The Tory Anarchist

I’m leaning towards voting for Barr come November. But if Obama picks Virginia Sen. Jim Webb as his running mate, I might have to vote Democratic. Browsing through Webb’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, I see that Webb has a reasonably sound view on the drug war. After listing many of the war’s evils — the overflowing prisons, the counter-productive and region-destabilizing interdiction efforts in Afghanistan and Latin American — Webb writes:

The time has come to stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana. It makes far more sense to take the money that would be saved by such a policy and use it for enforcement [against] gang-related activities. We should also fully fund the increasingly popular concept of drug courts, where drug offenders are allowed to enter treatment instead of prison and have their drug offense expunged from their records if they successfully complete treatment. …

Drug addiction is not in and of itself a criminal act. It is a medical condition, indeed a disease, just as alcoholism is, and we don’t lock people up for being alcoholics. Most Americans understand this distinction, even though the political process seems paralyzed when it comes to finding remedies to address it. Our country urgently needs more funding and more treatment centers for treating this disease, not more prison cells for punishing people who have fallen into conduct that, at bottom, is more harmful to themselves than it is to our society.

This is, or used be, pre-DLC, a fairly standard liberal line, and there’s much about it I don’t like. I’m enough of a Szaszian to think that drug abuse (and alcoholism) is more often a personal-responsibility issue than a medical one, and more funding for government-run treatment programs doesn’t seem too promising to me. All that notwithstanding, this is still a better, more humane policy than what the Clintonites and Republicans are offering, and it’s about as good as what Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr has been saying lately. Barr now takes a federalist line against the drug war — and federal rehabilitation programs too, I presume — but he’s shaky on interdiction. By contrast, Webb writes:

the reality is that the opium production in Afghanistan is an example of basic market economics at work. The Afghanis grow opium, sometimes in fields so vast that they resemble the rice paddies of Vietnam, because there is a foreign market for their crops, a market that they could not duplicate with any other known product.

If you want to reduce the opium cop, you’ll have to find a way to reduce the demand for heroin at its destination point.

Webb also objects to giving “the Mexican government a pile of money to buy fancy equipment, which it may or may not use to try and chase down drug runners in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.” Webb’s suggestion that we use the anti-drug aid given to Mexico to fight gangs here in the U.S. is not necessarily a great improvement: fighting drug gangs over here instead of over there. But the direction of Webb’s thought on the drug war in general is encouraging. He sees it as an injustice to lock up nonviolent offenders, and he knows interdiction efforts are worse than futile.

I’ve lately been reading another senator’s thoughts on prohibition — of alcohol rather than narcotics — the late “senatorial immortal” Jim Reed’s The Rape of Temperance, published in 1931, two years after Reed had left the Senate. Webb and Barr could both profit from consulting Reed’s book, especially on the topic of the essential folly of the prohibitionist project:

Basically these regulatory statutes are mistaken or vicious beause they invade the realm of morals.

We seek to do by legislative enactment that which belongs to the school, the church, the home. We fail because a constable, a prohibition spy, or a jailer cannot take the place of a minister … Like it or not, the cold fact is that no people will obey a law they do not respect. And no law can be enforced by officers of the law which is not in the in the vast majority of instances voluntarily obeyed and enforced.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Books, Liberty, Politics, War, magazines. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.