and the (compulsory) treatment of persons who use the legalized
substance is one of the most sinister features of the therapeutic state. It
should also be a clear warning of the reformers’ true intentions, and serve
as a foretaste of the consequences of their reforms.
 6

Blacks and Drugs:

Crack as Genocide

Crack is genocide, 1990’s style.

—Cecil Williams1

No one can deny that, in the tragicomedy we call the War on Drugs, blacks
and Hispanics at home and Latin Americans abroad play leading roles:
They are (or are perceived to be) our principal drug abusers, drug addicts,
drug traffickers, drug counselors, drug-busting policemen, convicts
confined for drug offenses, and narco-terrorists. In short, blacks and
Hispanics dominate the drug abuse market, both as producers and as
products.
I am neither black nor Hispanic and do not pretend to speak for either
group or any of its members. There is, however, no shortage of people,
black and white, who are eager to speak for them. Which raises an
important question, namely: Who speaks for black or Hispanic Americans?
Those persons, black or white, who identify drugs—especially crack—as
the enemy of blacks? Or those who cast the American state—especially its
War on Drugs—in that role? Or neither, because the claims of both are
absurd oversimplifications and because black Americans—like white
Americans—are not a homogeneous group but a collection of individuals,
each of whom is individually responsible for his own behavior and can
speak for himself?

BLACK LEADERS ON DRUGS

 For the mainline black drug warrior, illegal drugs represent a temptation
that African-Americans are morally too enfeebled to resist. This is what
makes those who expose them to such temptation similar to slaveholders
depriving their victims of liberty. After years of sloganeering by anti-drug
agitators, the claim that crack enslaves blacks has become a cliché,
prompting the sloganeers to escalate their rhetoric and contend that it is
genocide.

Crack as Genocide, Crack as Slavery

The assertion that crack is genocide is a powerful and timely metaphor
we ought to clarify, lest we get ourselves entangled in it. Slavery and
genocide are the manifestations and the results of the use of force by some
people against some other people. Drugs, however, are inert substances
unless and until they are taken into the body; and, not being persons, they
cannot literally force anyone to do anything. Nevertheless, the claim that
black persons are “poisoned” and “enslaved” by drugs put at their disposal
by a hostile white society is now the politically correct rhetoric among
black racists and white liberals alike. For example, New York Times
columnist A. M. Rosenthal “denounces even the slightest show of tolerance
toward illegal drugs as an act of iniquity deserving comparison to the
defense of slavery.”2 Of course, people who want to deny the role of
personal agency and responsibility often make use of the metaphor of
slavery, generating images of people being enslaved not only by drugs but
also by cults, gambling, poverty, pornography, rock music, or mental
illness. Persons who use drugs may, figuratively speaking, be said to be the
“victims” of temptation, which is as far as one can reasonably carry the
rhetoric of victimology. However, this does not prevent Cecil Williams, a
black minister in San Francisco, from claiming,
The crack epidemic in the United States amounts to genocide…. The primary intent of 200
years of slavery was to break the spirit and culture of our people…. Now, in the 1990’s, I
see substantial similarities between the cocaine epidemic and slavery…. Cocaine is foreign
to African-American culture. We did not create it; we did not produce it; we did not ask for
it.3

If a white person made these assertions, his remarks could easily be

interpreted as slandering black people. Being enslaved is something done to
a person against his will, while consuming cocaine is something a person
does willingly; equating the two denigrates blacks by implying that they
are, en masse, so childish or weak that they cannot help but “enslave”
themselves to cocaine. Williams’s remark that cocaine is foreign to black
culture and hence destructive compounds his calumny. Rembrandt’s art,
Beethoven’s music, and Newton’s physics are also foreign to black culture.
Does that make them all evils similar to slavery?
Another black minister, the Reverend Cecil L. Murray of Los Angeles,
repeats the same theme but uses different similes. He refers to drugs as if
they were persons and asserts that “drugs are literally killing our people.”4
Like other anti-drug agitators, Murray is short on facts and reasoning, and
long on bombast and scapegoating. He excoriates proposals to legalize
drugs, declaring, “This is a foul breach of everything we hold sacred. To
legalize it, to condone it, to market it—that is to put a healthy brand on
strychnine…. [W]e cannot make poison the norm.”5
By now, everyone knows that cigarettes kill more people than illegal
drugs. But the point needs to be made again here. “Cigarette smoking,”
writes Kenneth Warner, a health care economist, “causes more premature
deaths than do all of the following together: acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome, heroin, alcohol, fire, automobile accidents, homicide, and
suicide.”6 Many of the conditions Warner lists affect blacks especially
adversely. Both smoking and obesity are unhealthy (“poisonous”) but
“legal” (not prohibited by the criminal law), yet neither is regarded as the
“norm.”

Up with Hope, Down with Dope

The Reverend Jesse Jackson is not only a permanent presidential
candidate, but is also A. M. Rosenthal’s favorite drug warrior. Jackson’s
trademark incantation goes like this: “Up with hope, down with dope.”
Better at rhyming than reasoning, Jackson flatly asserts—no metaphor here,
at least none that he acknowledges—that “drugs are poison. Taking drugs is
a sin. Drug use is morally debased and sick.”7 Poison. Sin. Sickness.
Jackson the base rhetorician refuses to be outdone and keeps piling it on:
“Since the flow of drugs into the U.S. is an act of terrorism, antiterrorist
policies must be applied…. If someone is transmitting the death agent to
Americans, that person should face wartime consequences. The line must
be drawn.”8
 It certainly must. The question, however, is this: Where should we draw
it? I believe we ought to draw it by categorizing free trade in agricultural
products (including coca, marijuana, and tobacco) as good, and dumping
toxic wastes on unsuspecting people in underdeveloped countries as bad;9
by recognizing the provision of access to accurate pharmacological
information as liberating drug education, and rejecting mendacious
religiomedical bombast as lamentable political and racial demagogy.

Mayor Marion Barry as Drug Hero

In former days, moral crusaders—specially men of the cloth—thundered
brimstone and hellfire at those who succumbed to temptation, typically of
the flesh. Why? Because in those benighted pre-Freudian days, moral
authorities held people responsible for their behavior. Not any more. And
certainly not Jesse Jackson vis-à-vis prominent blacks who use illegal
drugs. Foreign drug traffickers are responsible for selling cocaine.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry is not responsible for buying and
smoking it. After the mayor was properly entrapped into buying cocaine
and was videotaped smoking it, Jackson pontificated, “Now all of America
can learn from the mayor’s problems and his long journey back to health.”10
A remarkable disease, this illegal drug use, U.S.A, anno Domini 1990:
Caused by being arrested by agents of the state; cured by a “program”
provided by agents of the state; its course a “journey”; its prognosis—
known with confidence even by priest-politicians without any medical
expertise—a return “back to health.”
Shamelessly, Jackson used Barry’s arrest as an occasion not only for
sanctifying the defendant (as if he were accused of a civil rights violation)
but also for promoting his own political agenda. A priori, the defendant was
a good and great man, “entering the Super Bowl of his career.” His accuser
—the U.S. government—was, a priori, an evil “political system that can
only be described as neocolonial.” While thus politicizing drugs, Jackson
impudently inveighs against his own practice. “Circumstances like these,”
he babbles, “remind us that the war on drugs … should not be politicized. It
is primarily a moral crusade, about values and about health and sickness.”
Having unburdened himself of his pearls of wisdom about politics, moral
values, and sickness and health, Jackson comes to his main point: “Behind
these gruesome statistics lies the powerlessness of the people who live in
the shadow of a national government from which they are structurally
excluded. Now more than ever, it is time to escalate the effort to gain
statehood and self-government for the district”—and elect Jesse Jackson
senator-for-life-or-until-elected-president. Should we not expect political
self-government to be preceded by personal self-government, as it normally
is in progressing from disfranchised childhood to enfranchised adulthood?
Jackson’s envy of and thirst for the power of whites is clear enough. His
contention that blacks in Washington, D.C., sell, buy, and use illegal drugs
because they are “powerless” is thus but another instance of a drug
warrior’s fingering a scapegoat in the guise of offering an explanation.
Is Jackson, one of our most prominent anti-drug agitators, trying to
protect black Americans from drugs or is he trying to promote his own
career? Unlike the Black Muslims committed to an ideology of self-help,
self-reliance, and radical separatism, Jackson is playing on the white man’s
turf, trying to gain power by the “enemy’s” methods and rules. The War on
Drugs presents him, as it presents his white counterparts, with the perfect
social problem: Here is an issue on which Jesse Jackson can join—on
common ground, shoulder to shoulder—not only such eminent white
liberal-democrats as Mario Cuomo and Kitty Dukakis, but also such
eminent white conservative-Republicans as Nancy Reagan and William
Bennett. Indeed, on what other issue besides drugs could Jesse Jackson and
Nancy Reagan—one a black militant struggling up the social ladder, the
other a white conservative standing on its top rung—agree? As
pharmacological agents, dangerous drugs may indeed be toxic for the body
anatomic of the individuals who use them; but as a propaganda tool,
dangerous drugs are therapeutic for the body politic of the nation, welding
our heterogeneous society together into one country and one people,
engaged in an uplifting, self-purifying, moral crusade.

THE WAR ON DRUGS: A WAR ON BLACKS

A Martian who came to earth and read only what the newspaper
headlines say about drugs would never discover an interesting and
important feature of America’s latest moral crusade, namely, that its
principal victims are black or Hispanic. (I must add here that when I use the
word victim in connection with the word drug, I do not refer to a person
who chooses to use a drug and thus subjects himself to its effects, for good
or ill. Being his own poisoner—assuming the drug has an ill effect on him
—such a person is a victim in a metaphoric sense only. In the conventional
use of the term, to which I adhere, a literal or real victim is a person
unjustly or tragically deprived of his life, liberty, or property, typically by
other people—in our case, as a result of the criminalization of the free
market in drugs.)
However, were the Martian to turn on the television to watch the evening
news, or look at a copy of Time or Newsweek, he would see images of drug
busts and read stories about drug addicts and drug treatment programs in
which virtually all of the characters are black or Hispanic. Occasionally,
some of the drug-busting policemen are white. But the drug traffickers,
drug addicts, and drug counselors are virtually all black or Hispanic.
Carl Rowan, a syndicated columnist who is black, finally spoke up.
“Racist stereotypes,” he correctly pointed out, “have crippled the minds of
millions of white Americans.”11 Then, rather selectively, Rowan
emphasized that “white prejudice on this point has produced a terrible
injustice,” but chose to remain discreetly silent about the fact that black
leaders are the shock troops in this anti-black drug war. “Blacks,”
complained Rowan, “are being arrested in USA’s drug wars at a rate far out
of proportion to their drug use.” According to a study conducted by USA
Today, blacks comprise 12.7 percent of the population and make up 12
percent of those who “regularly use illegal drugs”; but of those arrested on
drug charges in 1988, 38 percent were blacks.12
Other studies indicate that blacks represent an even larger proportion of
drug law violators/victims. For example, according to the National Institute
on Drug Abuse (NIDA, the leading federal agency on drug abuse research),
“Although only about 12% of those using illegal drugs are black, 44% of
those who are arrested for simple possession and 57% of those arrested for
sales are black.”13 Another study, conducted by the Washington-based
Sentencing Project, found that while almost one in four black men of age
20–29 were in jail or on parole, only one in sixteen white men of the same
age group were.14 Clarence Page dramatized the significance of these
figures by pointing out that while 610,000 black men in their twenties are in
jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system, only 436,000 are
in college.15 “Just as no one is born a college student,” commented Page,
“no one is born a criminal. Either way, you have to be carefully taught.”16
 Page does not say who is teaching blacks to be criminals, but I will: The
economic incentives intrinsic to our drug laws. After all, although black
Americans today are often maltreated by whites, and are in the main poorer
than whites, they were more maltreated and were even poorer fifty or a
hundred years ago, yet fewer young black males chose a criminal career
then than do now. This development is far more dangerous for all of us,
black and white, than all the cocaine in Colombia. “Under the nation’s
current approach,” a feature report in the Los Angeles Times acknowledges,
“black America is being criminalized at an astounding rate.”17
Nevertheless, the black community enthusiastically supports the War on
Drugs. George Napper, director of public safety in Atlanta, attributes this
attitude to “black people … being more conservative than other people.
They say: ‘To hell with rights. Just kick ass and take names.’”18 Father
George Clements, a Catholic priest who has long been in the forefront of
the struggle against drugs in Chicago’s black communities, exemplifies this
posture: “I’m all for whatever tactics have to be used. If that means they are
trampling on civil liberties, so be it.”19 The black leadership’s seemingly
increasing contempt for civil liberties is just one of the disastrous
consequences of drug prohibition. The drug war’s impact on poor and
poorly educated blacks is equally alarming and tragic. Instead of looking to
the free market and the rule of law for self-advancement, the War on Drugs
encourages them to look to a race war—or a lottery ticket—as a way out of
their misfortune.

Drug Prohibition: Pouring Fuel on the Fire of Racial Antagonism

Clearly, one of the unintended consequences of drug prohibition—far
more dangerous to American society than drugs—has been that it has fueled
the fires of racial division and antagonism. Many American blacks (whose
views white psychiatrists would love to dismiss as paranoid if they could,
but happily no longer can) believe that the government is “out to get them”
and the War on Drugs is one of its tools: A “popular theory [among blacks]
is that white government leaders play a pivotal role in the drug crisis by
deliberately making drugs easily available in black neighborhoods.”20
Another consequence of our drug laws (less unintended perhaps) has been
that while it is no longer officially permissible to persecute blacks qua
blacks, it is permissible to persecute them qua drug law violators. Under the
pretext of protecting people—especially “kids”—from dangerous drugs,
America’s young black males are stigmatized en masse as drug addicts and
drug criminals. The possibility that black youths may be more endangered
by society’s drug laws than by the temptation of drugs surely cannot be
dismissed out of hand. It is an idea, however, that only those black leaders
who have shaken off the shackles of trying to please their degraders dare to
entertain. Thus we now find the Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan
articulating such a view, much as the martyred Malcolm X did a quarter of a
century ago. “There is,” says Farrakhan, “a war being planned against black
youth by the government of the United States under the guise of a war
against drugs.”21 I suspect few educated white persons really listen to or
hear this message, just as few listened to or heard what Malcolm X said.
And of those who hear it, most dismiss it as paranoid. But paranoids too can
have real enemies.
The U.S. Customs Service acknowledges that, to facilitate its work in
spotting drug smugglers, the service uses “drug courier” and “drug
swallower” profiles developed in the 1970s. Critics have charged that “one
characteristic that most of those detained have in common is their race.
‘The darker your skin, the better Your chances,’ said Gary Trichter, a
Houston defense lawyer who specializes in such cases.”22 In a ruling
handed down on April 3, 1989, the Supreme Court endorsed the
government’s use of drug profiles for detaining and questioning airline
passengers. Although the Court’s ruling addressed only airports, the profiles
are also used on highways, on interstate buses, and in train stations. In
addition, the Customs Service is authorized to request the traveler, under
penalty of being detained or not allowed to enter the country, to submit to
an X-ray examination to determine if he has swallowed a condom
containing drugs. “In Miami, of 101 X-rays, 67 found drugs. In New York,
of 187 X-rays, 90 yielded drugs. In Houston … 60 people were X-rayed
[and] just 4 were found to be carrying drugs.”23 Although the profiles have
proved to be of some value, this does not justify their use unless one
believes that the government’s interest in finding and punishing people with
illegal drugs in their possession deserves more protection than the
individual’s right to his own body.
What do the statistics about the people stopped and searched on the basis
of drug profiles tell us? They reveal, for example, that in December 1989 in
Biloxi, Mississippi, of fifty-seven stops on Interstate 10, fifty-five involved
Hispanic or black people.24 On a stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike where
less than 5 percent of the traffic involved cars with out-of-state license
plates driven by black males, 80 percent of the arrests fitted that
description. Topping the record for racially discriminatory drug arrests is
the drug-interdiction program at the New York Port Authority Bus
Terminal, where 208 out of 210 persons arrested in 1989 were black or
Hispanic.25 Still, the anti-drug bureaucrats insist that “the ratio of arrests
reflected a ‘reality of the streets,’ rather than a policy of racial
discrimination.”26
However, in January 1991 Pamela Alexander, a black judge in
Minnesota, ruled that the state’s anti-crack law—which “calls for a jail term
for first-time offenders convicted of possessing three grams of crack, but
only probation for defendants convicted of possessing the same amount of
powdered cocaine”—discriminated against blacks and was therefore
unconstitutional.27 Her ruling focuses on the fact that crack cocaine and
powdered cocaine are merely two different forms of cocaine, and that
blacks tend to use the former, and whites the latter. The law thus addresses a
difference in customs, not a difference in drug effects. “Drug policy,” Judge
Alexander concluded, “should not be set according to anything less than
scientific evidence.” Unfortunately, this is a very naive statement. There is
no scientific basis for any of our “drug policies”—a term that, in this
context, is a euphemism for prohibiting pharmaceutical and recreational
drugs. Warning people about the risks a particular drug poses is the most
that science can be made to justify.
In any case, science has nothing to do with the matter at hand, as the
contention of the drug enforcers illustrates. Their rejoinder to Judge
Alexander’s ruling is that “crack is different.”28 In what way? “The stuff is
cheap and … affordable to kids in the school yard who can’t afford similar
amounts of powdered cocaine.” Behind this pathetic argument stand some
elementary facts unfamiliar to the public and denied by the drug warriors.
Simply put, crack is to powdered cocaine as cigarettes are to chewing
tobacco. Smoking introduces drugs into the body via the lungs; snorting and
chewing, via the nasal and buccal mucosae. Different classes tend to display
different preferences for different drugs. Educated persons (used to) smoke
cigarettes and snort cocaine; uneducated persons chew tobacco and smoke
crack. (This generalization is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the United
States, though much less in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, smoking
cigarettes is becoming a lower-class habit.) These facts make a mockery of
the Minnesota legislators’ disingenuous denunciation of Judge Alexander’s
decision: “The one thing we never contemplated was targeting members of
any single minority group.” It remains to be seen whether the Minnesota
Supreme Court, to which the case was appealed, will uphold punishing
crack smokers more severely than cocaine snorters.
The enforcement of our drug laws with respect to another special
population—namely, pregnant women—is also shamefully racist. Many
state laws now regard the pregnant woman who uses an illegal drug as a
criminal—not because she possesses or sells or uses a drug, but because she
“delivers” it to her fetus via the umbilical cord. Ostensibly aimed at
protecting the fetus, the actual enforcement of these laws lends further
support to the assumption that their real target is the unwed, inner-city,
black mother. Although, according to experts, drug use in pregnancy is
equally prevalent in white middle-class women, most women prosecuted
for using illegal drugs while pregnant have been poor members of racial
minorities. “Researchers found that about 15 percent of both the white and
the black women used drugs … but that the black women were 10 times as
likely as whites to be reported to the authorities.”29

