As I wrote in my 1994 book Lost Rights, “The war on drugs is essentially a civil war to uphold the principle that politicians should have absolute power over what citizens put into their own bodies.” But there is scant hope that politicians will forfeit any punitive power regardless of how many lives they continue to blight.
https://mises.org/wire/my-forty-year-war-reefer-madness
Forty years ago last week, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner published my first attack on the federal drug war. The previous year, the Reagan administration had unleashed its “Just Say No” program, vilifying anyone who smoked a joint, sniffed the wrong powder, or used nonapproved hallucinogens. I was mortified to see Ronald Reagan—who was elected on a promise to get “government off your backs”—double-cross his supporters with what morphed into the most intrusive scheme in American history.
Like kids everywhere in the 1970s, I laughed at the 1936 movie Reefer Madness in my high school health class. I’d occasionally smoked marijuana but hadn’t felt compelled to burn down any orphanages afterward. When Reagan went on the antidrug warpath, I was “laying for him,” as Mark Twain would say.
The Herald Examiner was a conservative-leaning paper, so I slanted my argument accordingly: “Many heavy marijuana users voted Republican in 1982, so there is no proof that it causes irreparable brain damage.” I pointed out that legalizing and taxing marijuana could raise enough money to pay for the MX missile program that Reagan championed. (Pentagon boondoggles were much cheaper back then.) Ending marijuana prohibition would put hundreds of lawyers out of work, I cheerily noted. Reagan’s drug crackdown was playing to a culture war theme which I mocked in the final sentence of my piece: “Personally, I’m all in favor of locking up hippies, but we need to find a better reason.” The editor wisely deleted that last sentence before printing the article.
My attempts at humor were not universally appreciated. When I took the page from the Herald Examiner to a photocopy shop in uptown Washington, the cranky old manager was outraged by the article’s headline: “Making Pot a Crime Is, Well, Un-American.” He railed about how drugs were destroying the nation and wagged his finger so hard he almost threw his shoulder out of joint. The real problem, he said, was troublemakers like me. I just grinned at him and found another copy shop.
Two years later, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, I declared, “The only things drug laws achieve is to make drugs more dangerous, crime more prevalent, and government more obnoxious.” I scoffed, “If the FBI didn’t have a thousand agents chasing dope dealers, would the Soviets be having so much success stealing U.S. military secrets?” I also whacked the Feds’ narcotic nitwittery in the Detroit News and other papers.
My pieces had as much impact on the drug war as bouncing a ping pong ball off the hull of a battleship. After the drug war became politically profitable, the number of drug offenders in prisons rose tenfold. More people were locked up for drug offenses than for violent crimes, and possessing trace amounts of cocaine was often punished with longer sentences than rape, murder, or child molesting.
In 1992, I headed to Guatemala to give a few speeches on perfidious US protectionist policies. Outside of Guatemala City, I met farmers and small businessmen who explained to me how the US drug war was ravaging their country. A Guatemalan banker told me that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was involved in shooting down or forcing crash landings of small planes suspected of carrying drugs. A prominent Guatemalan politician told me, “If you criticize the Drug Enforcement Administration, you might lose your visa” and be banned from visiting the US.
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