Anthony Placido, head of intelligence for the DEA, wants the 35-year-old drug war to continue because drugs are “mind-altering substances that destroy human life and create violence.”
Ponder carefully the first part of Placido’s statement — the part about drugs being bad for people. What he is saying is that as a government official, he should have the power to punish people for ingesting substances that are harmful only to themselves.
We have lived for so long with the drug war that we hardly give a thought to the audaciousness of such a claim.
Let’s assume that a person is sitting quietly in his own home somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. Every day, he ingests a quantity of cocaine … or marijuana … or heroin … or booze … or tobacco.
All of a sudden, Anthony Placido shows up with a SWAT team of drug agents, busts into the house, and declares, “We are here to help you see the error of your ways by arresting you, prosecuting you, incarcerating, and fining you, all for your own good because drugs are bad for you.”
Why doesn’t a person have the right to decide for himself what to ingest? Even if it is conclusively determined that an item is harmful to health, why shouldn’t a person nonetheless be free to ingest it, if that’s what he wishes to do? Why shouldn’t that be his business? Why should it be the business of Anthony Placido and his fellow statists to determine what people ingest and don’t ingest?
The statist sees everyone as part of a collective — like drones in a bee hive — and thinks that they must be made to serve the best interests of society. The notion that a person should be free to live his life on his own terms, no matter how harmful to himself, is anathema to a statist.
We libertarians see life differently. We believe that human beings are born with fundamental, natural, inherent, God-given rights, ones that are not subject to the whims of the collective. Among these rights is liberty, which entails the right of a person to live his life any way he wants, so long as his conduct is peaceful.
In a genuinely free society, people have every right in the world to ingest whatever they want, no matter how harmful or self-destructive and no matter how much others in that society disapprove of it. In a free society, the state no more has the authority to determine what a person ingests than it has to determine what a person reads. Fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote.
Placido also suggests that drugs “cause violence,” notwithstanding the obvious fact that most people who ingest drugs don’t commit acts of violence.
Libertarians have a different idea. How about punishing people who commit acts of violence, whether they ingest drugs or not, and leave everyone else alone?
It is amazing that statists like Placido fail to recognize a phenomenon that has characterized the war on drugs since its inception some 35 years ago. It is the drug-war itself, including the exorbitant black-market profits it generates, that has spawned massive violence across society in the form of gang wars, assassinations, murders, muggings, robberies, thefts, and burglaries.
The time has come to discharge Placido and his statist ilk into the private sector, where they can devote their lives to educating people about the dangers of drugs. It’s time to remove the legal authority of these people to punish individuals for making peaceful decisions that others disapprove of. It’s time to end the untold violence that the drug war has spawned. There’s only one way to do that: Legalize drugs.