Drugs and Racism

How do the drug warriors rationalize the racism of the War on Drugs?
Partly by ignoring the evidence that the enforcement of drug laws
victimizes blacks disproportionately compared to whites; and partly by
falling back on a time-honored technique of forestalling the charge by
appointing a respected member of the victimized group to a high position in
the machinery charged with enforcing the persecutory practice. This is what
former drug czar William Bennett did when he picked Reuben Greenberg, a
black Jew, as his favorite drug cop.30 What has Greenberg done to deserve
this honor? He chose to prosecute as drug offenders the most defenseless
members of the black community. “The tactics Greenberg developed in
Charleston [South Carolina],” explained Time magazine, “are targeted on
the poorest of the poor—the residents of public-housing projects and their
neighbors…. The projects were ‘the easiest place to start, because that’s
where the victims are.’”31 Perhaps so. But, then, it must be safer—
especially for a black Jewish policeman in South Carolina—to go after
blacks in inner-city housing projects than after whites in suburban
mansions.
The evidence supports the suspicion that the professional pushers of drug
programs pander precisely to such racial prejudices, with spectacularly
hypocritical results. Consider the latest fad in addictionology: a racially
segregated drug treatment program for blacks. Because the program is
owned by blacks, is operated by blacks for blacks, and offers a service
called “drug treatment,” its owner-operators have been able to pass it off as
a fresh “culturally specific” form of therapy. If whites were to try to do this
sort of thing to blacks, it would be decried as racist segregation. When
black “former drug abusers” do it to fellow blacks, the insurance money
pours in: Soon after opening, the clinic called Coalesce was handling three
hundred patients at $13,000 a head per month—not bad pay for treating a
nonexisting illness with a nonexisting treatment.32

BLACK MUSLIMS ON DRUGS

Mainstream American blacks are Christians, who look for leadership to
Protestant priest-politicians and blame black drug use on rich whites,
capitalism, and South American drug lords. Sidestream American blacks
are Muslims, who look for leadership to Islamic priest-politicians and
maintain that drug use is a matter of personal choice and self-discipline.
The Black Muslim supporters of a free market in drugs (though they do
not describe their position in these terms) arrive at their conclusion not from
studying the writings of Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but from their
direct experience with the American therapeutic state and its punitive
agents decked out as doctors and social workers. As a result, the Black
Muslims regard statist-therapeutic meddling as diminishing the person
targeted as needing help, robbing him of his status as a responsible moral
agent, and therefore fundamentally degrading; and they see the
medicalization of the drug problem—the hypocritical defining of illegal
drug use as both a crime and a disease, the capricious law enforcement, the
economic incentives to transgress the drug laws, and the pseudotherapeutic
drug programs—as a wicked method for encouraging drug use, crime,
economic dependency, personal demoralization, and familial breakdown. I
have reviewed the enduring Black Muslim principles and policies on drugs,
as developed by Malcolm X, elsewhere.33 Here I shall summarize only
what is necessary to round out the theme I develop in this chapter.
Black Muslims demand, on moral and religious grounds, that their
adherents abstain from all self-indulgent pleasures, including drugs.
Accordingly, it would be misleading to speak of a Black Muslim approach
to the “treatment of drug addiction.” If a person is a faithful Black Muslim
he cannot be an addict, just as if he is an Orthodox Jew he cannot be a pork
eater. It is as simple as that. The Muslim perspective on drug use and drug
avoidance is—like mine—moral and ceremonial, not medical and
therapeutic. Of course, this does not mean that we come to all the same
conclusions.

Malcolm X: Triumph through Resisting Temptation

Malcolm X’s passion for honesty and truth led him to some remarkable
drug demythologizings, that is, assertions that seemingly fly in the face of
current medical dogmas about hard drugs and their addictive powers.
“Some prospective Muslims,” wrote Malcolm, “found it more difficult to
quit tobacco than others found quitting the dope habit.”34 As I noted, for
Muslims it makes no difference whether a man smokes tobacco or
marijuana; what counts is the habit of self-indulgence, not the
pharmacomythology of highs or kicks. Evidently, one good mythology per
capita is enough: If a person truly believes in the mythology of Black
Muslimism—or Judaism, or Christianity—then he does not need the ersatz
mythology of medicalism and therapeutism.
The Muslims emphasize not only that addiction is evil, but also that it is
deliberately imposed on the black man by the white man. “The Muslim
program began with recognizing that color and addiction have a distinct
connection. It is no accident that in the entire Western Hemisphere, the
greatest localized concentration of addicts is in Harlem.”35 The monkey on
the addict’s back is not the abstraction of drug addiction as a disease, but
the concrete reality of Whitey. “Most black junkies,” explains Malcolm,
“really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the
white man’s America.”36 By politicizing personal problems (defining self-
medication with narcotics as political oppression), the Muslims neatly
reverse the psychiatric tactic of personalizing political problems (defining
psychiatric incarceration as hospitalization).
 Because for Muslims drug use—legal or illegal—is not a disease, they
have no use for pretentious drug treatment programs, especially if they
consist of substituting one narcotic drug for another (methadone for heroin).
Instead, they rely on breaking the drug habit by expecting the drug user to
quit “cold turkey.” The ordeal this entails helps to dramatize and ritualize
the addict’s liberation from Whitey. “When the addict’s withdrawal sets in,”
explains Malcolm, “and he is screaming, cursing and begging, ‘Just one
shot, man!’ the Muslims are right there talking junkie jargon to him, ‘Baby,
knock that monkey off your back! … Kick Whitey off your back!’”37
Ironically, what Black Muslims tell their adherents is not very different
from what white doctors told each other at the beginning of this century. In
1921, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Alfred
C. Prentice, M.D.—a member of the Committee on Narcotic Drugs of the
American Medical Association—rejected “the shallow pretense that drug
addiction is a ‘disease’… [a falsehood that] has been asserted and urged in
volumes of ‘literature’ by self-styled ‘specialists.’”38
Malcolm X wore his hair crew-cut, dressed with the severe simplicity
and elegance of a successful Wall Street lawyer, and was polite and
punctual. Alex Haley describes the Muslims as having “manners and miens
[that] reflected the Spartan personal discipline the organization
demanded.”39 While Malcolm hated the white man—whom he regarded as
the “devil”—he despised the black man who refused the effort to better
himself: “The black man in the ghettoes … has to start self-correcting his
own material, moral, and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to
start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction,
prostitution.”40
This is dangerous talk. Liberals and psychiatrists need the weak-willed
and the mentally sick to have someone to disdain, care for, and control. If
Malcolm had his way, such existential cannibals masquerading as
dogooders would be unemployed, or worse. Here, then, is the basic conflict
and contradiction between the Muslim and methadone: By making the
Negro self-responsible and self-reliant, Muslimism eliminates the problem
and with it the need for the white man and the medicine man; whereas by
making the white man and the doctor indispensable for the Negro as
permanent social cripple and lifelong patient, medicalism aggravates and
perpetuates the problem.
 Malcolm understood and asserted—as few black or white men could
understand or dared to assert—that white men want blacks to be on drugs,
and that most black men who are on drugs want to be on them rather than
off them. Freedom and self-determination are not only precious, but
arduous. If people are not taught and nurtured to appreciate these values,
they are likely to want to have nothing to do with them. Malcolm X and
Edmund Burke shared a profound discernment of the painful truth that the
state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud. Indeed,
perhaps the only thing Malcolm failed to see was that, by articulating his
views as he did, he was in fact launching a religious war against greatly
superior forces. I do not mean a religious war against Christianity. The
religious war Malcolm launched was a war against the religion of Medicine
—a faith other black leaders blindly worship. After all, blacks and whites
alike now believe, as an article of faith, that drug abuse is an illness. That is
why they demand and demonstrate for “free” detoxification programs and
embrace methadone addiction as a cure for the heroin habit. Malcolm saw
this, but I am not sure he grasped the enormity of it all. Or perhaps he did
and that is why in the end, not long before he was killed, he rejected the
Black Muslims as well—to whom, only a short while before, he gave all the
credit for his resurrection from the gutter. He converted, one more time, to
Orthodox Islam. Then he was murdered.

Do Drug Prohibitionists Protect Blacks?

Not surprisingly, drug prohibitionists systematically ignore the Black
Muslim position on drugs. Neither bureaucratic drug criminalizers nor
academic drug legalizers ever mention Malcolm X’s name, much less cite
his writings on drugs. The fact that Louis Farrakhan, the present leader of
the Nation of Islam, continues to support Malcolm X’s position on drugs
does not help to make that position more acceptable to the white
establishment.41 In characteristically statist fashion, instead of seeing drug
laws as racist, the drug prohibitionists see the absence of drug laws as
racist. If “the legalizers prevail!”—James Q. Wilson, a professor of
management and public policy at UCLA, ominously predicts—
then we will have consigned hundreds of thousands of infants and hundreds of
neighborhoods to a life of oblivion and disease. To the lives and families destroyed by
alcohol we will have added countless more destroyed by cocaine, heroin, PCP, and
 whatever else a basement scientist can invent. Human character is formed by society….
[G]ood character is less likely in a bad society.42

Virtually everything Wilson asserts here is false. Liberty is the choice to

do right or wrong, to act prudently or imprudently, to protect oneself or
injure oneself. Wilson is disingenuous in selecting alcohol and drugs as the
“destroyers” of people. And as for his implying that our present
prohibitionist mode of managing drugs has promoted the formation of
“good character”—the less said, the better.
Wilson’s argument brings us back full circle to the genocidal image of
drugs, suggested here by a prominent white academic rather than a black
pries-politician. As I observed before, this view casts the individual in a
passive role, as victim. But if there are injured victims, there must be
injuring victimizers. Wilson knows who they are: us. But he is wrong.
Opportunity, choice, temptation do not constitute victimization. Wilson
affronts the supporters of liberty by so categorizing them.
Finally, Wilson’s explanation leaves no room for why some blacks
succeed in not being consigned to what he revealingly calls “a life of
oblivion and disease.” Nor does Wilson consider the dark possibility that
there might, especially for white Americans, be a fate worse than a few
thousand blacks selling and using drugs. Suppose every black man, woman,
and child in America rejected drugs, chose to emulate Malcolm X, and
became a militant black separationist. Would that be better for American
whites, or for the United States as a nation?
 7

Doctors and Drugs:

The Perils of Prohibition

Among the remedies which it has pleased the Almighty God to

give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so
efficacious as opium.
—Thomas Sydenham, M.D. (1680)1

The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval.

—Russell Portnoy, M.D., Pain Service,
Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital (1987)2

In the days before prescription laws, when lay people had the same access
to drugs as doctors, there was no need for a person in pain to assume the
patient role, find a physician, and obtain a prescription for an analgesic. He
could simply go to a store and buy tincture of opium exactly as he now buys
aspirin. Correspondingly, there was no need for the physician to assume the
role of a medical expert whose duty is to ascertain whether the patient is
telling the truth or lying, and decide whether he truly needs an analgesic
drug, or merely wants one.
Why must lay persons and physicians now play these roles? Because the
sale, possession, and use of potent analgesics without a prescription are
illegal; and because the code of conduct of the medical profession and the
laws of the United States mandate that physicians prescribe such drugs only
to bona fide patients suffering from bona fide pain. These requirements
make the issues of who counts as a bona fide patient, and what counts as
bona fide pain, crucially important. For example, can the doctor be his own
patient? Can the doctor’s spouse or children be his patients? For the purpose
of making a diagnosis, yes; for the purpose of prescribing a controlled
substance, no.
Individuals who assume the patient role fraudulently and obtain
prescription drugs under false pretenses—for example, by exaggerating or
faking symptoms or signs of illness—are said to be guilty of prescription
drug abuse; and doctors who dispense such drugs to persons who are not
really their patients or who do not truly need the drugs are said to be guilty
of abusing the prescription laws. The result is that regulations governing
prescription writing have come to play a huge, and hugely distorting, role in
determining what drugs physicians prescribe, what drugs patients obtain
from their doctors, what drugs are sold over the counter, what drugs are
advertised and to whom, and what drugs are traded on the black (drug)
market.
Some personal recollections may be of interest in this connection. In the
1940s when I was a medical student, intern, and medical resident, cough
syrup containing codeine was available over the counter, opiates were
widely prescribed for pain, and barbiturates, bromides, and chloral hydrate
were freely dispensed for insomnia. The terms drug abuse, prescription
drug abuse, and improper prescribing habits had not yet entered our
vocabulary. More than a decade later, in the late 1950s and early 1960s—as
my daughters and I well remember—we would attend medical meetings in
Atlantic City where, along with free Coca Cola and Campbell soups,
tobacco companies handed out free samples of cigarettes by the carton, and
pharmaceutical companies dispensed free samples of Darvon, Nembutal,
and Seconal in bottles of one hundred—no prescription, no name, no
questions asked. And the physician or his wife could come back again and
again, stocking up to his or her heart’s content.

THE PERILS OF DRUG PROHIBITION

One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the
War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful
illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs
because of physicians’ well-founded fears of prescribing so-called
controlled substances. The reasons are obvious. The most effective
analgesic drugs are opiates (morphine, heroin, dilaudid, and codeine) and
methadone. The authors of the textbook of pharmacology used when I was
a medical student stated, in italics: “The opium alkaloids have no rival for
the relief of pain”; and to support this opinion, they added: “Sydenham …
remarked that without opium few physicians would be sufficiently callous
to practice therapeutics. [Sir William] Osler frequently referred to morphine
as ‘God’s own medicine.’ These statements serve to emphasize the
indispensable nature of opium alkaloids, especially for the relief of pain.”3
Practicing therapeutics without opiates, which Sydenham regarded as an
unthinkable calamity for mankind, we now regard as the political and legal
desideratum for good medical practice. Opiates are the most strictly
controlled of our controlled substances. The Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) watches doctors prescribing opiates like customs
agents watch dark-complected travelers at Kennedy Airport.

Opiophobia or Fear of the Therapeutic State?

Physicians know they cannot prescribe for pain as they used to, as they
would like to, or as their patients’ welfare requires. But they have become
so accustomed to state control of drugs that they never lay the blame for
their loss of freedom to prescribe effective painkillers, or the patients’ loss
of access to such drugs, where it belongs: at the door of drug controls. On
the contrary, they endorse drug controls (which, inter alia, make them the
beneficiaries of a state-controlled drug monopoly), and then naively cast
about for absurd explanations of the controls’ inexorable consequences.
For example, C. Stratton Hill, Jr., director of the Pain Service in the
Department of Neuro-oncology at the University of Texas in Houston,
recognizes the problem but is reluctant to reach the conclusion to which his
own experiences point. “As the tumor grows and spreads,” he writes, “the
pain becomes diffuse … and will require narcotic analgesics to control it.
[Nevertheless, physicians] fail to use them properly in such cases.” Why?
Because “physicians have developed an ‘opiophobia’ that prevents
prescribing opiates in adequate doses.”4
It is sad enough that most physicians have never heard of Ludwig von
Mises. It is sadder still that, having heard of Sigmund Freud, they mistake
manufacturing psychiatric slang for making medical progress. “This phobia
[of prescribing opiates],” declares Hill, “is like all others, not subject to
rational correction.” But Hill is wrong and he must know it. Physicians
avoid prescribing opiates because of their perfectly rational fear of being
apprehended by agents of the American drug-police state and punished by
the courts for violating the drug laws.
What does Hill propose to remedy the situation? “Educational efforts …
since it is unlikely that adequate doses of narcotics will be prescribed for
patients until the phobia is dealt with.” Like the patient’s pain, the
physician’s license constricts his view of the world. Both are so
preoccupied by their actual experiences that they have no energy or
imagination left to look around and see themselves and their situation in a
broader context and clearer light. In the end, Hill tranquilizes himself and
his readers with pious platitudes and a patriotic denunciation of the medical
miscreants: “Educational efforts must be directed to all segments of
society…. Those who divert drugs from legitimate to illegitimate use
—‘script doctors’—are criminals and should be sought out and prosecuted.”
But the vexing question remains, despite Hill’s avoidance of it: Where is
the line between legitimate and illegitimate pain, and hence between
legitimate and illegitimate drug prescribing and drug use for pain? No one
knows, and no one says. However, while the line between legitimate and
illegitimate drug prescribing and drug use may be unclear, there is nothing
unclear about what happens to people—doctors and patients alike—who
cross it. They are shot down by the border guards—the physicians, as
“script doctors”; the patients, as “drug abusers.” Examples abound,
especially among ambitious and conceited doctors who cater to VIP
patients and who often become little more than pharmaceutical pimps
procuring controlled substances for their prominent patrons. The physicians
who prescribed for President Kennedy and for Elvis Presley played such a
role and, after their patrons died, were prosecuted for it. More recently (in
September 1990), three California physicians made the news when they
were charged with “unprofessional conduct” for prescribing drugs to
Elizabeth Taylor “in amounts that exceed a legitimate medical purpose.”5
Let that be a lesson to doctors prescribing painkillers.

