DEATH IS EASY by Russell Madden   Softcover, $14.95 Hardcover, $24.95     (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $4.81.)	FREEDOM, As If It Mattered by Russell Madden   Softcover, $24.95 Hardcover, $34.95   (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $5.63.)

As a regular viewer of your television program, I have enjoyed your defenses of individual responsibility and initiative. I also am pleased when you state you are motivated by facts rather than emotions in deciding your stances on the issues of the day; when you state that morality should not be legislated; and when you defend principled, consistent approaches to the problems we face.

I am troubled, however, when I hear you make arguments which I believe are inconsistent with ideas such as those mentioned above. While there are a number of areas in which we disagree, the topic motivating me to write this letter now is your approach to the drug problem. As your arguments have not convinced me of the correctness of your position, so, too, I do not expect the points I raise to alter your beliefs. The purpose of my letter is less to try to persuade you than to ask you to clarify for me your reasoning process in maintaining that your position on drugs is consistent with your general defense of freedom and distaste for the nanny state. I would find it personally enlightening if I could understand how you come to the conclusion that no contradiction exists here.

As for myself, I am a communication instructor at Mt. Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I have had a number of essays printed in The Freeman and other magazines and spent a year as an editorial writer for The Daily Iowan newspaper in Iowa City.

Before I delve specifically into the drug issue, there are a number of general points I would first like to establish.

• Any valid ethical/moral system must meet certain criteria to qualify as a guide to life's moral issues:

1. Alternatives must exist among which an individual can choose. Since one purpose of morality is to guide us in making choices, where choices do not exist, there is no ethical decision that can be made.

 

2. Moral choices imply the existence of free will, that is, the ability of individuals on some level to select course x as opposed to y or z. If one is not free to select the bad over the good or vice versa, then, again, morality becomes meaningless.

 

3. Such free will choices must be free, i.e., uncoerced. If you are forced/coerced to do the right thing, then again it is incorrect to apply morality to what you are forced to do. (By coercion, I mean the use or threat of physical force, either directly or indirectly.) You cannot be considered a moral agent, worthy of blame or praise for your ethical choices, if it is not you making those choices which can affect your life for good or ill.

 

• Political rights are the extension of personal ethical guidelines to the social realm, i.e., they are guidelines defining how individuals must deal ethically with one another in their relationships, that is, how they should treat one another in order to preserve the moral autonomy and dignity of everyone as individuals. In line with the function and purpose of morality as outlined above, this means that individuals may not initiate force to make other people act in ways violating their free will ethical choices, as long as those choices likewise are noncoercive. Thus, each person may follow his own morality -- for good or ill -- as long as that morality respects the right of others to make their own ethical judgments as they best see fit. Non-coercion also implies you cannot make someone else (who does not choose to associate with you voluntarily) suffer the negative consequences of your moral decisions. Conversely, someone else cannot ethically force you to surrender the values you have earned when you have made correct ethical decisions. Retaliatory force/coercion is permissible to defend oneself from those who would attempt to violate your political rights

• The only legitimate purpose of government is to recognize and help to preserve our individual political rights, that is, to prevent the initiation of coerion against us by other groups or individuals or to stop and/or punish those who have done so. Thus the armed forces, courts, and police are the only legitimate activities of government, that is, the state has a monopoly on the legal use of force, but only in a retaliatory way. Government transgresses its proper role whenever it seeks to initiate force against those who have not engaged in coercive behavior. Thus, the government acts to preserve the conditions necessary for individuals to make their own moral choices, that is, enables them to practice their (non-coercive) ethics (whatever they are) without fear of physical harm from others. The state must therefore not attempt to legislate any particular morality. Moral choices must be left to individuals if the concept is to have any meaningful role in guiding people's decisions.

Basically, the issue of drug use involves the application of these basic, underlying principles. I believe that your position on the legal status of the use of drugs (by adults) contradicts these ideas of what political freedom means. Indeed, I think your arguments against the legalization of drugs cedes to the liberals the very principle they use in calling for restrictions in so many areas of our lives. Gun control, health and safety laws and regulations, compulsory social security and medicare, and the crusade against tobacco all rely upon the same principle you seem to be implicitly endorsing by calling for the criminalization of drug use.

