The issue of drug use has been on my personal radar the longest of all these ethical issues. I remember watching crime shows on TV while I was in middle school about good cops chasing down evil heroine drug dealers. I remember encountering drug users in the army and college, and in those times I also encountered new outlooks on the drug issue.
The attitude I picked up on in college and still hold to this day is: Recreational drug use is a victimless crime and the government should not be involved. Since those college days I've added a lot more diverse ammunition to that basic premise, and it still seems right.
But the big surprise to me is that the war goes on. ... Wow!
I estimate this war to prohibit is ten times more futile than fighting in Afghanistan, but the American community continues to support the effort. ... Wow again!
What's going on here? Americans are usually a whole lot more practical than this. If something isn't working, we try something that does work. We cut bait on the Vietnam situation. We didn't go to war over the Cuban Missile Crisis. We got rid of Sunday "Blue Laws" that kept retail stores closed. We let people wear jeans to school and into fine restaurants. Why has America been sticking with this expensive, not-working, criminalize-recreational-drug strategy for about a hundred years? Many people today feel that Nixon started the War on Drugs in the 1960's, but federal anti-recreational drug laws date back to the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.
The basic answer to its longevity is emotion -- people are thinking about this issue with their guts, not their heads. Just as love and guilt can make people do crazy things, so can fear, and I suspect fear is the big engine behind the drug war craziness.
The fear comes from two factors. First, people act strangely when they are intoxicated, and that is scary for others to watch -- it looks too much like being crazy. This first fear is often overcome by familiarity -- if friends and neighbors are routinely getting intoxicated in a certain way, the fear fades quickly because people have been getting drunk and silly since prehistoric times. The second fear comes from watching strangers get intoxicated. This is a combination fear -- strange actions and strange people -- and that fear is much harder to lose.
In practice, instead of losing that second kind of fear the mainstream American community has over the last century turned to outlawing what scared them -- de facto wishing it would go away -- and enthusiastically supported a laundry list of reasons why strange intoxications were bad, bad, bad.
Sadly, first the strangers -- immigrants and other non-mainstream people -- and then the youth of the sixties (also not mainstream people at that time), noticed the contradiction between how the community treated bad, bad, bad strange intoxicants and how it treated OK intoxicants such as nicotine and alcohol ... and called bullshit ... and partook and experimented. This response seems to have even more deeply scared the mainstream community and from the seventies on through to the present "getting tough on drugs" has been a consistent vote-getter for politicians and community leaders.
The biggest tragedy of sustaining this mainstream community fear is that we are now living in civil war conditions -- our civil liberties are curtailed, property rights are not respected, there is elevated violence, our police operate as if they are an occupying force, and our jails are filled. We don't call it one, but by most conventional measures America is in the midst of a civil war over the drug issue.
How do we end this civil war. It's simple... we take a big, deep breath... and we legalize... fully legalize... for recreational use.
When we do so, the non-mainstream parts of our American community become more fully enfranchised and they can take responsibility for their own actions. The drug supply infrastructure can "go legit" and stop supporting violence. The police can go back to being community helpers, not occupying soldiers who get to break down doors, collect loot from the hapless, get discouraged and corrupted by participating in an unwinnable situation, and get to fear for their lives whenever they deal with a potential drug situation.
Just as repealing Prohibition demonstrated that alcohol drinkers could drink responsibly, and alcohol suppliers could supply responsibly, so repealing anti-recreational drug use laws will let other intoxicant users and suppliers become responsible, as well. And when they do, we can end this hundred-years-long civil war and start healing all the damage it's doing to our community.