Monitoring Prescription Writing

Today, the physician who prescribes a controlled analgesic or hypnotic
drug (painkiller or sleeping pill) must carefully conform his prescribing
behavior to the requirements of the law. It is not enough that he issue a
controlled substance “in good faith.” He must also “examine” his patient,
and the patient must have an illness that justifies prescribing the controlled
substance. Ironically, in the past, when the habitual use of barbiturates was
not considered to be a disease, the physician who prescribed these drugs for
regular use was not persecuted and punished; whereas today, when the habit
is defined as a disease (“substance abuse”), the physician who prescribes
controlled substances for such a person is persecuted and punished. This
scenario has become so familiar that the fate of such medical miscreants
now merits no more than a brief report as a “medicolegal decision,” such as
the following.
A physician in California treated a “back surgery patient for pain.” The
patient had twice been in a drug program and his mother had told the doctor
that her son was abusing codeine and Doriden (gluthetimide, a controlled
hypnotic). The physician prescribed one hundred tablets of Tylenol with
codeine and fifty tablets of Doriden for the patient; the pharmacist reported
the doctor to the State Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; the bureau
dispatched two undercover agents to entrap the doctor; the doctor treated
both spies as if they were his patients and, without examining them, gave
each a “single prescription for 30 Tylenol with codeine.” The physician was
arrested, tried, and “convicted on five counts of unlawful prescription of
controlled substances.”6
Some years ago, when doctors first began to be persecuted and punished
for prescribing too many painkillers, there were occasional articles in
medical journals about the plight of such hapless practitioners. A report in
Medical Economics in 1984, entitled “Patients in Pain Can Put You in
Jail”—about a California physician whom “a state panel found … guilty of
prescribing too many painkillers for his patients”—was a typical story.7
Although the authorities concluded that “none of the violations were
motivated by personal profit or gain,” the doctor was “placed on probation
for seven years, with severe restrictions on his prescribing privileges.” His
legal fees at the time the article was written stood at $130,000 and were still
rising, since he was trying to appeal the verdict.
What did this doctor do wrong? According to Medical Economics,
nothing. He was simply “caught in a head-on collision between two
irreconcilable priorities—the nation’s need to control drug abuse and the
physician’s humanitarian need to treat chronic-pain patients with
compassion.”8 Pathetically, this physician tried to defend himself by
accusing the state medical authorities of not having promulgated guidelines
spelling out “precisely how much prescribing is too much, and under what
circumstances.” It did him no good. The rule of law—as scholars of liberty
have long emphasized—is precious not because it guarantees good laws,
but because it ensures that their application yields predictable results,
permitting persons to plan their actions accordingly. It is precisely this
feature that is absent in our drug laws, transforming doctors and patients
alike into drug law violators.
The vile beauty of contemporary American anti-drug politics is that the
authorities need no guidelines to recognize a drug malefactor. They know
one when they see one. William W. Tucker, an internist and past president
of the Sacramento-El Dorado Medical Society, said it well in this comment
to Medical Economics: “As the situation now stands, there are no clear
lines. It’s like being stopped for speeding. When the driver asks the
patrolman just what the speed limit is, he answers, ‘I don’t know, but you
were over it.’”9
Although the analogy between the limit for drug prescribing and the
speed limit is attractive, it fails in an important respect. The maximum
speed for driving an automobile on a particular stretch of road can be
precisely stated, and the speed with which a car travels can be objectively
measured. But neither the severity of the patient’s pain (which ostensibly
legitimizes the prescribing) nor the nature and quantity of drugs he
medically requires (which ostensibly legitimizes what the physician may
prescribe for him) can be specified in the abstract.
These considerations lead us back to one of medicine’s classic
conundrums, namely, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
pain, real and imaginary pain, physical and mental pain, organic and
psychogenic pain, pain in medical patients and pain in psychiatric patients.
Much can be, and has been, said on this interesting subject.10 For our
present purposes it is enough to emphasize that the distinction between
these two kinds of pain may be entirely strategic; in other words, the
distinction may not relate to anything in the patient at all, but may relate
instead to what the physician treating the patient says and does. The latter
phenomenon is exemplified by the fact that insurance companies pay for
prescribed analgesics, but not for over-the-counter painkillers. If the
physician prescribes ibuprofen for arthritis in 400-milligram or 600-
milligram doses, the insurance company pays for it; but if he simply tells
the patient to take it for pain, then the patient must get it in 200-milligram
doses over the counter and pay for it himself.11 Indeed, the notion that the
reality of the patient’s pain may be “validly” inferred not from examining
the patient but rather from his doctor’s response to him is officially affirmed
by the Social Security system, whose agents ascertain whether a patient’s
pain is real and severe enough to qualify him for Social Security Disability
Insurance payments by determining how his physician treats the pain:
“Prescribed medication for pain is an indicator of the credibility of the
client’s complaints.”12

Drug Controls vs. Primum Non Nocere

Nothing of what I have said so far is intended to imply that
distinguishing between painful sensations that have their source in a bodily
lesion from those that do not is unimportant. On the contrary. Making or
failing to make that distinction correctly may mean the difference between
the patient’s life and death, between his receiving or not receiving the
appropriate treatment for what ails him. My point is that we must scrutinize,
in each particular instance, why a doctor or patient wants to know what
kind of pain the patient experiences.
Typically, both doctor and patient try to make this distinction if the
patient complains about his body and if both want to discover whether there
is or is not something demonstrably wrong with the patient’s body—which
the physician may or may not be able to diagnose and remedy. Often,
however, this is not what the patient wants his physician to do for him, nor
is it what the physician would like to do for his patient. For example, a
person may have pain whose nature is no longer in doubt because a correct
diagnosis (say, of cancer of the prostate with metastases to the spinal
column) has already been made on previous examinations. Or the person
may feel pain, the doctor may be unable to determine its cause, and the
patient may simply want relief from pain. In these and similar situations,
the patient does not ask his physician to determine the anatomical source of
the patient’s pain. All he wants is relief from pain.
Faced with such a request, the doctor—like any moral agent—is free to
accept it or reject it. Either choice is perfectly legitimate. What is morally
illegitimate is the physician’s allowing himself to be seduced by economic
and political enticements into abandoning his role as healer and betraying
his ethical obligation to the patient (Primum non nocere! First of all, do no
harm!), and assuming instead the role of referee—arbitrating the conflict
between the patient who wants a powerful analgesic and the state that wants
to withhold it from him. (In psychiatry, the relationship is frequently
reversed, inverting the conflict between healer and denominated sufferer:
The state and its psychiatrist-agent want the patient to take the anti-
psychotic drug, and the [involuntary] mental patient wants to reject it. It is a
fundamental characteristic of the therapeutic state that, as a matter of
medical principle and social policy, it prevents sane adults from taking the
drugs they want, and insane adults from rejecting the drugs they do not
want.)
The doctor who assumes this Solomonic role—and most practicing
physicians do, the practical circumstances of their lives leaving them little
other choice—victimizes his client qua patient, and compromises his own
integrity as a healer. When I first addressed this dilemma almost forty years
ago, the situation was not nearly so bad as it is today. The medical
profession had not yet collectively thrown in the towel.13 In a laudatory
comment on my essay, the editor of the Journal of the Iowa State Medical
Society wrote,
As long as he [the physician] remains in his man’s corner, he can be a true physician, able
and willing to help him; but in the center of the ring, as the personification of the Rules of
the Marquis of Queensberry, of the Selective Service System, or of whatever other
authority is assumed to have jurisdiction, he is very nearly incapable of helping him at
all.14

Even back then, the physician was pulled and pushed, with
blandishments and threats, to abandon his traditional allegiance to his
patient, stop his hopeless struggle to stem the onrushing tide of the alliance
between medicine and the state, and become a double (or triple) agent—
allegedly serving the patient, actually taking orders from the state, and still
looking out mainly for himself. As more and more third parties entered into
the previously (largely) private relationship between patient and doctor—
ostensibly to protect the patient from economic and professional
exploitation by the physician, but actually to enlist the physician as an agent
of the state—the patient lost the most important means he possessed for
controlling the medical situation: his clout over the physician’s pocketbook.
Nevertheless, the illusion that the physician is primarily a doctor rather
than a detective—an agent of the patient rather than of the state—lingers
on. Indeed, how could it be shattered when we all depend on doctors to care
for us when we are ill? Thus, even when reports in the popular press
criticize the widespread practice of physicians undertreating pain, the
doctors are never blamed for it. Either no one in particular is blamed for the
suffering of the inadequately treated pain patient, or it is blamed on the
scapegoat: drug abuse. I have never seen the physicians’ fear to properly
treat pain attributed directly to our drug laws. A report in Newsweek on
cancer pain, misleadingly subtitled “Doctors Can Ease Suffering with
Drugs,” is illustrative.15 Ironically, the story was not about how doctors can
ease suffering with drugs, but about how they fail to do so. “The way we
treat pain borders on a national disgrace,” declared Dr. Charles Schuster,
head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. But the fact is that a hundred
years ago doctors had no trouble controlling pain. Now they do. How does
Newsweek explain this? By quoting the opinion of Dr. Mitchell Max,
cancer-pain specialist at the National Institutes of Health, who offers this
gem: “We treat infections, cut out tumors, set breaks in bones, but when it
comes to pain, there’s always the question of whether it’s real or not…. All
medicine is organized around what you can see.”16 There you have it.
Doctors now undertreat pain because they cannot see it. Apparently they
could see it better a hundred years ago. We are not told how or why doctors
went pain-blind.

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN THE ANTI-NARCOTIC STATE

As I described in Chapter 2, we began to lose control of the
pharmacopoeia in the early years of this century when certain drugs
classified as prescription drugs were removed from the market, and
dispensing them became a state monopoly controlled by physicians and
pharmacists.
The penultimate transformation of medical practice from a privately
entrepreneurial activity to a publicly bureaucratic one was brought about by
the convergence of three critical economic and technological changes: (1)
third-party payments for hospital and physicians’ services and drugs; (2)
new synthetic psychoactive drugs, such as Valium, replacing traditional
“natural” drugs, such as opiates; and (3) computerized monitoring of
doctors’ prescription-writing habits and patients’ prescription drug use. (I
call this the “penultimate transformation” because we have not yet taken the
ultimate step in this process: the formal nationalization of the country’s
health services.) In 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and private third-party
payers became prepotent participants in the doctor-patient relationship and
assumed an appropriately decisive role in determining what drugs and other
treatments were or were not necessary for the patient’s proper medical care.
New anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills (such as Valium and Dalmane)
offered ways of sedating patients without the use of the bad old “habit-
forming” drugs (such as bromides and barbiturates). But before long, their
use reopened the old medical-moral wound of “drug addiction,” which was
now regarded as more festering than ever. The abuse of recreational drugs
thus became a medical as well as popular concern and led to the invention
of the new disease “drug abuse,” a term that subtly transformed self-
medication into a genuine illness. Finally, the use of computers enabled
bureaucrats to keep tabs on doctors and patients alike. This intrusion
destroyed the last vestige of privacy in the medical arena and provided the
evidence necessary to punish doctors and patients if they dispensed or
consumed too many pleasure-producing drugs. Of course, before this
glorious revolution could succeed, and before the guillotine decapitating
our right to drugs could fall, the country had to be deluded into believing
that the government was about to grant people lifelong protection from the
threat of costly medical expenses, and that it will cost them nothing. It took
people a while to realize—and most people still do not realize—that the
“freedom” they gained is the freedom to be medical dependents whose
therapeutic decisions are made for them by their parentified physicians
acting as agents of the therapeutic state.

The Degradation of the Doctor-Patient Relationship

It should surprise no one that prescription laws have failed to fulfill their
original purpose and promise of curing or curbing drug (ab)use. Instead,
they have encouraged both patients and doctors to resort to indirect
behaviors that help them achieve their goals. People who want prescription
drugs have learned how to play the patient role and present the kinds of
symptoms that will secure the needed medical document. When this
(mis)behavior is detected, it is labeled “prescription drug abuse.” Similarly,
physicians who want to please and profit from serving important or indigent
persons have learned how to write prescriptions that generate grateful VIPs
or a large volume of medical visits billable to Medicaid. When this practice
is detected, the physician is stigmatized as an “overprescriber” and
punished as a “script doctor” running a “pill mill.” Instead of remedying
drug abuse, prescription drug laws have succeeded only in encouraging
deception by patients and dishonesty by doctors, thus adding new
dimensions to the drug problem.
The fact that our drug laws require people to secure a prescription for
many of the drugs they want (but cannot get on the free market) fosters a
mutually degrading dishonesty between physicians and patients, epitomized
by the prescribing of sleeping pills. The law prohibits doctors from
prescribing controlled substances to patients whom they have not examined.
The result is a colossal charade—patients, doctors, insurance companies,
and the government all pretending to believe that a person’s telling his
doctor that he cannot sleep and would like some sleeping pills may be a
bona fide disease called “insomnia”; that doctors can diagnose this disease
by distinguishing between patients who “medically” need, and patients who
“merely” want, sleeping pills; and that prescribing sleeping pills is a bona
fide medical treatment. The existential and economic importance of this
charade—just one among many generated by drug prohibition combined
with drug permission via prescriptions—cannot be overestimated. It is well
established that “symptoms of insomnia are among the most common
complaints in the doctors’ office,” and that hypnotic drugs are high on the
list of best-selling drugs.17 Accordingly, the cost saving from a free market
in sleeping pills and painkillers alone would be immense.
Why is it is necessary that we all pretend that insomnia is a disease that
only doctors can diagnose and treat? Because wanting a sleeping pill is not,
but needing it is, a “proper medical indication” for prescribing it. How does
a physician determine whether the patient suffers from the disease of
insomnia and whether it is serious enough to require treatment? By
examining him. But how can a doctor examine a person for insomnia in the
middle of the day, in the doctor’s office, when the patient is wide awake and
is waiting impatiently to get out of the office and go about his business?
Mutatis mutandis, how can a physician prevent or treat drug abuse? By
withholding controlled substances from patients he suspects of abusing
drugs; and if the patient is already abusing drugs, by switching him to a
different, supposedly non-habit-forming, drug. It does not matter that we
have been through all this before—for example, when methadone was
substituted for heroin, Dalmane for Seconal, and Valium for the older
tranquilizers.18 So now people abuse methadone and the benzodiazepines,
which addicts and patients obtain legally from clinics and doctors, and
nonpatients obtain illegally on the black market (supplied by resold or
stolen prescription drugs).
All the while, a steady stream of new psychoactive drugs—like new
Broadway plays—appear, get good reviews, then fall into disfavor and
disappear. Who still remembers Miltown? The current stars on the hit
parade of prescribed mind-altering drugs are lithium and Prozac, the latter
already coming under attack for allegedly driving people to suicide. The
catchy advertising slogan “Better living through chemistry” had clearly
captured something basic in the modern American zeitgeist, namely, our
seemingly limitless fear of and faith in drugs. The fear explains our timidity
toward opiates; the faith, our belief that the habitual use of one narcotic
(heroin) is a disease, which can be successfully treated with another
narcotic (methadone). Grounded in pharmacomythology, not pharmacology,
these fears and faiths cannot be dispelled by common sense or medical
experience. Instead, we live according to the old adage Credo quia
absurdum est (I believe it because it is absurd), which we find comforting
because the credo lifts the burden of responsibility for our bad habits from
our shoulders. Using one narcotic to cure the addict’s taking another
narcotic authenticates the doctors’ expertise about habit-forming and habit-
curing drugs, legitimizes them as pharmacological miracle workers, and
makes them steadily more indispensable as the suppliers of new controlled
substances. Rufus King was right—but no one listened to him—when he
denounced the original Dole-Nyswander methadone program as having
been “undertaken in tacit defiance of the federal Narcotics Bureau and local
enforcement agencies in New York, but because of its eminent auspices
[i.e., the Rockefeller University, and especially would-be U.S. president
Nelson Rockefeller] it was not molested,”19 and when he ridiculed and
dismissed methadone treatment as “the final example of the cynicism and
folly in the American drug saga.”20
Prescribing old psychoactive drugs such as the barbiturates has thus
become tantamount to medical malpractice, whereas prescribing new
psychoactive drugs such as Prozac is viewed as the hallmark of practicing
scientific medicine. The newer the drug the better, as the story of Prozac
illustrates. Launched in 1988 by Eli Lilly and Company, Prozac was hailed
for helping “to revolutionize the treatment of depression by stressing the
biochemical nature of the disorder.”21 Sales for 1989 were approximately
$600 million, up 65 percent from 1988. In 1992, sales of Prozac are
expected to exceed $1 billion. I believe Prozac is so popular with patients
and doctors alike not because it is therapeutically effective (what is the
disease being treated?), but rather because most people like the way the
drug makes them feel and because—it not being a controlled substance—
doctors feel secure prescribing it. Moreover, the manufacturer is so eager to
encourage the use of Prozac that it has done something unprecedented in
the history of promoting so-called ethical (prescription) drugs: It has sent
letters to physicians, promising to “defend, indemnify, and hold you
harmless against claims, liabilities or expenses arising from personal injury
alleged to have been caused by Prozac.”22
Behind the mystifying pharmacomythology of contemporary mood-
altering drugs lies a relatively simple situation. One class of these drugs
consists of chemicals that people like to take because they make them feel
better—for example, amphetamines and benzodiazapines. Another class
consists of chemicals that people do not like to take because they make
them feel worse—for example, Haldol and Thorazine (but which others,
caring for troublesome persons, like to give them). Both classes of
chemicals typically begin their medical careers as miracle drugs; those in
the first class then become gradually transformed into drugs abused by
those who use them (for example, Valium), whereas those in the second
class become gradually transformed into drugs abused by those who
dispense them (for example, Haldol).23

