81 years ago. The federal government may one day take notice.
Most of the US Constitution is anti-libertarian and designed to extract more taxes and centralize political power. Some of the Amendments, however, are quite pro-freedom, including, of course, the first ten amendments, but we should also mention the 21st amendment, which repealed the 18th amendment banning the sale, importation, production, and possession of alcoholic beverages.
How quaint it was that Americans once thought we needed an amendment to allow the federal government to ban and substances and regulated what we eat or drink. Shortly after the passage of the 21st amendment, however, the feds realized they can just do whatever they want and pass statutes banning this substance or that. And regulating each and every thing you put in your body. This is what we call the Drug War today, which in government action is indistinguishable from the Prohibition of old, but which apparently, magically, requires no amendment to authorize it. Enormous numbers of Americans today find this to be perfectly fine and acceptable, and many of these people refer to themselves as being in favor “free markets.”
Ludwig von Mises, of course, is not to be found among such people. Last year in The Free Market, Laurence Vance wrote on Mises’s views on the matter:
None of this means that there is necessarily anything good about illicit drugs, but as Mises explains “It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices.” But, as Mises contends, the fact that something is a vice is no reason for suppression by way of commercial prohibitions, “nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of a government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora’s box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.”
The other mischievous dangers of the drug war that have been let loose are legion. The war on drugs has clogged the judicial system, unnecessarily swelled prison populations, fostered violence, corrupted law enforcement, eroded civil liberties, destroyed financial privacy, encouraged illegal searches and seizures, ruined countless lives, wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hindered legitimate pain treatment, turned law-abiding people into criminals, and unreasonably inconvenienced retail shopping. The costs of drug prohibition far outweigh any possible benefits.
But that’s not all, for once the government assumes control over what one can and can’t put into his mouth, nose, or veins or regulates the circumstances under which one can lawfully introduce something into his body, there is no limit to its power and no stopping its reach. Again, as Mises makes clear “[o]pium 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.”
“As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life,” Mises goes on, “we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail.”
Read the full article.