(I am not referring to coercive actions taken to supply a drug habit, e.g., theft, robbery, or murder. Nor does my position say minors should be allowed access to drugs. A proper morality is crafted for adults who are responsible for their own existences, e.g., while an adult must provide for his own livelihood [may not force others to provide for him], a child cannot be expected to make his own living and could force a parent to do so.)

You have stated that drugs should be outlawed and users severely punished because drugs kill and have no redeeming values. While I think the evidence shows that currently illegal drugs can be used recreationally and responsibly without long-term problems (e.g., thousands of soldiers used such drugs in Vietnam and students used them here in the U.S. in the Sixties and then simply quit using them), even if such drugs always and in every instance led to negative consequences, your position would not be justified.

It is even less justified when compared, for example, to alcohol. Many of the charges leveled against drugs today were made against alcohol during the prohibitionist movement. Yes, drugs can be used irresponsibly and can lead to destroyed lives. Yet that can be said with even more evidence against alcohol. Prohibition of alcohol led to the same kind of violent criminal problems as we witness today in regard to the prohibition of drugs. Other than its social and legal acceptability today, there is no fundamental difference -- no difference in kind -- between alcohol use and drug use.

In abstract form, your argument boils down to, "Because [X] can and has been used irresponsibly [misused] by some people and can have (extremely) negative consequences and harm innocent people, [X] should be prohibited/banned/outlawed for all individuals, and the people who use it in any fashion should be punished." Yet this is precisely the argument statists/collectivists use all the time to justify their intrusions into our private lives.

Substitute any number of objects or actions for [X] and you will have the arguments constantly being advanced by those seeking to intrude themselves into our lives. "Because guns can and have been used irresponsibly by some people, they should be banned." "Because tobacco can and does have such negative health consequences, it should be outlawed." "Because over-eating can have life-threatening effects on obese people, we should tax junk food out of existence and force people to eat right and exercise." "Because alcohol can be misused, it should be prohibited."

Essentially, the main problem with this argument is that it says people should not be treated as moral agents and allowed to choose well or poorly but should instead have even the possibility of making a moral choice prohibited to them even in the absence of any coercive behavior on their part. Though you argue convincingly against liberals who seek to make our decisions for us, who want to run our lives, or who desire to protect us from ourselves because we are "too stupid/ignorant" to make our own choices, you are making the same argument in regard to drug use.

Yes, if someone uses drugs and then harms someone else, he should be punished. But the same can be said for drunk driving. No one has a right to endanger someone else's life without his consent. A drunk driver is not punished for consuming alcohol per se but for using it in a context which violates the non-initiation of force principle. He is perfectly within his political rights to get stinking drunk in the privacy of his own home, even drink himself to death. He must be free to make even self-destructive moral choices if his moral autonomy/dignity is to be respected.

The same principle applies to drug use. Prohibiting the use of drugs to everyone because it can be used in a way which violates individual rights is an example of prior restraint, that is, assuming you are guilty of a crime before you have done anything violating someone's rights. If a person denies one individual or group of people the right to make decisions which he believes are objectively harmful, then that individual has no basis for complaint when a stronger gang does the same thing to him.

Such prior restraint is demonstrated all the time by politicians who impose regulations on business owners simply because they own businesses. Business people are assumed to be guilty even if they have never done anything coercive in nature.

Drug prohibition, then, is a prime example of the government violating the moral and political principles outlined above. From my perspective, your agreement with this action lends implicit support to the principle advocated by liberals and statists in nearly all of their attempts to run our lives. Your statements undercut not only the consistency you seek to obtain but your criticism of liberals when they seek to protect us from ourselves and to make our moral decisions for us (or more precisely, impose their morality on those who think differently).

I do not advocate drug use any more than I advocate racism, sexual discrimination, or tobacco use. Yet I have no desire to impose my values on others anymore than I would want them to impose their values on me. People must be free to make lousy choices as well as good ones. They can never be expected to obtain skill in making moral judgments if they are never allowed to do so.

Again, my purpose in writing is the hope that you may clarify for me how your support of drug criminalization is consistent with your stated positions regarding the impropriety of legislating morality and the value of trusting individuals to make their own decisions (and requiring them to live with the consequences of those decisions for good or ill). If you disagree with my characterization of the requirements for morality and the purpose of government, I would also be interested in those observations and how you might justify the initiation of force/coercion against those who are not endangering others' lives.

I am a passionate advocate of liberty and morality. I know you are, as well, even though we apparently disagree on the proper relationship between those two vitally important ideas.

Thanks for your time.