Intensifying the Drug Controls: The Triplicate Prescription Form

On January 1, 1989, a new law went into effect in New York State,
requiring physicians prescribing benzodiazepines to use a triplicate
prescription form, theretofore reserved for prescribing narcotics. Triplicate
prescriptions can be written for no more than a month’s supply of the drug
and cannot be refilled. One copy of the form is for the physician’s own
records, another is for the pharmacist, and the third goes to the state
bureaucracy monitoring the doctor’s drug-prescribing and the patient’s
drug-using profiles. It would be difficult to imagine a more fitting emblem
of the therapeutic criminalization of America. While in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union people are revolting against the police monitoring their
behavior, having at last recognized that state security is simply a pretext for
the government’s meddling in their lives, we supinely accept agents of the
therapeutic state monitoring our drug-using behavior, refusing to recognize
that it is simply a pretext for the government’s meddling in our lives.
Why was this additional tightening of the prescription laws necessary?
“Health officials say the controls are needed to identify physicians who
prescribe the addictive drugs too liberally and to shut down ‘pill mills’ that
sell prescriptions to addicts and teenagers.”24 As one might expect, the
number of prescriptions physicians wrote for benzodiazepines fell
precipitously, which the media idiotically interpreted as “success … in the
effort to curb the misuse of tranquilizers.”25 Inasmuch as there are no
criteria for what counts as drug misuse, the new law has succeeded only in
withholding another class of drugs from the public.
Some of the specific consequences of New York State’s new triplicate
prescription law are worth detailing. The first and most fundamental
consequence was that physicians became afraid to prescribe
benzodiazepines. Two years after the law went into effect, only 27,000 of
New York’s 67,000 registered physicians obtained the necessary pads.26
According to a report issued by the Medical Society of the State of New
York, “Some physicians no longer prescribe benzodiazepines…. [Others]
are referring patients … to an emergency room to obtain benzodiazepine
prescriptions.”27
Not surprisingly, in the first half of 1989, the number of benzodiazepine
prescriptions written for the state’s 1.2 million Medicaid recipients fell 55
percent compared to a year earlier. “‘We believe the regulation has been
extremely effective in reducing [illegal street sales] and protecting patients
from unnecessary drug dependence and injuries,’ said John Eadie, director
of public health protection for the State Health Department.”28 Note that
Mr. Eadie’s title is “director of public health protection.” Who needs him,
and why? Evidently, we in the State of New York need him, to protect us
from physicians licensed by the State of New York to practice medicine.
The ancient admonition Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who shall guard
the guardians?) has thus been given a new lease on life, creating jobs for the
untold numbers of bureaucrats who are monitoring the prescribing habits of
doctors, who monitor the drug habits of patients. In the meantime, old
people in nursing homes are abused by the drug laws. According to the
report by the Medical Society of the State of New York cited above, “In one
study [of the consequences of the triplicate prescription law], 25 percent of
nursing home residents taking benzodiazepines were switched to
antipsychotic medications, which have more severe long-term adverse
effects.”29
The New York State Legislature’s mania for drug monitoring is creating
a steadily more lucrative black market in certain prescription drugs. For
example, the street price of one Xanax pill rose from $1.50 in December
1988 (before the new triplicate prescription law went into effect) to $8 by
mid-1989, while the price of a single Valium tablet rose from $2 to more
than $6. “That’s a measure of how we’ve been able to dry up the supply of
these drugs on the street,” Director of Public Health Protection Eadie
explained. Other benefits of the triplicate prescription law have been the
divestiture of one doctor’s privilege to prescribe controlled substances, and
the launching of more than three hundred criminal and civil investigations.
Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York
City, concludes, “It shows that when doctors are being looked at, they
behave somewhat differently.”30 So do the farmers “looked at” by Soviet
bureaucrats. Thus is depriving people of what they want elevated by the
communist state to a political virtue, and by the therapeutic state to a
medical virtue.
Today the drug-scapegoating craze touches the lives of nearly every
man, woman, and child in the United States. The initial targets of
persecution were the foreign profiteers and domestic deviants—South
American drug lords and intravenous drug abusers. Then, in quick
succession, followed doctors, drug manufacturers, prescription drug
abusers, smokers, and advertisers. “Drug companies and doctors,” writes
Congressman Pete Stark, Democrat of California, “present the biggest
obstacle to prescription drug reform.”31 What does Stark mean by
prescription drug reform? Saving hundreds of millions of dollars spent
annually on Medicaid payments for controlled substances such as Valium
and Xanax. Noting that, in the nine states that require multiple-copy
prescription forms, prescriptions for controlled drugs fell 35–50 percent
after such extra monitoring was instituted, Stark concludes that his “plan
could save hundreds of millions a year.” If Congressman Stark really
wanted to save the taxpayer’s money, he could do so more easily and
effectively by restoring the free market in drugs. But, clearly, this is not his
aim. Like every politician, Stark knows that you render people servile by
making them dependent on the state. And you make them dependent on the
state by depriving them of what they want and could—were it not for state
interference—provide for themselves.

The Problem of the “Drug Abuse Problem”

The attention we give to the War on Drugs makes it appear as if we
Americans were especially disposed to “abusing” drugs. Thus, protesting
the FDA’s plan to reclassify some prescription drugs as over-the-counter
drugs, Dr. James Todd, executive vice-president of the American Medical
Association, complains that “Americans are already the most over-self-
medicated population.”32 Todd’s assertion exemplifies the confused
equation of self-medication with drug abuse, and the mindless assumption
that self-medication is, a priori, undesirable. (As I noted in Chapter 2, some
courageous and far-seeing persons predicted, back in the 1930s when
Roosevelt undertook to destroy the free market in drugs, that self-
medication would become a crime.) The same idea is voiced by Herbert D.
Kleber, professor of psychiatry at Yale and one of the country’s leading
substance abuse experts, who states approvingly, “Medically, abuse is often
defined as nonmedical use.”33 Todd’s and Kleber’s ideas are reminiscent of
the now passé notion that self-abuse (that is, masturbation) is a disease. I
submit that we ought to count knowledgeable and responsible self-
medication as a moral and social good, not as a medical disease or moral
evil. As for the claim that Americans are more over-self-medicated than
other people, there is (as I observed earlier) not a shred of solid evidence for
it, and much impressionistic evidence against it. Suffice it to add that
alcohol has long been a popular drink in many parts of the world. Irishmen,
Frenchmen, and Russians—to mention but a few nationalities—have been
as fond of drink as Americans, but only the American people saw fit to
deputize their elected representatives to prohibit their favorite beverage.
With the War on Drugs, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon, mistaking
our tendency toward law intoxication with a tendency toward drug
intoxication.
As anyone who travels abroad can observe, the use of nicotine—still
called “smoking” by medically uncivilized people—is much more common
in Europe and Asia than in the United States. And so is the use of a variety
of quack medicines in which we have no interest. In fact, we are less
disposed to the nonmedical use of drugs than people in many other
countries, but, as I noted, we call virtually all such drug use “drug abuse”
and hence remain blissfully unaware of the fact that the maniacal pursuit of
“good drugs” (which we expect to cure every disease on earth) and the
maniacal persecution of “bad drugs” (to which we attribute a galaxy of
human miseries) are not the manifestations of medical-scientific
enlightenment, but are rather peculiarly American social phenomena.

WHEN NARCOTICS ARE OUTLAWED …

Like physicians, pharmacists too have good reasons to fear the drug
laws. If they sell too many controlled substances—“too many” being
undefined for them also—they are likely to be persecuted and punished by
the government, especially if their clients are poor and the government pays
for the drugs. In a typical raid on a pharmacy in Harlem, New York
Congressman Charles B. Rangel led a group of reporters to two clinics to
confront the pharmacists: “‘All you’re involved in is legalized drug
pushing,’ Mr. Rangel said to a pharmacist at Nino Drugs at 77–99 East
115th Street. ‘This place makes more money off Medicaid than any other
pharmacy its size in the city.’”34
Besides giving a good deal of space to Rangel’s views on the profit
motive, the gist of the report was that twenty-five physicians and twenty
drugstores were “ousted from Medicaid” for what was considered to be an
abuse of the system. The system is, of course, an invitation to abuse, and to
being caught for it as well. One physician in Harlem—admiringly dubbed
“the Dwight Gooden of Medicaid billers”—ordered nearly $4 million in
prescriptions and services in a single twelve-month period, most of the
drugs being “immediately sold back to black-market suppliers.”35 The
pharmacists at least had an excuse, but it probably did them no good: “I am
not doing anything illegal,” said Saleem Rashid, a part-owner of RQS
Pharmacy. “I am just filling their [the patients’] prescriptions.”36
As if the threat of drug agents were not enough to instill fear into
pharmacists, they also face the threat of addicts and criminals looking for
narcotics to steal. These problems have led to a little-recognized medical
advance: pharmacies without narcotics. “Even when doctors do prescribe
narcotics,” reports Newsweek, “their patients may find it amazingly hard to
get the prescription filled.”37 A survey of twelve hundred drugstores around
the country revealed that only half could supply morphine tablets. In New
York City, the main reason pharmacists gave for not stocking the drug was
fear of robbery; elsewhere, it was the lack of demand, “because physicians
weren’t prescribing narcotics.”

A New Medical Specialty: Withholding Narcotics

How has the medical profession responded to the escalating
restrictiveness of drug controls, especially with respect to narcotics? By
creating special “pain clinics” and “pain services,” staffed with physicians
who specialize in the (non)treatment of pain. Perversely, these drug-denying
doctors love to talk about the mistreatment they impose on their own
patients, for which they invariably blame others. For example, Michael H.
Levy, M.D., director of the Palliative Care Service at the Fox Chase Cancer
Center in Philadelphia, complains, “There is still a good deal of resistance
among physicians when it comes to pain control. That resistance comes out
of lack of education.”38 Just the contrary. Physicians do not lack education
about pain control. Instead, they have learned to withhold opioid analgesics
even from dying patients because they are being taught that giving such
painkillers in ample doses turns patients into “drug addicts” and exposes
doctors to the risk of criticism or worse for abusing their prescription-
writing privileges. When doctors run no risk for underprescribing
painkillers but run a considerable and yet unpredictable risk for
overprescribing them, what else can we expect but that patients will be
systematically deprived of adequate pain relief?
The anti-narcotic zeal of the therapeutic state, which demands that even
terminal patients suffering agonizing pain be denied adequate relief,
pervades the entire medical scene. “Nurses,” reports the New York Times,
“are surprisingly stingy about dispensing pain killing drugs.”39 A study of
nurses’ drug-dispensing behavior revealed that “the doses of analgesics
given the patients were one-fourth the amount permitted [prescribed] by the
physician.”
At the same time, doctors specializing in “cancer pain relief” reveal that
physicians do not prescribe adequate doses of analgesics, driving some
patients to suicide. In a group of two hundred patients treated in the pain
clinic at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, “16
percent reported suicidal thoughts and impulses.”40 Mirabile dictu, the pain
researchers have discovered “that ineffective treatment of pain is a major
reason that cancer patients become depressed and suicidal.” But what is a
pain clinic for if not for the ineffective treatment of pain? More often than
not, the effective treatment of pain requires neither clinics nor doctors, but
only a free market in drugs. However, such pharmaceutical freedom would
make our highly paid pain researchers and pain clinicians unnecessary and
unemployed. Clinging to their privileges, the experts pretentiously
conclude, “Often, treating the underlying pain … may eliminate a person’s
wish to die.”41 What medical madness! First, doctors plead for the
prohibition of opiates, to prevent people from using the drugs to kill
themselves; then, doctors discover that people kill themselves because they
have been deprived of opiates, and plead for letting the patients have more
opiates.
The mind-numbingly banal conclusion of Charles S. Cleeland, chairman
of the U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Committee, illustrates the intellectual
bankruptcy of the pain specialists: “Millions of cancer patients [who] have
pain … could be treated effectively if more narcotics were available and
administered.”42 But narcotics are available, ad libitum, in the streets. Only
in medical settings—in hospitals and doctors’ offices—is the availability of
narcotics so restricted that patients are harmed as a result. The gun lobby
has long warned, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
We have outlawed narcotics, and now only outlaws have narcotics.
Physicians must, of course, bear a good deal of the blame for not having
done more to stem the tide of the anti-narcotic restrictions imposed on them
by the therapeutic state. Instead, they have endorsed drug controls and
exploited them for their own selfish benefit—for example, by chairing and
participating in various national and international drug commissions which,
by the way, have conferences in elegant hotels in interesting cities. The
experts did not really care what anti-libertarian policies these bureaucratic-
medical commissions endorsed, so long as the patients remained dependent
on the medical profession. Thus, for decades, international narcotic
commissions composed of physicians labored to restrict both the medical
and nonmedical uses of opiates. Now (in May 1990), acting as if this had
never happened, American Medical News approvingly reports that “the
International Narcotics Control Board has joined the World Health
Organization in endorsing expanded use of narcotic drugs for treating
cancer pain.”43
The mind boggles. We spend more money on medical care than any
other people in the world. And what is the result? That we live in a society
in which people who, according to doctors, should have no access to
narcotics seemingly have unlimited (illegal) access to them, while people
who, according to doctors, have the most urgent need for narcotics have
little or no access to them. Who is at fault? No one. Everyone is a victim,
including the physicians, who are concerned that they will lose their
licenses or be prosecuted if they prescribe narcotics “in the amounts
necessary to treat chronic severe cancer pain.”44
Sydenham, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, attributed the
miraculous powers of opium to relieve pain and suffering to the Almighty
God. What God has given, the therapeutic state has taken away.
 8

Between Dread and Desire:

The Burden of Choice

In wise hands, poison is medicine; in foolish hands, medicine is

poison.
—Casanova1

Better remembered for his erotic than for his medical expertise, Casanova
offered this sagacious observation more than two hundred years ago. It
could serve equally well as an epitaph for the free market in drugs, or as a
promotional slogan for it.

THE TWIN TEMPTATIONS: DRUGS AND DRUG LAWS

The War on Drugs has had many undesirable consequences, not least
among them the mass production of experts on drug abuse. As befits their
role, these savants have written millions of words about “drugs,” but the
word temptation is not among them. Joining the current drug debate on the
terms chosen by those in control of its accredited vocabulary thus requires
that one be ignorant of history—especially religious history. I say this
because so much of what we think of as the formation of personal character
and human destiny—from the Old Testament Fall to the present moment—
may be seen as the chronicle of temptation and the struggle against yielding
to it. Aphoristic examples abound. “Was not Abraham found faithful in
temptation?” the writers of the Apocrypha ask rhetorically, only to answer
further on that “it was imputed unto him for righteousness.”2 The New
Testament teaches this once familiar anti-temptation slogan: “Blessed is the
man that endureth temptation”;3 and in the Lord’s Prayer, the supplicant
pleads, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”4 (A
bumper-sticker humorist has changed this to read: “Lead me not into
temptation. I can find it myself.”) Ralph Waldo Emerson sounds a modern,
psychological note: “We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”5
The temptations that people always found, and probably always will
find, hardest to resist are sex, money, and power. Drugs and food belong on
this list, of course, but rank nowhere near the top. Nevertheless, our “drug
problem” could profitably be viewed in terms of a struggle against
temptation, which is precisely the way most Americans in the nineteenth
century viewed it.6 Mark Twain was much amused by this spectacle and
offered many wise and witty recommendations on the subject. “There are,”
he characteristically remarked, “several good protections against
temptations, but the surest is cowardice.”7 In a more serious mood, he
mockingly pondered, “There are people who strictly deprive themselves of
each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way
acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all
they get. How strange it is!”8 Mark Twain did not live long enough to see
something even stranger, namely, the American government’s resorting to
the use of naked force to impose this idea on people, at home and abroad.
Thus, he never saw his fellow Americans electing and deputizing their
representatives in Congress to deprive them of satisfying desires from
which they could perfectly well have deprived themselves, if that is what
they had really wanted to do. But note that the Volstead Act, which
prohibited nearly everything connected with alcohol, did not prohibit
drinking it. I interpret this paradox as one of the earliest symptoms of
America’s loss of faith in free will.

Unfree Will, Unfree Market

In contemporary political discourse, the issue of free will is raised only
to assert its absence and, hence, the unsuitability of market relations in
economic life in general, but especially where emotionally charged goods
and services such as drugs and health care are at stake. Indeed, what is the
point of giving people choices if we are convinced that they are unable to
make the “right” choices because they are too young, too old, mentally ill,
or otherwise incompetent?
 In the War on Drugs in particular, whence do we draw our image of
(un)free will? Sad to say, we draw it from and base it on the image of the
enfeebled will of the stereotypical inner-city “kid” who is deprived of
parenting, of education, and of hope, and is faced with the lure of using and
trading in a powerful pleasure-producing drug—typically, “crack.” The fact
that drug warriors are so fond of resting their arguments on this image of
abused children succumbing to temptation shows that they play with loaded
dice: This caricature is offered to justify prohibiting the sale of drugs to
competent adults! Needless to say, the fact that a drug is for sale (legally or
illegally) does not mean that anyone has to buy it or use it. I reemphasize
this truism because overlooking or denying it lays the foundations for the
fallacious concept of drug (ab)use as an illness amenable to treatment.
When even so staunch a defender of the free market as Milton Friedman
regards treatment as the proper response to the drug problem, how can we
expect ordinary people to resist this deadly delusion?
Friedman begins his “Open Letter to [Former Drug Czar] Bill Bennett”
with a fatal concession. “The drug war,” Friedman pleads, “cannot be won
by those [Bennett’s] tactics without undermining the human liberty and
individual freedom that you and I cherish.”9 Because Bennett is nothing if
not intelligent, we ought to assume that he realizes just as clearly as
Friedman that his drug policies are destructive of dignity, liberty, and
responsibility. Accordingly, we ought to assume that Bennett knowingly
accepts this cost because, unlike Friedman, he believes that it is more
important that America be drug free than that it be politically free. It is
disingenuous to appeal to “treatment” as offering us, friend and foe of
freedom alike, a common ground on which to meet. Thus, it is no use to
say, as does Friedman in concluding his plea, “Moreover, if even a small
fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition
were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of
compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm
done to the users could be dramatic.”10 This is tantamount to giving away
the game. Endorsing the expenditure of government funds for fictitious
treatments of nonexistent diseases is prescribing more of the same poison:
statism and therapeutism. (Friedman’s endorsement of government-funded
drug treatment programs is inconsistent with his support of the libertarian
critique of medical licensure. Without state-sanctioned doctors, there could
be no state-sanctioned “diagnoses” of “substance abuse” and no state-
funded “treatments” for it. See Chapter 1.)
The therapeutic state is a totalitarian state—all the more so for masking
its tyranny as therapy. Ironically, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
educated people everywhere thought that ours was going to be a new
golden age of scientific progress and personal freedom. Who would then
have thought that ours was going to be the age that affirms the reality and
near-universality of mental illness, denies free will and responsibility, and
celebrates the abrogation of contract? Who would then have anticipated that
half of the world’s population would end up living in totalitarian states
dedicated to protecting people from their antisocial desire for private
economic profit? And that the other half would end up living in therapeutic
states dedicated to protecting people from their anti-medical desire for
private pharmacological pleasure? The Soviet Union—the model socialist
state—became the incarnation of the principle that private property is evil
and thus the desire for economic self-determination is inimical to the health
of the body politic. The United States—the model therapeutic state—
became the incarnation of the principle that self-medication is evil and thus
the desire for pharmacological self-determination is inimical to the health of
the body. Both the Soviet Union and the United States thus became
persecutory states—one determined to find and punish people dealing in
real money, epitomized by traffickers in hard currencies; the other
determined to find and punish people dealing in pleasure-producing
chemicals, epitomized by traffickers in hard drugs. And so, step by step,
generation after generation, habits of law engendered habits of mind, and
vice versa, until in the Soviet Union the idea of a free market in land and
houses became unthinkable, and in the United States the idea of a free
market in drugs became unthinkable.

