Just before he leaves office, President Biden is commuting the prison sentences of 2,500 people who have been convicted of non-violent drug offenses. Biden stated, “This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars.”
Biden’s last-minute drug-war commutations raise several questions.
First, why did he wait until now to release those people from prison? Given his professed concern for righting wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and giving people more time with their families, why didn’t he issue those commutations during his first week in office? Why did he force those people to spend four more unnecessary years in prison?
Second, and more important, why were those people in prison in the first place? In other words, what business does the federal government (or any government) have punishing people for engaging in purely peaceful behavior, even if it is considered harmful?
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That’s the question that all too many Americans simply refuse to ask. Having been born and raised under a vicious drug war, they view drug laws as something permanent, immutable, and perpetual. From the first grade on up, they were indoctrinated into believing that government has a legitimate role in controlling what people ingest and punishing them when they ingest something that the government hasn’t approved.
Control of people is what the drug war is all about. All of the drug-war enforcement measures have one aim in mind: to prevent people from possessing and ingesting what the government says is harmful to them. Amazingly, with the exception of libertarians, no one finds that objectionable.
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek was referring to the push toward government regulation and economic control, it would be difficult to find a better example of America’s serfdom society than the drug war. With its power to determine what people possess, ingest, and distribute, the federal government has firmly established that it is the master and that the citizens are the serfs. Drug laws demonstrate perfectly that, for all practical purposes, the federal government owns the American people. They exist to serve the government.
Why shouldn’t people be free to possess, ingest, and distribute anything they want, no matter how harmful it might be? Why should the government wield the authority to send them to jail for any period of time, short or long? Why should there be any drug laws at all? After all, we don’t have laws against the possession, ingestion, and distribution of alcohol and tobacco. Why not the same for other drugs?
There is also a utilitarian question that needs to be asked? What good are drug laws? Sure, they enable the government to punish people who engage in self-destructive activity. But so what? People have always engaged in self-destructive activity. Moreover, despite all of the harsh measures that government has taken to enforce its drug war — which Biden and presidents before him have acknowledged with their pardons and commutations — people continue to engage in self-destructive activity.
The drug war has done nothing to change that aspect of human nature. What the drug war has done is make society worse. Consider the drug cartels and the drug gangs and the massive violence that has come with them. The cause? The drug war. Without drug laws, there would be no drug cartels or drug gangs or drug violence.
Or consider the massive assault on civil liberties brought on by the drug war: asset-forfeiture laws, no-knock raids, unjustified stopping of people and pat-down searches, and warrantless searches. Consider also mandatory-minimum sentences, assaults on financial privacy, and money-laundering laws. Consider also the never-ending parade of much-publicized record drug busts and criminal prosecutions.
None of it has worked to achieve a drug-free society. Yet, the drug war just keeps going and going and going. Just mindlessly repeating the same patterns, with every U.S. president striving to show how good and caring he is by issuing last-minute commutations and pardons of people for crimes that should never have been crimes in the first place.