Teaching America the Wrong Drug Lesson

Using any drug for any purpose entails risks. The same goes for drug
laws. However, this is not the way we now perceive the drug problem.
Instead, we see drugs as the problem, and drug controls as the solution. To
maintain this distorted image, we exaggerate and even falsify the
dangerousness of prohibited drugs, while we minimize and even deny the
dangerousness of drug prohibitions. It is not surprising, then, that most
people consider proposals even for limited drug “legalization”—much less
for a genuine free market in drugs—to be unwise and impractical. Their
“conservatism” with respect to drugs rests on having stopped questioning
the following propositions and policies:
1. The use of illicit drugs is not only a crime, but also a disease.
2. Illicit drugs cause both crime and illness.
3. It is morally praiseworthy to attribute drug use to mental illness, peer
pressure, parental neglect, poverty, social injustice, drug pushers, the
addictive properties of drugs—to anything but the drug user’s free
will.
4. It is legally just to punish persons who trade in (prohibited) drugs,
because they sell a harmful product; and to forcibly treat drug
(ab)users, because they are sick (but deny it and refuse to be treated).
Although these explanations are plainly false, their scientific validity is
authenticated by the medical profession; and although these explanations
are patent evasions of personal choice and responsibility, their moral
legitimacy is authenticated by the courts. For example, a brewery worker
becomes fond of beer, is dismissed as a drunkard, develops cirrhosis of the
liver, and dies when his hospital bed catches fire as a result of his smoking.
Whose fault is his drinking and dying? His employer’s. In a suit brought by
the worker’s widow against the brewery, the Michigan Court of Appeals
ruled that “alcoholism is like any disease” and that the “circumstances of
the job shaped the course of [this man’s] disease … thus constituting a
personal injury.”11 Such habits of mind and law preclude (at least for the
time being) a serious examination of our so-called drug problem, much less
a radical reorientation of our social policies vis-à-vis prohibited drugs.
As I have tried to show, of all the dangers that drugs pose, only one
requires state intervention, namely, mislabeling. All the others can be
effectively controlled by individuals assuming responsibility for their own
behavior. Admittedly, in our contemporary American society, it is
chimerical to expect people to assume responsibility for informing
themselves about drugs and for adhering to the principle of caveat emptor.
But this is because, with respect to drugs, the American government has
consistently encouraged the public to conduct itself according to the maxim
Caveat emptor non necesse (The buyer need not beware). Why not?
Because the government will protect him. Can such paternalism on the part
of the rulers lead to anything but infantilism on the part of the ruled?
Although the prohibitionist stubbornly denies it, drug controls foster
precisely those moral values and personal behaviors that we mistakenly
attribute to drugs. It is not drugs but drug prohibitions that lead to drug use
that is uninformed, irresponsible, self-indulgent, and personally and socially
self-destructive. If we were true to our political heritage, our aim would be
not a “drug-free America,” but an “America free of drug laws.”

Why Do We Reject Responsibility for Drug Use?

The War on Drugs is a moral crusade and hence must be squarely met on
moral grounds. The only morally coherent (and, in the United States,
probably the only practical) alternative to drug prohibition is its repeal. The
dearth of supporters for this option raises an obvious question: Why are we
so afraid of a free market in drugs? For many reasons, the two most obvious
ones being that people believe and fear that, if drugs were freely available,
more people would choose an easy life of parasitism over a hard life of
productivity, and more people would become “drug crazed” and thus
commit criminal acts. Suffice it to say here that the problem of economic
productivity—crucial for the prosperity and very survival of every society
—has nothing to do with drugs but has everything to do with family
stability, cultural values, education, and social policies. The second fear is
equally misplaced. The “drug-crazed” criminal is a figure of psychiatric
fiction. The idea this image engenders is not just incorrect; it is inverted:
Drugs are not an inducement to crime; prohibiting drugs is. Instead of these
displaced concerns, I want to examine a reason for our fear of the free
market in drugs that we systematically ignore, but that I believe inclines us
powerfully toward drug prohibition. Unlike the two fears just mentioned,
this fear entails a very real connection between certain drugs and a form of
behavior long prohibited by religious, legal, and psychiatric codes of
conduct, namely, suicide. Although free-market access to drugs would not
necessarily make it easier for people to become parasites or criminals, it
would make it easier for them to commit suicide.

THE ULTIMATE CHOICE: SUICIDE

 We have launched ourselves on a self-contradictory quest for a veritable
medical dystopia, that is, for an America free of drug abuse because doctors
effectively control drug use, and where everyone dies a painless and
pleasant death because benevolent doctors kill “dying” people who want to
be killed. My point is that—having combined a dread of dying a protracted,
pointless, and perhaps painful death with a fear of living with a free market
in drugs—we have negated our chances for attaining pharmacological
autonomy, that is, freedom vis-à-vis drugs similar to the freedom we enjoy
vis-à-vis food or religion.
Deprived of drugs useful for committing suicide, we nevertheless
continue to cling to the hope of receiving the drugs we need to die a
painless death when we are terminally ill. The result is that we now
seriously entertain the preposterous idea of giving doctors and judges the
right to kill us. In view of our faulty premises, the appalling conclusion that
“medical euthanasia” is preferable to a free market in drugs is quite logical:
We abhor and reject the idea of granting adults legally unrestricted access to
drugs suitable for suicide; we view the desire to die as a symptom of mental
illness; we interpret virtually all suicide as a tragedy that ought to have been
prevented; and we forget that euthanasia, mercifully administered by
“ethical” doctors, is a particularly sinister gift totalitarian governments have
bestowed on modern man. In short, I believe that one of the main reasons
we reject a free market in drugs is because we fear having an unfettered
opportunity to kill ourselves (which a free market in drugs necessarily
entails) and expect a grand alliance between medicine and the state to solve
our existential tasks of living and dying for us.12

Drugs, Suicide, and the Right to Die

Because we enjoy a free market in food, we can buy all the bacon, eggs,
and ice cream we want and can afford. If we had a free market in drugs, we
could similarly buy all the chloral hydrate, heroin, and Seconal we wanted
and could afford. We would then be free to die easily, comfortably, and
surely—without any need for recourse to violent means of suicide or fear of
being involuntarily kept alive “dying” in a hospital. We would then no
longer have to complain about doctors, nurses, relatives, hospitals, nursing
homes, lawyers, and insurance companies mistreating us, overtreating us,
undertreating us, withholding pain medications from us, keeping us alive,
and depriving us of our right to die.13
How did the idea of a “right to die” arise? What does the phrase mean?
How can the inevitable biological destiny of all living beings be a right?
Actually, the phrase refers primarily to our confused rejection of the
spectacle of doctors keeping moribund persons alive with the aid of modern
biotechnological machinery. Why do physicians do this? Because medical
ethics ostensibly demands it; because they enjoy the powers science and the
state have put in their hands; because they often have both professional and
economic incentives for it; because they assume this is what the patient
would want, could he express his wishes; because courts or kin command
them to do “everything possible” to keep the patient alive; and lastly,
because withholding life-sustaining measures could be regarded as
deliberately killing the patient.
For many of us today, the term sanctity of life has lost virtually all
meaning. No longer truly religious but not yet free of superstition
masquerading as God-given rules for living, we cannot cope with the
prospect of what seems a pointless prolongation of living or, rather, dying.
At the same time, we cling to life—up to a point. After that, we want to be
“allowed” to die—an imagery that falsely implies we are inescapably bound
to persons determined to prevent us from dying. To deny them that role, we
have complemented the proposition that we have a “right to life” (which
has become the code phrase of the anti-abortion movement), with the
seemingly contrary proposition that we have a “right to die.”
However, the similarity between these two semantically reciprocal rights
is illusory. Each addresses a completely different set of existential choices
and ethical perplexities: The phrase right to life refers to our options
regarding the (“natural” or spontaneous) beginning of life; the phrase right
to die refers to our options regarding the (“unnatural” or artificially
induced) ending of it. The right in the “right to life” thus belongs to the
fetus, at risk of being aborted; whereas the right in the “right to die”
(usually) belongs to persons other than the dying human being.
If a person executes a “living will” in which he requests the withholding
of certain life-sustaining measures, then he is exercising his right to die or,
more precisely, his right to reject certain medical interventions. A living
will gives a person a chance or right to make certain decisions about his
health or terminal care when he can no longer do so, just as a last will gives
him such a right about his property. A living will may be a request for or
against extraordinary measures of life preservation. Similarly, a terminal
patient may or may not want to die. Attributing a right to die to him implies
that those who keep him alive are injuring him by depriving him of a right.
However, if he does not execute a living will, then it seems to me that
the phrase right to die identifies a “right” that does not belong to the dying
person himself. Even the most ardent supporters of this fictitious right
acknowledge that its designated beneficiary is usually past suffering and
hence cannot, in good conscience, be said to have an urgent need of any
right (except perhaps of the right not to be killed). The phrase thus refers, in
a hypocritically distorted language, to the survivors’ interest in bringing the
moribund person’s life to an end. I am not implying that this interest is, a
priori, morally wrong. I am merely trying to clarify our use of the term right
to die, and to suggest that, used approvingly (as it often is), it is a modern
code term that expresses the speaker’s endorsement of authorizing the state
to grant doctors the “right to kill” (certain persons), of defining such an
intervention as a “medical service,” and of labeling it euphemistically as
“aid in dying.”14
It is not within the scope of the discussion here to analyze further this
important issue. Let me add only that a great deal of the money we spend
on what we call “health care” is in fact spent on extending life by a few
months, weeks, or days, and that it is within the means of most people most
of the time (accident victims forming the main exception) to take
appropriate action to prevent their dying in a hospital, hooked to machines,
deprived of their right to die.

The Right to Drugs vs. the Right to Euthanasia

In matters so heavily freighted with moral significance, the language we
use is all-important. In 1990 a group calling itself Washington Citizens for
Death with Dignity introduced an initiative in that state’s legislature,
phrased as follows: “Should adult patients who are in a medically terminal
condition be permitted to request and receive from a physician aid-in-
dying?” Recognizing the semantic trap thus laid, the Washington State
Catholic Conference challenged the wording, but was unable to change
“aid-in-dying” to “physician-caused death.”15
 The phrase right to die is thus emblematic not only of our skittishness
about suicide and our longing for good doctors to kill us at just the right
time and in just the right way, but—more fundamentally—of our
repudiation of bodily self-ownership and the responsibilities that go with it.
It remains to be seen how many Americans prefer legalizing doctors to kill
them, over legalizing themselves to own drugs and shouldering the
responsibilities that the ownership of such a valuable property entails.
So long as the phrase right to die does not include an unqualified right to
suicide—a subject its supporters never mention—it is destined to be
nothing more or less than just another step in the medicalization of life and
in our headlong rush into the deadly embrace of the therapeutic state. On
the other hand, if the phrase is intended to encompass the right to suicide,
then—lest it be an empty slogan—the “right to die” must include the “right
to drugs.” We know, however, that most people (especially in the United
States) consider the desire to commit suicide—much less the act itself—not
a right, but a symptom of preventable and treatable mental illness. As
against this view, I hold that the option to commit suicide is inherent in the
human condition, that committing suicide ought to be considered a basic
human right and may sometimes be a moral duty, and that the expectation
or threat of suicide never justifies the coercive control of the (allegedly)
suicidal person. At the same time, I consider it a basic moral wrong for a
physician, qua physician, to kill a patient or anyone else and call it
“euthanasia.”16 This does not mean that “pulling the plug” on a dying
patient is (necessarily) an immoral act; it means only that doing so does not
(necessarily) require medical expertise, should not be defined as a medical
intervention, and should not be delegated (specifically) to physicians. I
maintain that our longing for doctors to give us lethal drugs betokens our
desire to evade responsibility for giving such drugs to ourselves, and that so
long as we are more interested in investing doctors with the right to kill
than in reclaiming our own right to drugs, our discourse about rights and
drugs is destined to remain empty, meaningless chatter.
Of course, a people cannot expect to regain their right to acts and objects
unless they are willing and prepared to assume responsibility for the
conduct of the acts and the care of the objects in question. This principle
applies now to the Soviet people with respect to the tools of free trade, and
applies to us with respect to drugs. Specifically, since the most important
practical consequence of our loss of the right to bodily self-ownership is the
denial of legally unrestricted access to drugs, the most important symbol of
the right to our bodies now resides in our reasserting our right to drugs—to
all drugs, not just to one or another so-called recreational drug. At this
point, we come face-to-face with our real drug problem, namely, that most
Americans today do not want to have legally unrestricted access to drugs.
On the contrary, they dread the idea and the prospect it portends. Indeed, the
American people do not view access to drugs as a right, just as the Soviet
people do not view “speculating” in currencies as a right. Illustrative of the
persistence of this deeply ingrained anti-capitalist impulse was the Soviet
government’s decision, in February 1991 to confiscate all fifty- and
hundred-ruble notes. The actual purpose of this scheme was to destroy the
people’s savings, for which there were no legally available goods to buy.
However, then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov justified the measure on the
ground that it was a necessary “tool to combat illegal currency speculation
and drug dealers.”17

CORN LAWS AND DRUG LAWS

The first law of political dynamics is that the ruler’s basic aim is always
the same, namely, to deprive the ruled of liberty. The only thing that varies
from time to time is the justification for the deprivation, namely, whether it
is religious, political, economic, or medical. Thus, protectionism always
plays a prepotent role in the government’s regulating the affairs of men.
This principle is illustrated by the similarities between the English Corn
Laws and the American drug laws—two seemingly different systems of
protection, each of which came into being, was motivated by, and achieved
widespread popular support because each was regarded as indispensable for
the safety, welfare, and preservation of the society that adopted it; and, over
long periods of time, each of which was viewed as a necessary exception to
the ideals and rules of the free market.

The English Corn Laws, c. 1100–1846

The Corn Laws provide us with an astonishingly relevant historical
antecedent to the War on Drugs. Before the nineteenth century, England
was still primarily an agricultural society, the people’s survival depending
mainly on grains (and, after the seveteenth century, also on potatoes). From
the twelfth century onward, local governments and the king’s council had
the right to prohibit exports of grain during periods of failing harvests. After
the sixteenth century, as methods of agriculture and transportation
advanced, agricultural surpluses in one country became a threat to domestic
producers of the same product in another country. Tariffs on imported
grains were established to protect the interests of farmers and the land-
owning classes. Since that time, the term Corn Laws became synonymous
with regulations governing the import of grain into England, the term corn
being used generically for grain.18 Although the so-called Corn Laws were
abolished in 1846—ushering in an era of unprecedented economic liberty
and prosperity in Great Britain—and despite the popular Western rhetoric
about “free trade” and “free markets,” similar restrictions continue to
govern international trade in many agricultural (and other) commodities.19
Indeed, a free international market in food is an economic fiction similar to
the physicist’s ideal gas. Real markets and real gases do not behave like
these models, which nevertheless are important—in physics, as scientific
concepts; in commerce, as economic principles; and in politics, as
libertarian ideals.
Of particular relevance to our understanding of our drug laws is the fact
that, by the eighteenth century, the Corn Laws were so firmly established in
England that even a free-market prophet such as Adam Smith believed it
was altogether impossible to abolish them. He wrote,
[The 1773 Corn Law,] though not the best in itself … is the best which the interests,
prejudices and temper of the time would admit of…. The laws concerning corn may
everywhere be compared to the laws concerning religion. The people feel themselves so
much interested in what relates either to their subsistence in this life, or their happiness in a
life to come, that government must yield to their prejudices, and in order to preserve public
tranquillity, establish that system of which they approve of. It is upon this account, perhaps,
that we so seldom find a reasonable system established with regard to either of those two
capital objects.20

Smith’s seemingly casual comparison of the Corn Laws with religious

laws was prescient, anticipating the Founding Fathers’ insight into the
necessity of separating church and state. Such a separation had never
existed before, and still does not exist in so pure a form anywhere else. At
the same time, Smith predicted that state support of religion (by any other
name, such as health and drugs today) leads inexorably to an
“unreasonable” system of regulations, such as the Corn Laws (or the War
on Drugs).
As the nineteenth century dawned over England, that nation’s position as
the world’s leading economic, intellectual, and military power was securely
established. Conscientious observers of society began to recognize that,
while the Corn Laws helped the superior classes (the farmers and landed
aristocracy), they harmed the inferior classes—those most in need of
protection from economic hardship. While the producers got a better price
for their grain than they would have if they had been forced to compete
with cheaper imports in a free market, the consumers (that is, everyone,
with the poor hit the hardest) had to pay more for their daily bread than they
would have had to, had they been free to buy foreign grain on the same
terms as domestic. In effect, then, the Corn Laws were a form of price
embargo whose burden was borne overwhelmingly by the poorest members
of society.

The Case against the Corn Laws and the Drug Laws
During the 1830s, critics of the Corn Laws began to organize and
quickly became influential. Their arguments apply perfectly to our drug
laws. Note especially the critics’ language and the fact that their aim was to
abolish a restrictive legislation so as to ensure economic and personal
freedom, not to reform or perfect methods of coercive state control of the
economy and personal conduct. In 1838 John Benjamin Smith (no relation
to Adam Smith) founded the Anti-Corn-Law Asocciation and stated its
purpose as follows.
It [the association] had been established upon the same righteous principle as the Anti-
Slavery Society. The object of that society was to obtain the free right for negroes to
possess their own flesh and blood. The object of this was to obtain the free right of the
people to exchange their labour for as much good as could be got for it; that we might no
longer be obliged by law to buy our food at one shop, and that the dearest in the world, but
be at liberty to go to that at which it can be obtained cheapest.21

When I wrote Ceremonial Chemistry and my earlier critiques of the drug

laws, I did not realize the relevance of the Corn Laws to the drug laws.
However, my reasoning in support of a free market in drugs was similar to
the reasoning articulated above, as the following rephrasing of Smith
illustrates:
 The Anti-Drug-Law Association ought to be established on the same righteous principle as
the Anti-Slavery Society and the Anti-Corn-Law Association…. The object of this
association shall be to obtain the free right of the people to exchange their labor for the
drug of their choice; that we might no longer be obliged by law to obtain our drug in one
way only, by securing permission from a physician for buying it, in an atmosphere in which
doctors and drug agents are obsessed with the mission of ensuring that none of us receives
a drug merely because he wants it.

It is obvious who the beneficiaries and victims of the Corn Laws were,
and it is equally obvious who the beneficiaries and victims of the drug laws
are. I shall not belabor the subject. Suffice it to say that doctors, lawyers,
and politicians started the War on Drugs and continue to wage it, and that
they are its real beneficiaries. In contrast, the drug war’s ostensible
beneficiaries—the poor, the uneducated, the young, the old, and the sick—
are its actual victims.
What happened to England’s leading Corn Law supporters after
prohibitions on the trade in corn were lifted? They quickly discovered the
truth and justice of the free market in grains. Lord John Russell’s
metamorphosis is illustrative. Born in 1792, Russell was prime minister
from 1846 until 1852, and again from 1865 until 1866. (The Corn Laws
were abolished in 1846 while Sir Robert Peel was prime minister, only a
short time before Lord Russell succeeded him.) In 1845 Russell wrote,
I confess that … my views have, in the course of twenty years, undergone a great
alteration. I used to be of the opinion that corn was an exception to the general rules of
political economy; but observation and experience have convinced me that we ought to
abstain from all interference with the supply of food…. Let us then, unite to put an end to a
system which has been proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the
source of bitter division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and crime
among the people.22

Every blight and bane Lord Russell attributed to the sacrosanct Corn
Laws now applies, with even greater force, to our sacrosanct drug laws.23

ENVOI: TOWARD FREE-MARKET CONTROL OF DRUG

USE
Although Jefferson had no trouble seeing the future darkly, I doubt he
could have imagined a United States in which individuals who trade in
drugs would be declared malefactors so dangerous as to deserve to be
decapitated, and that at the behest of an American “czar.”24 However,
Jefferson did foresee the day when the American people would be more
interested in riches than in rights: “From the conclusion of this war,” he
warned, “we shall be going down hill…. They [the people] will be forgotten
… and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole
faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due
respect for their rights.”25
By the time Ludwig von Mises was born, Jefferson’s prediction had
come true and other political and social developments conspired to erode
the ideals of Jeffersonian liberties. Mises’s greatness lies in his lucid
unmasking of, and courageous opposition to, the “protections” with which
paternalistic statists are ever ready to injure us. (Mises overlooked one
front, which in the long run may prove to be the Achilles heel of the free
society, namely, psychiatry. Involuntary, institutional psychiatric
interventions are the epitome of paternalist-statist protections that are, by
definition, immune to effective opposition based on appeals to the subject-
patient’s rights).
In Human Action—his magnum opus—Mises wrote,
Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle
is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own
foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments…. [W]hy
limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body
only? … The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for
the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.26

Jefferson would have found it difficult to believe that the nation he

helped found has embraced a political system based on the self-
contradictory premise that people are competent enough to elect their own
representatives to govern them, but so deeply distrust their own competence
with respect to managing drugs that they deputize their elected
representatives to permit them (the people) to use the drugs the state deems
good for them, and prohibit them from using the drugs it deems bad for
them. Mises rebelled against, and rejected, the legitimacy of the second half
of this oxymoronic premise.
Jefferson and Mises were men of principle who sought to formulate
political policies befitting a society of free and self-respecting people. No
one can accuse our leading drug experts—in medicine, law, or politics—of
being persons of principle. They have risen above that: They are persons of
compassion. How can they be expected to worry about abstract principles
when their attention is occupied by drug crises epitomized by mayors
snorting coke and welfare mothers producing crack babies? It is easy
enough to understand how the spectacle of a prominent person’s pleasurable
drug use might upset the envious, or how the prospect of a poor welfare
mother’s persistent production of muggers might disturb the racist wrapped
in the liberal’s mantle. But such ad hoc concerns cannot form the basis for a
political order.
At this very moment in Eastern Europe, a complex political order based
on fundamentally flawed principles seems to be coming apart at the seams.
What, after all, is communism if not a political system based on (fake)
compassion and (real) coercive paternalism? Rejecting the free market as
uncaring toward the indigent and the infantile, the planned economies of
Marxism-Leninism have substituted for it a system of political-economic
directives aimed at supplying all with everything the omnicompetent state
deems good, and denying to all everything it deems bad—precisely the
features that drug controls share with other anti-capitalist political
principles and practices.
If my critique of drug controls seems extreme or radical, let me observe
that in fact it is neither. It is old-fashioned and, strictly speaking,
conservative. I take my stand with the Old and New Testaments, where
many sins are enumerated, but using drugs is not one of them; with the
Constitution of the United States of America, which gives the government
certain powers, but denying us the right to take drugs is not one of them;
and with Ludwig von Mises, who fought—for a long time virtually alone—
the threat posed by the paternalist-protectionist state.

Judging People: Meritorious Behavior vs. Abstinence from Drugs

We cannot intelligently examine the pros and cons of drug controls if we
accept, as prima facie valid, the premise that it is in the best interest of
individuals as well as of society to curtail or eliminate the use of (certain,
so-called dangerous) drugs. This postulate, which virtually everyone now
accepts, justifies punishing persons not only because they injure or kill
others, but also because they produce, possess, sell, or use certain drugs.
Although the prospect is not imminent, it is possible that there will come
a time when, once again, we shall prefer a drug peace to a War on Drugs.
We shall then have to abandon our ideological opposition to drugs and
reapproach the problem prudentially, as we approach most everyday
problems. As a rule, we are rewarded and punished for the behaviors we
display—not for the virtues or vices others attribute to our character, or for
the drugs they detect in our urine. To illustrate this distinction, consider how
we now treat professional athletes, and how we might treat them if they had
the same right to use the drugs of their choice as they have to practice the
religion of their choice. If our policy is that an athlete must be drug free,
then we are justified in testing him and punishing him for being “on drugs.”
On the other hand, if our policy were that his taking a drug before a game is
not any more of our business than is his praying before a game, then, if he
used alcohol or sedatives, he would be “punished” by his opponents who
would best him; whereas if he used anabolic steroids or stimulants, he
would be “rewarded” by besting superior opponents.
Whether any particular drug would or would not have such an effect on a
particular player’s performance is irrelevant to this argument. What is
relevant is that many drugs enhance performance, and many others impair
it; and so, too, do many nonpharmacological factors, from the behavior of
the weather to the disposition of one’s spouse. The effect of a drug on
behavior, like the effect of religion on it, may be for good or ill. Some of the
greatest works of art in the world were created by men intoxicated with
drugs, religion, or both. The point is that we have a choice about how to
judge the other person’s behavior: We can reward or penalize his
performance because we are interested (only) in it, and eschew entering
uninvited into his life; or we can reward or punish him for the drugs he
avoids or seeks because we are obsessed with his drug-using habits,
attribute deleterious consequences to the use of certain scapegoated drugs,
and regard it as our duty to protect him (and others) from those
consequences, whether he likes it or not.
This distinction between performance-oriented and prohibition-oriented
rules rests on, and reprises, Lysander Spooner’s distinction between vices
and crimes. (See Chapter 2.) In the old days, if a factory worker showed up
in the morning drunk, the foreman fired him. Today, a social worker from
the company’s employee assistance program refers him to a drug treatment
program. In the end, the drunkard is still likely to lose his job. The only
thing we can be sure of is that the drug treatment program will delay the
worker’s and his family’s confronting the truth, and will make the
company’s product less competitive on the world market.
 When a drug enhances rather than impairs the user’s performance, the
differing consequences of the performance-oriented and prohibition-
oriented approaches are just as significant. Sigmund Freud might not have
successfully endured the struggles of his early career had he been unable to
augment his regular intake of nicotine with frequent doses of cocaine, and
William Halstead might not have become America’s most celebrated
surgeon and one of the stars of the Johns Hopkins Medical School had he
not been able to medicate himself with morphine whenever he felt the need
for it.27 In short, saying no to drugs may be neither to the individual drug
user’s nor to society’s best interests—unless we postulate that a social
parasite “off drugs” is a better person and a better citizen than a great
athlete, entertainer, or surgeon “on drugs.”

Limits on the Right to Drugs

Commitment to the belief that a person has a basic right to grow and
smoke tobacco or marijuana does not imply that he has a right to do these
things on someone else’s property, without the owner’s permission. The
government can, therefore, rightfully prohibit smoking in a public building,
just as it can rightfully prohibit growing tobacco on public land. Mutatis
mutandis, driving a car places the driver in a position where his behavior
may be a threat to the safety of the public. Hence, the state is justified in
prohibiting people who do not know how to drive from driving, and in
prohibiting those who know how to drive from driving if their ability is
impaired by the use, or non use, of drugs. This principle justifies depriving
persons guilty of driving while intoxicated (DWI) offenses of their drivers’
licenses, and granting epileptics licenses only on condition that they
maintain themselves on anti-convulsant drugs to control their seizures.
Moreover, compulsory drug testing (periodically or randomly) is justified in
occupations where a worker’s impairment endangers the public—for
example, in commercial aviation. However, here too the emphasis must be
on a rational assessment of the worker’s impairment (if any), not on the
government’s or public’s pharmaceutical-ideological prejudices masked as
medicine. Some diseases—for example, epilepsy or glaucoma—disqualify a
person from being a pilot; others—for example, acne or athlete’s foot—do
not. Similarly, it makes sense to prohibit a pilot from taking LSD, but not
from taking aspirin. Lastly, we must not forget that a commercial aircraft is
not the pilot’s private property. It belongs to the airline company, which,
together with the government, has the right to set the rules for protecting its
property and the safety of the service it renders the public.
I should like to say here that nothing in this book should be interpreted
as my denying that we have a “drug problem.” The drug problem exists. It
is social reality. And it exhibits the two mutually reinforcing constituents of
which it is comprised: drug producers/sellers and drug buyers/users. But let
us be crystal clear what the problems are.
The drug user’s “problem”—assuming he thinks he has a problem—is
that he has a habit, say smoking, he wants to quit. To break his habit, he
must want to stop smoking more than he wants to continue smoking. Easier
said than done? Of course. But merely because a habit is difficult to break
does not mean that indulging in it is a disease or a crime, or that the
government has a right to punish or involuntarily treat the person who
practices it.
Our problem—assuming we consider another person’s trading in or
using drugs to be a problem (the pusher has a business, the user a habit)—is
that we too have a habit, namely, preferring a command economy in drugs
to a free market in them. To break this habit, we must reinvert our moral
preferences and reembrace the true basis of a liberal social order: Which
means that we would have to value cooperation more highly than coercion,
self-control and self-medication more highly than meddling and “therapy,”
a free market in drugs more highly than drug prohibition.
The so-called drug debate has become a bore. We are long past the point
where declaring that the War on Drugs is not working or where offering
proposals to reform our drug control policies makes any sense. Recall once
more that, although the purpose of Prohibition was to stop people from
drinking liquor (not from transporting it), the Eighteenth Amendment
outlawed only “the manufacture, sale, or transportation” of alcohol. Why
did the men who drafted that constitutional amendment not prohibit
drinking alcohol, as Congress now prohibits drinking cough syrup with
codeine? I submit that this question points in the direction we ought to go if
we want to get past the deadlock on drugs. In the final analysis, the problem
is not merely that the War on Drugs is a classic case of the cure being worse
than the disease it purports to cure, but that we are unwilling to come to
grips with what we, as a people, believe ought to form the moral
foundations for the United States’ interest in protecting our lives, liberties,
and properties.
Today, the legitimacy of secular states—specially of the United States—
rests primarily on the prudential interests of its citizens in maximizing the
security of their lives, liberties, and properties. It does not lie in the state’s
commitment to saving us from falling into moral sin, political error, or
medical illness. If this proposition is true, and if we desire to uphold it as a
principle worth honoring, then we would have to conclude that our interests
would be better served if our drug laws conformed with the principles of the
free market. In practice, this would mean rejecting drug prohibitions and
embracing, instead, a policy of consistently punishing people guilty of
genuine crimes. But that would not be quite enough. In what may perhaps
be an even more radical departure from our present practices, we would
have to disallow drug use (intoxication) and mental illness (however
defined) as excusing conditions from crimes, and would have to discontinue
using state-sanctioned coercions to protect people from themselves.
In short, there is nothing particularly novel about our present drug
problem. Nor is there anything particularly novel about envisioning a return
to a free market in drugs. We need not reinvent the wheel to solve our drug
problem. All we need to do is stop acting like timid children, grow up, and
stand on our own two feet. “It is ordered in the eternal constitution of
things,” wrote Edmund Burke, “that men of intemperate minds cannot be
free. Their passions forge their fetters.”28 Nor can men of infantile minds
and childish habits be free. Their dependency—on the state, not on drugs—
forges their fetters.
 Notes

Epigraph
1
The epigraph at the front of this book is from Adams J., “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal
Law,” 1765, reprinted in R. J. Taylor, ed., The Papers of John Adams, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 112.

Preface
1
Hebra F. von, quoted in L. F. Celine, The Life and Work of Semmelweis, 1924, reprinted in Mea
Culpa & The Life and Work of Semmelweis, trans. R. A. Parker (New York: Howard Fertig, 1979), p.
131. Hebra, a pupil of the famous Viennese pathologist Karl Rokitanksy, was the founder of the
Vienna School of Dermatology.
2
For typical examples, see “Drug war a battle of law vs. treatment,” Syracuse Herald-Journal,
Syracuse, NY, April 17, 1991; and Kris E., “State to force classes on adult sex offenders,” Syracuse
Herald-Journal, May 2, 1991.

Introduction
1
Butler S., quoted in R. V. Sampson, The Psychology of Power (New York: Pantheon, 1966), p. 110.
2
Hopkins J. F., A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Lexington
Press, 1951); Moore B., A Study of the Past, the Present and the Possibilities of the Hemp Industry in
Kentucky (Lexington, KY: James E. Hughes, 1905); and Washington G., “Diary Notes,” cited in L.
Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977),
pp. 10–12.
3
Constitution of the United States, Art. I, sec. 2.
4
Bastiat F., Economic Sophisms, 1845/1848, reprint, trans. Arthur Goddard (Princeton, NJ: Van
Nostrand, 1964), p. 4.
5
See, for example, Jacob J. B., “Imagining drug legalization,” Public Interest 101 (Fall 1990): 28–
42.
6
Dicey A. V., Lectures on the Relations between Law and Public Opinion ill England during the
Nineteenth Century, 1905, 1914, reprint, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. lxxix.

1. Drugs as Property: The Right We Rejected

1
Madison J., “Property,” National Gazette, March 29, 1792, reprinted in The Writings of James
Madison, vol. 6, ed. Gaillard Hunt, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), p. 101.
2
Locke J., “The Second Treatise of Government,” bk. 2, ch. 5, sec. 27, in Two Treatises of
Government, 1690, reprint, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), pp. 328–29.
3
Madison, “Property,” p. 103; for a more sustained analysis of this theme, see Szasz S. M.,
“Resurfacing the road to serfdom,” Freeman 41 (February 1991): 46–49.
4
Friedman M., “Private property,” National Review (November 5, 1990): 55–56; quote at p. 56.
5
Erler E. J., “The Great Fence to Liberty: The Right to Property in the American Founding,” in E. F.
Paul and H. Dickman, eds., Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 43, 56.
6
See Barnett R. E., ed., The Rights Retained by the People (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University
Press, 1989).
7
Madison, “Property,” p. 105; see also Nedelsky J., Private Property and the Limits of American
Constitutionalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. pp. 16–66.
8
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), cited in V. G. Rosenblum and A. D. Castberg,
eds., Cases on Constitutional Law (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1973), pp. 73–85; quote at pp. 74–
79.
9
Burke E., Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, reprint, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 247–48.
10
Jefferson T., “Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1781, reprinted in A. Koch and W. Peden, eds., The
Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Modern Library, 1944), p. 275.
11
Twain M., “Osteopathy,” 1901, quoted in C. T. Harnsberger, ed., Mark Twain at Your Fingertips
(New York: Beechhurst Press, 1948), pp. 341–42.
12
See Szasz T. S., “The Ethics of birth control—Or: Who owns your body?” Humanist 20
(November/December 1960): 332–36.
13
Friedman M. Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) p. 138.
14
See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
15
See, for example, “‘Grass’ could cost a rancher his land,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, March 19,
1991.
16
McDermott v. Wisconsin, 228 U.S. 115 (1913); emphasis added.
17
Christopher T. W., Constitutional Questions in Food and Drug Laws (Chicago: Commerce
Clearinghouse, 1960), p. 3; emphasis added.
18
Ibid., pp. 3–4.
19
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), p. 84.
20
Ibid., p. 86. I wish to thank Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., office,
for kindly calling my attention to this case. The interpretation I advance is solely my responsibility.
21
Mackay C., Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841, 1852, reprint
(New York: Noonday Press, 1962).
22
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged (Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam,
1961), p. 2162.
23
Mises L. von, Socialism, 1922, reprint, trans. from the 2nd German edition by J. Kahane
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1981), p. 469.
24
Freud S., Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929, reprint in SE, vol. 21, p. 113.
25
Freud S., The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916–17, reprint in SE, vol. 16, p. 389.
26
Mises, Socialism, p. 107.
27
Mises L. von, Human Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 874.
28
Even many libertarians do not support a free market in drugs—a market uncontaminated by the
presumption that drug (ab)use is a disease. Among those who do, see, for example, Rothbard M. N.,
For a New Liberty (New York: Collier, 1973), pp. 111–112; Mitchell C. N., The Drug Solution
(Ottawa, Canada: Carleton University Press, 1990); and Ebeling R. M., “The economics of the drug
war,” Freedom Daily 1 (April 1990): 6–10.
29
Lear’s (March 1990).
30
TV Guide (May 19–25, 1990).
31
People (May 21, 1990).
32
Time (December 17, 1990): 19.
33
Purvis A., “Just what the patient ordered,” Time (May 28, 1990): 42.
34
Ibid.
35
Anglin M. D., and Hser Y., “Legal Coercion and Drug Abuse Treatment: Research Findings and
Social Policy Implications,” in J. A. Inciardi and J. R. Biden Jr., eds., Handbook of Drug Control in
the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 151–76; quote at p. 152.
36
Bastiat F., Economic Sophisms, 1845/1848, reprint, trans. Arthur Goddard (Princeton, NJ: Van
Nostrand, 1964), pp. 125–26.
37
Jones L., “Evaluation of drug treatment research urged,” American Medical News (October 26,
1990): 4.
38
Calero-Totedo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co., 416 U.S. 663 (1974).
39
Ibid., p. 665.
40
Ibid., p. 663.
41
Ibid., p. 695.
42
United States v. One Assortment of 89 Firearms, 465 U.S. 354 (1974), p. 356.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
See, for example, Szasz T. S., Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, 1963, reprint (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1989) and Psychiatric Justice, 1965, reprint (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1988).
46
See Herpel S. B., “United States v. One Assortment of 89 Firearms,” Reason (May 1990): 3–36.
47
Dillin J., “Nation’s liberties at risk,” Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 1990.
48
For example, see Treaster J. B., “Agents arrest car dealers in sales to drug traffickers,” New York
Times, October 4, 1990.
49
“Marshalls faulted on drug property: Report says mismanagement of seized real estate has cost the
U.S. millions,” New York Times, April 21, 1991.
50
McDonald F., quoted in L. M. Werner, “If Jefferson et al. could see us now,” New York Times,
February 12, 1987.
51
Lewis D., “Prohibition and persuasion,” North American Review 139 (August 1884): 188–99,
quote at p. 194, reprinted in C. Watner, “Foreword,” in L. Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes: A
Vindication of Moral Liberty 1875, reprint (Cupertino, CA: Tanstaafl, 1977), pp. viii-ix.
52
Hobbes T., Leviathan, 1651, reprint, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1962),
p. 105.
53
Mandeville B., The Fable of the Bees, 1732, reprint, F. B. Kaye edition, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Press, 1988); see also Hunter R. and Macalpine, I., eds, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry,
1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 296. It may be of interest to note that
Bernard de Mandeville was also a pioneer in psychiatry (psychotherapy)—an enterprise closely
related to economics, albeit this connection is no longer officially recognized. Mandeville’s medical
practice was limited to patients suffering from what the alienists called “nerve and stomach
disorders” or, as he called them, the “hypochondriack and hysterick passions.” In 1711 he published
A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, written explicitly “by way of Information
to Patients [rather] than to teach other Practitioners.” Although Mandeville’s books went through
numerous printings and he was one of the most famous and influential figures of his age, his name is
now rarely mentioned except by libertarian writers.
54
Johnson P., Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 728.

2. The American Ambivalence: Liberty vs. Utopia

1
Rogers W., quoted in P. Yapp, ed., The Traveller’s Dictionary of Quotations (London and New
York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 919.
2
McDonald F., Novus Ordo Seclorum (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 10 and 16.
3
See Burke K., “Interaction: III. Dramatism,” in D. L. Sils, ed., International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), p. 450.
4
Although the similarity between these two problems is based on nothing more than a strategic
analogy, it is now commonly misunderstood as a literal equivalence; see, for example, Schrage M.,
“Vaccine to fight drug addiction is needed,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1990.
5
“It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” Shaw H. W. (“Josh Billings”) , quoted in
J. Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 12th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), p. 518.
6
Reagan N., quoted in S. V. Roberts, “Mrs. Reagan assails drug users,” New York Times, March 1,
1988.
7
Bennett W., quoted in “In the news,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, June 13, 1990.
8
Nelis K., “Cuomo applauds students for taking on ‘the devil,’” Post Standard, Syracuse, NY,
January 28, 1988.
9
See Mackay C., Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841, 1852, reprint
(New York: Noonday Press, 1962); and Moore R. I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society
(Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
10
See Tuveson E. L., Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
11
Bush G., “Transcript of Bush’s Inaugural Address,” New York Times, January 21, 1989.
12
Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, p. 132.
13
“Censorship,” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 5 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1973),
p. 161.
14
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged (Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam,
1961), p. 468.
15
Lader L., “Margaret Sanger: Militant, pragmatist, visionary,” On the Issues 14 (1990): 10–12, 14,
30–35; quote at p. 30.
16
Ibid.
17
Broun H., and Leech M., Anthony Comstock (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1927),
pp. 15–16.
18
“Plea, U.S. v. D. M. Bennett,” quoted in ibid., epigraph, p. i, and p. 89.
19
Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, p. 88.
20
“Censorship,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 6, p. 249.
21
See Shryock R. H., Medical Licensing in America, 1650–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1967).
22
Food and Drugs Act, 34 Stat. 768, ch. 3915 (June 30, 1906). This act is often erroneously called
the Pure Food and Drug Act.
23
Temin P., Taking Your Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 33.
24
I wish to thank Sheldon Richman for calling my attention to this antilibertarian aspect of the 1906
Food and Drugs Act.
25
Food and Drugs Act, 34 Stat. 768, p. 770.
26
See United States v. Johnson, 221 U.S. 488 (1911).
27
Ibid., p. 505; emphasis added.
28
Harrison Narcotic Act, 38 Stat. 785 (1914).
29
United States v. in Fuey Moy, 241 U.S. 394 (1915), p. 394; emphasis added.
30
Whipple v. Martinson, 256 U.S. 41 (1921), p. 45; emphasis added.
31
Musto D. F., The American Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 64.
32
Sontheimer M., “Ein Hustenmittel aus Elberfeld [A cough medicine from Elberfeld]”, Die Zeit,
April 6, 1990, p. 64.
33
Carpenter T. G., and Rouse R. C., “Perilous Panacea: The Military in the Drug War,” CATO
Institute Policy Analysis, Washington, DC, February 15, 1990, p. 24.
34
See Szasz T. S., Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, 1963, reprint (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1989), pp. 212–22, and The Therapeutic State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984).
35
Spooner L., Vices Are Not Crimes, 1875, reprint (Cupertino, CA: Tanstaafl, 1977), p. 1.
36
Ibid.
37
Kolata G., “Temperance: An old cycle repeats itself,” New York Times, January 1, 1991.
38
Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes, p. 4.
39
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
40
Spargo J., Social Democracy Explained (1918), pp. 306–7, quoted in J. H. Timberlake ,
Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 98.
41
Strong J., The Gospel of the Kingdom 8 (July, 1914): 97–98, quoted in Timberlake, Prohibition
and the Progressive Movement, p. 27.
42
Tennant F. S., quoted in D. L. Breo, “NFL medical adviser fights relentlessly against drugs,”
American Medical News (October 24/31, 1986): 18–19.
43
Quoted in Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, p. 180.
44
Ibid., p. 38.
45
For an excellent, though uncritical, account of drug legislation during Roosevelt’s first two terms,
see Jackson C. O., Food and Drug Legislation in the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1970).
46
Hornberger J. G., “Democracy vs. constitutionally limited government,” Freedom Daily 1 (June,
1990): 1–5; quote at p. 4.
47
See, for example, Kallett A., and Schlink F. J., 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (New York: Vanguard
Press, 1932).
48
Jackson, Food and Drug Legislation, p. 19.
49
Ibid., pp. 151–60.
50
Young J. H., The Medical Messiahs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 159; see
also Young J. H., The Toadstool Millionaires (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).
51
Young, The Medical Messiahs, p. 160.
52
Ibid., p. 165; emphasis added.
53
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 52 Stat. 1040 (1938).
54
Jackson, Food and Drug Legislation, p. 37.
55
Ibid., p. 38.
56
Ibid., p. 46.
57
King R., The Drug Hang-up (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 348–49; in this connection, see also
Mark J. F., “The drug laws and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments,” Drug Law Report 1 (May/June
1986): 241–50.
58
Temin P., “The origin of compulsory drug prescription,” Journal of Law and Economics, 22
(1979): 91–106. For a comprehensive history of prescription laws, see Mitchell C. N., The Drug
Solution (Ottawa, Canada: Carleton University Press, 1990).
59
Temin, Taking Your Medicine, p. 48.
60
U.S. Congress, Quackery: A $9 Billion Scandal, 1984, quoted in P. Skrabanek , “Health quackery
—holding back the tide,” International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine 1 (1990): 65–69;
quote at p. 65.
61
Beck M., et al., “Peddling youth over the counter: Wanna buy some eternal life?” Newsweek
(March 5, 1990): 50–52.
62
Ibid. ; see also Sullum J., “Cold comfort,” Reason 22 (April 1991): 22–29.
63
See Skrabanek P., and McCormick J., Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (Glasgow, Scotland:
Tarragon Press, 1989).
64
Berkmoes R. V., “A flamboyant crusader against overmedication of elderly,” American Medical
News (November 23–30, 1990): 26; and Garrard J., et al., “Evaluation of neuroleptic drug use by
nursing home elderly under proposed Medicare and Medicaid regulations,” Journal of the American
Medical Association 265 (January 23–30, 1991): 463–67.
65
Szasz T. S., “AIDS and drugs: Balancing risk and benefits,” Lancet (London), 2 (August 22,
1987): 450; and LeBrun M., “AIDS stalks women,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, November 30, 1990.
66
Quoted in Kinsky L., “The FDA and Drug Research,” in T. R. Machan, ed., The Libertarian
Alternative (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), p. 183.
67
“Safety questions on nonprescription drugs,” U.S. News & World Report (November 12, 1990): 93.
68
Young, The Medical Messiahs, p. 167.
69
Ibid., p. 168.
70
Ibid., p. 169; emphasis added.
71
Ibid., p. 215.
72
Peterson M. B., The Regulated Consumer (Ottawa, IL: Green Hill Publisher, 1971), p. 38.
73
See, for example, Nader R., “Endorsement,” for Torrey E. F., Nowhere to Go (New York: Harper
& Row, 1988), back jacket; and Torrey E. F., et al., “Washington’s grate society: Schizophrenics in
the shelters and on the streets,” Public Citizen, Washington, D.C., Health Research Group, (April 23,
1985).
74
Jackson, Food and Drug Legislation, pp. 52–53.
75
Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, pp. 73–74; emphasis added.
76
Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes, pp. 12–13.

3. The Fear We Favor: Drugs as Scapegoats

1
Hamlet, act. I, scene iii, line 43.
2
Vienne, M., quoted in J. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 1983, reprint, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 555.
3
Roosevelt F. D., “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, quoted in J. Bartlett, ed. Familiar
Quotations, 12th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951) p. 915.
4
Seneca (C. A.D. 54), quoted in B. Stevenson, The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and
Famous Phrases (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 786.
5
Delumeau, Sin and Fear, pp. 556–57.
6
Douglas M., and Wildavsky A., Risk and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
p. 7.
7
Anslinger, H. J., quoted in J. Kaplan, Marijuana (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 92.
8
See, for example, Rorabaugh W. J., The Alcoholic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), pp. 5–21.
9
Musto D. F., The American Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 248.
10
See, for example, Mintz M., “Tobacco decimating world, says WHO epidemiologist,” Washington
Post, April 5, 1990; also, Cook G., “Africa: Ashtray of the world,” Sunday Times, London, May 13,
1990.
11
For an example of such nonreforms, see Trebach A. S., “The Need for Reform of International
Narcotics Laws,” in R. Hamowy, ed., Dealing with Drugs (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987),
p. 103.
12
Burke E., Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, reprint, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(London: Penguin, 1986), p. 248; emphasis added.
13
Girard R., The Scapegoat, 1982, reprint, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), p. 16.
14
Szasz T. S., Ceremonial Chemistry, 1974, reprint, rev. ed. (Holmes Beach, FL: Learning
Publications, 1985).
15
John 11:48–50.
16
Girard, Scapegoat, p. 113; emphasis added.
17
Ibid., p. 114. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, England: Clarendon
Press, 1971) gives “to cut” and “cutting a knot” as the etymological roots of the term.
18
Marcus R., “Court: States can ban peyote rites,” Washington Post, April 18, 1990; see Employment
Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 110 S. Ct. 1595 (1990).
19
Greenhouse L., “Court is urged to rehear case on ritual drug use: Religious groups team with legal
scholars,” New York Times, May 11, 1990; also Neuhaus R. J., “Church, state and peyote,” National
Review (June 11, 1990): 40–44.
20
Starchild A., “U.S. imports criminals to fill domestic shortage,” Liberty 3 (November 1989): 25.
21
Ibid.
22
Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture, p. 184.
23
Bourne R., The Radical Will (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), p. 360.
24
See, for example, Anderson G. M., “Parasites, profits, and politicians: Public health and public
choice,” Cato Journal 9 (Winter 1990): 557–78.
25
Ibid., p. 573.
26
See, for example, Andrew E., Shylock’s Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
27
Tofani L., “Unapproved drugs given limited use,” Syracuse HeraldJournal, May 22, 1990.
28
Winerip M., “Drug works, but insurer won’t pay,” New York Times, November 27, 1990.
29
“Mom’s addiction results in conviction,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, May 23, 1990.
30
Lewin T., “Appeals court in Florida backs guilt for drug delivery by umbilical cord,” New York
Times, April 20, 1991.
31
U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, “Women,
Addiction, and Perinatal Substance Abuse: Fact Sheet,” mimeographed, April 19, 1990.
32
Hey R. P., “US targets maternal drug abuse as cost problems escalate,” Christian Science Monitor,
May 22, 1990.
33
See “National Foundation,” in The World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (Chicago: Field Enterprises,
1966), p. 37; and Gunn S. M., and Platt P. S., Voluntary Health Agencies (New York: Ronald Press,
1945), p. 34.
34
Macklis R. M., “Radithor and the era of mild radium therapy,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 264 (August 1, 1990): 614–18; quote at pp. 614–15.
35
Ibid.
36
Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture, p. 10.
37
For a delightful satire on this subject, see Romains J., Knock, 1923, reprint, trans. James B. Gidney
(Great Neck, NY: Barron Educational Series, 1962).
38
See Lewis H. W., Technological Risk (New York: Norton, 1990); also Paulos J. A., “What we fear
least kills most,” New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1990, pp. 11–12.
39
Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture, p. 53.
40
See Shenon P., “Bennett defends plan to fight drugs in Peru,” New York Times, June 22, 1990.
41
Steele K. D., “Hanford: America’s nuclear graveyard,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45
(October 1989): 15–23; quote at p. 15.
42
Ibid., p. 17 ; see also Wald M. L., “Wider peril seen in nuclear waste bomb making: Washington
soil tainted,” New York Times, March 28, 1991.
43
Wald M. L., “Disposal of mild radioactive waste to be less restricted in new policy,” New York
Times, June 26, 1990.
44
Satchell M., “A vicious ‘circle of poison’: New questions about American exports of powerful
pesticides,” U.S. News & World Report (June 10, 1991): 31–32; quote at p. 31.
45
Coolidge, C., quoted in Stevenson, Macmillan Book of Proverbs, p. 2117.
46
Mill J. S., On Liberty, 1859, reprinted in J. S. Mill, The Six Great Humanistic Essays, with an
introduction by Albert William Levi (New York: Washington Square Press, 1969), p. 220.
47
Kleber H. D., “The nosology of abuse and dependence,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 24,
suppl. 2 (1990): 57–64; quote at p. 59.
48
I wish to thank Charles S. Howard for suggesting these scenarios. Some months after he proposed
them, truth overtook fiction (see below in the text), proving that insightful speculation about a crowd
madness can approximate the predictive power of a hard science.
49
“Jailing of pregnant captain questioned,” Arkansas Democrat, May 25, 1991.
50
See Szasz T. S., Insanity (New York: Wiley, 1987).

4. Drug Education: The Cult of Drug Disinformation

1
Rogers W., “Slogans, Slogans Everywhere,” 1925, reprinted in W. Rogers, A Will Rogers Treasury,
ed. Bryan B. Sterling and Frances N. Sterling (New York: Bonanza Books, 1982), p. 71.
2
“Drug lecture prompts girl to turn parents in to police,” Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY, August 15,
1986.
3
“Hollywood seeks girl who turned in parents,” New York Times, August 20, 1986; emphasis added.
4
Bennett, W. J., quoted in R. L. Berke, “Drug chief urges youth: Just say who,” New York Times,
May 19, 1989.
5
Ibid.
6
Cummings J., “Agents call but in vain for girl who got police,” New York Times, August 22, 1986.
7
“More children informing on parents for drug abuse,” Syracuse HeraldJournal, November 13,
1986.
8
“Bush inspires boy to turn in his mom for using cocaine,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, September 15,
1989.
9
“Teen who sold drug shown by Bush jailed,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, November 1, 1990.
10
“For show and tell, beer,” New York Times, February 6, 1990.
11
Naylor S. W., “Teen suspended for dispensing over-the counter medication,” Syracuse Herald-
Journal, June 2, 1990.
12
Ibid.
13
Reagan R., An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), cited from M. Dowd,
“Where’s the rest of him?” New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1990, pp. 1 and 43.
14
See Szasz T. S., “Reagan should let jurors judge Hinckley,” Washington Post, May 6, 1981,
reprinted in T. S. Szasz, The Therapeutic State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), pp. 147–48.
15
Lewin T., “Drug-testing kit for parents spurs stormy debate,” New York Times, September 12,
1990.
16
Ibid.
17
Hite R., “The double danger of AIDS,” Free Market 6 (November 1988): 3–4; quote at p. 4; see
also Judson F. N., “What do we really know about AIDS control?” American Journal of Public
Health 79 (July 1989): 878–82.
18
“Public polled on attitudes about cocaine users, sellers,” American Medical News (February 16,
1990): 26.
19
See Oliver C. “Brickbats,” Reason (April 1990): 20.
20
“Billboards in War on Drugs bring criticism and lawsuits in Carolina,” New York Times, April 1,
1990.
21
Quindlen A., “Raising a generation of judgmental zealots,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, October 16,
1990.
22
“Candidates’ survival guide,” Newsweek (March 18, 1988): 13.
23
Ibid.
24
Jefferson, T., quoted in S. Platt, ed., Respectfully Quoted (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress,
1989), pp. 8–9; attributed to Jefferson, and possibly spurious.
25
Lincoln, A., quoted in ibid., p. 9.
26
Burke E., Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, reprint, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(London: Penguin, 1986), p. 136.
27
Reagan, R., quoted in “Teens at Covenant House give Reagan mixed reviews,” Syracuse Herald-
Journal, November 15, 1989.
28
Ritter B., Covenant House (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 5.
29
Ibid., p. 8.
30
Farber M. A., “O’Connor is moving to clear up ‘mess’ at Covenant House,” New York Times,
March 10, 1990.
31
McLaughlin J., “Let Covenant House survive Ritter’s woes,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, February
14, 1990.
32
See Collier P., and Horowitz D., The Kennedys (New York: Summit Books, 1984).
33
See Szasz T. S., Ceremonial Chemistry, 1974, reprint, rev. ed. (Holmes Beach, FL: Learning
Publications, 1985), p. 13; also Rensenberger B., “Amphetamine used by a physician to lift moods of
famous patients,” New York Times, December 4, 1962.
34
Heymann C. D., A Woman Named Jackie (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1989), p. 301.
35
Ibid., p. 303.
36
Lindsey R., “Mrs. Ford, in hospital statement, says: ‘I’m addicted to alcohol,’” New York Times,
April 22, 1978; see further Szasz T. S., “A dialogue about drug education,” in Szasz, Therapeutic
State, pp. 254–60.
37
Ford, B., quoted in “Review, Betty: A Glad Awakening,” Time (March 16, 1987): 81.
38
Blumenthal D., “A day in the life of the Betty Ford Center,” New York Times, February 27, 1987.
39
Shapiro W., “A mild dose of candor: Kitty Dukakis reveals a former drug dependency,” Time (July
20, 1987): 34.
40
Kunen J. S., et al., “From Kitty Dukakis, a cry of despair,” People (November 27, 1989): 115–19.
41
Shapiro, “Mild dose of candor.”
42
“Kitty Dukakis on the soapbox,” U.S. News & World Report (August 1, 1988): 30 and 46–51.
43
Kunen et al., “From Kitty Dukakis.”
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
Quoted in Gelman D., “Roots of Addiction,” Newsweek (February 20, 1989): 52.
47
Dukakis K., Now You Know (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
48
Dowd M., “Kitty Dukakis’s life of sad uncertainties and self-made mists,” New York Times,
September 6, 1990.
49
Clift E., “More than you ever imagined: The startling confessions of Kitty Dukakis,” Newsweek
(September 3, 1990): 64.
50
Sheppard R. Z., “Public life, private trouble,” Time (September 10, 1990): 85.
51
Szasz T. S., “Bad habits are not diseases: A refutation of the claim that alcoholism is a disease,”
Lancet (London) 2 (July 8, 1972): 83–84.
52
Rado S., “The psychoanalysis of pharmacothymia (drug addiction),” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2
(1933): 1–23; quote at p. 23; emphasis added.
53
Kleber, H., quoted in H. Fishman, “Whatever happened to the War on Drugs?” Psychiatric Times 8
(May 1991): 44–46; quote at p. 44.
54
Ibid., pp. 44–45.
55
Ibid., p. 45.
56
Simons M., “Gluttons for tranquilizers, the French ask, ‘Why?’” New York Times, January 21,
1991.
57
Ibid.
58
Mill J. S., On Liberty, 1859, reprinted in J. S. Mill, The Six Great Humanistic Essays, with an
introduction by Albert William Levi (New York: Washington Square Press, 1969), pp. 224–25.
59
Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 11 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1973), pp. 351–53.
60
Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 783–84.
61
See Szasz T. S., “The uses of naming and the origin of the myth of mental illness,” American
Psychologist 16 (February 1961): 59–65, reprinted as “The Rhetoric of Rejection,” in Ideology and
Insanity, 1970, reprint (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 49–68.
62
See Moore B., A Study of the Past, the Present and the Possibilities of the Hemp Industry in
Kentucky (Lexington, KY: James E. Hughes, 1905); Hopkins J. F. , A History of the Hemp Industry in
Kentucky (Lexington: University of Lexington Press, 1951); and Herer J., The Emperor Wears No
Clothes, 1985, reprint (Van Nuys, CA: HEMP Publishing, 1980).
63
See Schoeck H., Envy, 1966, reprint, trans. Michael Glenny and Betty Ross (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1969).

5. The Debate on Drugs: The Lie of Legalization

1
Bastiat F., Economic Sophisms, 1845/1848, reprint, trans. Arthur Goddard (Princeton, NJ: Van
Nostrand, 1964), p. 142.
2
See Szasz T. S. “The myth of the rights of mental patients,” Liberty 2 (July 1989): 19–26.
3
See, for example, Inciardi J. A., and Biden J. R., Jr., eds., Handbook of Drug Control in the United
States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).
4
Schmoke K. L., “We’re making progress in the movement to end the War on Drugs,” Drug Policy
Letter 1 (November/December, 1989): 2–3; quote at p. 3.
5
Drug Policy Foundation, “Biennial Report, 1988 & 1989,” p. 7 (Drug Policy Foundation, 4801
Massachusetts Ave., N. W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20016–2087).
6
Campbell F. B., “To control drugs, legalize,” New York Times, January 23, 1990.
7
See, for example, Hankins J., “Casualties of the drug war,” New York Times, January 31, 1990.
8
Glasser I., “Now for a drug policy that doesn’t do harm,” New York Times, December 18, 1990.
9
See Weaver R. M., The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Regnery, 1953).
10
“The federal drugstore,” National Review (February 5, 1990): 34–41.
11
Ibid., p. 41.
12
Hagerty B., “Drug-legalization debate gets louder,” Wall Street Journal//Europe, January 9, 1990.
13
Quoted in Roberts S., “On the question of legal drugs, a vote for maybe,” New York Times, January
25, 1990.
14
Rosenthal A. M., “A chat with Jesse,” New York Times, January 25, 1990.
15
Rangel C. B., “Legalize drugs? Not on your life,” New York Times, May 17, 1989; emphasis
added.
16
Ibid.
17
Twain M., Following the Equator, vol. 1 (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1903), p. 98.
18
Buckley W. F., “Who cares if leaders make things up?” Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY, March 31,
1990.
19
Ibid.
20
“United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances,” concluded at Vienna on December 20, 1988, in United Nations, Multilateral Treaties
Deposited with the Secretary-General (New York: United Nations, 1989), pp. 269–71.
21
See Inglis B., The Forbidden Game (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1975), pp. 154–77.
22
“Should we legalize the illegal?” Parade (February 4, 1990): 4; emphasis added.
23
Labaton S., “Federal judge urges legalization of crack, heroin, and other drugs,” New York Times,
December 13, 1989.
24
Beer D., “A judge who took the stand: It’s time to legalize drugs,” U.S. News & World Report
(April 9, 1990): 27.
25
Douglas W. O., concurring opinion in Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1961), p. 676.
26
Sweet R., “Admit that the drug war is not successful; abolish prohibition,” Drug Policy Letter 1
(November/December 1989): 5–6; quote at p. 5.
27
Sweet R., remarks made on “Firing Line Special Debate: ‘Resolved: Drugs Should Be legalized,’”
Firing Line TV show, March 26, 1990.
28
Guest T., “The growing movement to legalize drugs,” U.S. News & World Report (January 22,
1990): 22–23.
29
Sweet “Admit that drug war is not successful,” p. 5.
30
Treaster J. B., “Bush proposes more anti-drug spending,” New York Times, February 1, 1991.
31
Keillor G., “Where there’s smoke, there’s is ire,” American Health (December 1989): 50–53; quote
at p. 53.
32
Morley J., “De-escalating the war,” Family Therapy Networker 14 (November/December 1990):
25–27 and 30–35; quote at p. 27.
33
Nadelmann E., quoted in E. Yoffe, “How to legalize,” Mother Jones (February/March 1990): 18–
19.
34
Ibid.
35
So too does Richard Miller in The Case for Legalizing Drugs (New York: Praeger, 1991).
36
Haggerty J., “Decriminalizing narcotics use advocated,” Morning Times, Scranton, PA, March 29,
1990.
37
Grinspoon L., quoted in L. Jones, “Legalize or prohibit?” American Medical News (January 26,
1990): 2 and 32.
38
Grinspoon L., Ewalt J. R., and Shader R. I., Schizophrenia (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1972),
p. 230.
39
Grinspoon L., Marihuana Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1977), p. 399.
40
See, for example, “Marijuana for ill is curbed by U.S.” New York Times, June 23, 1991.
41
“American Bar Association rescinds policy on decriminalization of marijuana,” National Drug
Policy Network’s Newsbriefs (February 15, 1990): 1–2.
42
Grinspoon L., and Bakalar J. B., Cocaine, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 260.
43
Jacobs J. B., “Imagining drug legalization,” Public Interest 101 (February 1990): 28–42; quote at
p. 31.
44
Anderson D. C., “Legal crack? No sale: The idea fails on practical grounds,” New York Times,
November 26, 1990.
45
Ibid.
46
“Bush’s drug control strategy is more of the same,” National Drug Policy Network, news release,
January 25, 1990, pp. 1–2. The National Drug Policy Network should not be confused with the Drug
Policy Foundation, a Washington-based organization devoted to education, research, and the legal
defense of individuals persecuted under the drug laws. See note 5 above.

6. Blacks and Drugs: Crack as Genocide

1
Williams C., “Crack is genocide, 1990’s style,” New York Times, February 15, 1990.
2
Rosenthal A. M., quoted in L. H. Lapham, “A political opiate,” Harpet’s Magazine (December
1989): 43–48; quote at p. 46.
3
Williams, “Crack is genocide.”
4
Murray C. L., “‘We cannot make poison the norm,’” Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1990; emphasis
added.
5
Ibid.
6
Warner K. E., “Health and economic implications of a tobacco-free society,” Journal of the
American Medical Association 258 (October 16, 1987): 2080–86; quote at p. 2080.
7
Jackson J., quoted in D. Lazare, “How the drug war created crack,” Village Voice, January 23, 1990,
pp. 20–24; quote at p. 22.
8
Ibid.
9
See, for example, Anderson H., et al., “The global poison trade,” Newsweek (November 7, 1988):
66–68.
10
Jackson J., “Barry’s ordeal offers, a lesson for all of us,” Syracuse HeraldAmerican, January 29,
1990.
11
Rowan C., “Wake up white America: Stereotypes fogging war on drugs,” Syracuse Herald-
Journal, December 28, 1989.
12
Meddis S., “Drug arrest rate is higher for blacks,” USA Today, December 20, 1989.
13
“Just the facts,” FCNL Washington Newsletter of the Friends Committee on National Legislation
(February 1990): 2.
14
McAllister B., “23% of U.S. black men in their 20s under penal authority, study finds,”
International Herald Tribune, February 28, 1990.
15
Page C., “Our fear of young black males,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1990.
16
Ibid.
17
Harris R., “Blacks feel brunt of drug war,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1990.
18
Quoted in ibid.
19
Quoted in ibid.
20
DeParle J., “Talk grows of government being out to get blacks,” New York Times, October 29,
1990.
21
Wright L., and Glick D., “Farrakhan mission: Fighting the drug war-his way,” Newsweek (March
19, 1990): 25.
22
Belkin L., “Airport anti-drug nets snare many people fitting ‘profiles,’” New York Times, March
20, 1990.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Sullivan R., “Police say drug-program profiles are not biased,” New York Times, April 26, 1990.
26
Ibid.
27
London R., “Judge’s overruling of crack law brings turmoil,” New York Times, January 11, 1991.
28
Ibid.
29
Kolata G., “Racial bias seen on pregnant addicts,” New York Times, July 20, 1990.
30
Smith V. E., “A frontal assault on drugs: Reuben Greenberg’s methods actually get results,” Time
(April 30, 1990): 26.
31
Ibid.
32
Boyce J. N., “Tailoring treatment for black addicts,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1990.
33
Szasz T. S., Ceremonial Chemistry, 1974, reprint, rev. ed. (Holmes Beach, FL: Learning
Publications, 1985), pp. 89–103.
34
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York:
Grove Press, 1966), p. 259.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., p. 260.
37
Ibid., p. 261.
38
Prentice A. C., “The problem of the narcotic drug addict,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 76 (June 4, 1921): 1551–56; quote at p. 1553.
39
Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 384.
40
Ibid., p. 276.
41
See, for example, Kurtz H., “Drug scourge is conspiracy by whites, some blacks say,” Washington
Post, December 29, 1989.
42
Wilson J. Q., “Against the legalization of drugs,” Commentary (February 1990): 21–28; quote at
p. 28.

7. Doctors and Drugs: The Perils of Prohibition

1
Sydenham T., quoted in L. Goodman and A. Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics
(New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 186.
2
Portnoy R., quoted in D. Goleman, “Physicians said to persist in undertreating pain and ignoring
evidence,” Nero York Times, December 31, 1987.
3
Goodman and Gilman, Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, pp. 218, 217.
4
Hill C. S., Jr., “Narcotics and cancer pain control,” Ca: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 38
(December 1988): 322–25.
5
“Chronicle: 3 doctors charged with overprescribing for Elizabeth Taylor,” New York Times,
September 8, 1990.
6
“Medicolegal decisions: Physician prescribes, court convicts,” American Medical News (October
19, 1990): 24; a summary of People of the State of California v. Lonergan, 267 Cal. Rptr. 887, Cal.
Ct. of App. (March 26, 1990).
7
Carlova J., “Patients in pain can put you in jail,” Medical Economics (November 12, 1984): 195–
203.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
For a review and discussion, see Szasz T. S., Pain and Pleasure, 1957, reprint (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1989).
11
Meier B., “Widening drug availability: Two views,” New York Times, February 23, 1991.
12
Quoted in Lupus Foundation of America, A Legal Manual for Lupus Patients (St. Louis, MO:
Lupus Foundation of America, 1982), p. 28. I owe this reference to my daughter Suzy.
13
Szasz T. S., “Malingering: Diagnosis or social condemnation?” American Medical Association
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 76 (October 1956): 432–43.
14
Editorial, “Judge not!” Journal of the Iowa State Medical Society 47 (January 1957): 35–36.
15
Clark M., et al., “Cancer hurts before it kills: Doctors can ease suffering with drugs,” Newsweek
(December 19, 1988): 58–59.
16
Ibid.
17
Editorial, “Whatever happened to insomnia (and insomnia research)?” American Journal of
Psychiatry 148 (April 1991): 419.
18
See, for example, Szalavitz M., “Methadone addicts are as far from recovery as heroin addicts,”
letters to the editor, New York Times, April 26, 1990.
19
King R., The Drug Hang-up (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 257.
20
lbid, p. 260.
21
Value Line, Inc., “The Value Line Investment Survey,” New York, February 9, 1990, p. 1268.
22
Marcus A. D., and Lambert W., “Eli Lilly to pay doctors’ Prozac-suit costs,” Wall Street Journal,
June 6, 1991.
23
Garrard J., et al., “Evaluation of neuroleptic drug use by nursing home elderly under proposed
Medicare and Medicaid regulations,” Journal of the American Medical Association 265 (January 23–
30, 1991): 463–67; and Winslow R., “New rules to cut use of medication by nursing homes,” Wall
Street Journal, January 23, 1991. Also see, for example, Cowley G., et al., “The promise of Prozac,”
Newsweek (March 26, 1990): 36–41; and Clark D. B., et al. “Surreptitious drug use by patients in a
panic disorder study,” American Journal of Psychiatry 147 (April 1990): 507–10.
24
Hinds M. deC., “Anxiety rises as New York limits tranquilizer prescriptions,” New York Times,
January 21, 1989.
25
Winslow R., “Tranquilizer prescription law studied,” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1990.
26
Medical Society of the State of New York, “Triplicate prescription: Issues and answers,” News of
New York (February 28, 1991): 5.
27
Ibid., pp. 2 and 5.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid, p. 1.
30
Ibid.
31
Stark P., “Not all drug lords are outlaws,” New York Times, August 12, 1990.
32
Todd, J., quoted in Meier, “Widening drug availability.”
33
Kleber H. D., “The nosology of abuse and dependence,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 24 suppl.
2 (1990): 57–64; quote at p. 58.
34
“20 drugstores, 25 doctors off Medicaid,” New York Times, January 28, 1989.
35
Verhovek S. H., “Doctor charged with Medicaid fraud,” New York Times, May 31, 1991.
36
“20 drugstores.”
37
Clark et al., “Cancer hurts.”
38
Jones L., “Hospice’s next step: Into medical mainstream,” American Medical News (January 7,
1991): 17.
39
Goleman, “Physicians said to persist.”
40
Shuchman M., “Depression hidden in deadly disease,” New York Times, November 15, 1990.
41
Ibid.
42
Cleeland C. S., quoted in “Group backs more narcotics use for cancer,” American Medical News
(May 11, 1990): 28.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.

8. Between Dread and Desire: The Burden of Choice

1
Casanova (Giovanni Jacobo Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798), quoted in M. Schnyder, “Gedanken
zur Drogen—und Suchtprophylaxe” [Reflections on drug abuse—and drug addiction prevention],
Neue Zurcher Zeitung (October 20–21, 1984): 37; the translation is mine.
2
The Apocrypha 1 Maccabees 2:52.
3
James 1:12.
4
Matthew 6:12.
5
Emerson R. W., Essays, quoted in B. Stevenson, ed., The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims,
and Famous Phrases (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 2291.
6
See Szasz T. S., Ceremonial Chemistry, 1974, reprint, rev. ed. (Holmes Beach, FL: Learning
Publications, 1985), ch. 11.
7
Twain M., Following the Equator, vol. 1 (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1903), p. 339.
8
Twain M., Wits and Wisecracks, selected by Doris Benardete (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper
Press, 1961), p. 28.
9
Friedman M., “An open letter to Bill Bennett,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 1989.
10
Ibid.
11
“Widow of alcoholic at brewery wins suit,” New York Times, October 31, 1990.
12
See, for example, Rothman D. J., “M.D. doesn’t mean ‘more deaths,’” New York Times, April 20,
1991. For my general critique, see Szasz T. S., The Therapeutic State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus
Books, 1984) and The Untamed Tongue (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1990).
13
See, for example, Somerville J., “Illinois task force issues model right-to-die bill,” American
Medical News (April 20, 1990): 20.
14
See, for example, Gianelli D. M., “Compassion or murder? Washington state considers legalizing
euthanasia,” American Medical News (November 2, 1990): 3 and 6.
15
See Gianelli D. M., “Wash. voters asked if MDs may offer active euthanasia,” American Medical
News (May 18, 1990): 1 and 35; quote at p. 35.
16
See Szasz T. S., “The ethics of suicide,” 1971, reprinted in The Theology of Medicine, 1977,
reprint (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 68–85; “The case against suicide
prevention,” American Psychologist 41 (July 1986): 806–12; and The Untamed Tongue, pp. 245–52.
17
Editorial, “Mr. Pavlov’s ruinous reflexes,” New York Times, February 15, 1991.
18
Barnes D. G., A History of tire English Corn Laws from 1660–1846, 1930, reprint (New York:
Augustus M. Kelley/Reprints of Economic Classics, 1965); and McCord N., The Anti-Corn Law
League, 1838–1846 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958).
19
See Dam K. W., The GATT: Law and International Economic Organization (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970). The acronym GATT stands for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
20
Smith A., quoted in N. Longmate, The Breadstealers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 4.
21
Smith J. B., quoted in ibid., p. 19.
22
Russell J., quoted in ibid., p. 211.
23
For a libertarian critique of the Corn Laws, see Spall R. F., “Landlordism and liberty: Aristocratic
misrule and the Anti-Corn-Law League,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 8: (Summer 1987): 213–36.
24
Bennett W. J., quoted in Newsweek (June 26, 1989): 15; also Editorial, “Off with their heads: A
strange recipe for morality from our leader in drug war,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, June 17, 1989.
25
Jefferson T., “Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1781, reprinted in A. Koch and W. Peden, eds., The
Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Modern Library, 1944), pp. 276–77.
26
Mises L. von, Human Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 728–29
27
Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry, pp. 75–79.
28
Burke E., “A Letter from Mr. Burke to a Member of the National Assembly in Answer to Some
Objections to His Book on French Affairs,” in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, vol.
3 (Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1826), p. 315.
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 About the Author

THOMAS SZASZ (1920–2012) was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, State

University of New York Health Science Center, Syracuse. Dr. Szasz not
only holds numerous awards but has been honored by the establishment of
an award in his name for outstanding contributions to the cause of civil
liberties. Generally acknowledged as having had a greater influence on
contemporary thinking about psychiatry and mental illness than anyone in
the field, he is the author of the classic The Myth of Mental Illness and,
more recently, The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary.