Drugs and Libertarianism

Posted on June 29, 2009
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics | 17 Comments

I’m no Libertarian. (I’m for small but vigorously enforced regulations and don’t entirely buy the “there are no positive rights” argument) That said I’ve long thought the Libertarian argument against the drug war was compelling. Even conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley were convinced. Megan McArdle has up an interesting post in light of Michael Jackson’s overdose of demerol.

Discussion question for libertarians: assume we all agree that drugs should be legal. Is a doctor who enables an addicted patient to take fatal doses a good doctor, or should he be liable for malpractice? Discussion question for non-libertarians: how, pray tell, is this an argument in support of our current draconian drug laws?

I think that if drugs are legalized there are two ways to do it. The first is a mass decriminalization. There is then a “buyer beware” for people stupid enough to purchase unlicensed drugs. The second is some kind of competition with unlicensed drugs. That would be typically something akin to how methadone clinics work now. You have people come in. If they get the drugs they are being monitored so that if something happens a doctor can step in. Presumably you have them sign forms warning of the dangers before hand. But the fact that the amounts are monitored it is much safer.

To Megan’s question, it seems equivalent to asking if a doctor at a methadone clinic screws up. If they are negligent then of course they should be open for suing. For the street dealer I have a hard time seeing how you could sue since technically you are breaking the law (obtaining black market drugs). It’s akin to asking if you can sue the people you bought a stolen stereo from if it doesn’t work.

It seems to me though that getting rid of the drug war isn’t taking the position that drugs should be treated like alcohol and available at the local 7-11. Rather it’s just noting that the number of users of drugs doesn’t appear to be affected much by enforcement and that the costs for the drug war vastly outweigh the benefits.

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Comments

17 Responses to “Drugs and Libertarianism”

The logical corollary of drug legalization is the elimination of prescription requirements for virtually all medications. That seems to work pretty well in South Korea. The need for drug testing in certain safety critical jobs would probably go up, although I see that as a minor downside. A more serious issue is highway safety.

2 Mommie Dearest on June 30th, 2009 11:51 am

I read a book by a small-town law enforcement officer (very libertarian) which pointed out the ways that our 30 year war on drugs is a failure. After witnessing loved ones in their experiences with drugs, I agree with decriminalization of most recreational drug use. They will suck your life away, but it’s more effective to educate and rehabilitate than to arrest and incarcerate drug users. Drug dealers? I’d execute them. Here’s my source information, y’all can decide your opinion on the matter for yourself.

http://www.libertybill.net/

I never thought I would see the drug war this way, but I do. It’s a waste of resources and (more importantly, in my view) too much power in the hands of law enforcement.

Yeah, the resource question is important. The amount of people we could put in treatment for the cost of law enforcement and incarceration is ridiculous. I don’t favor total decriminalization – but make it a minor fine and require treatment and don’t focus in on it so much.

Mark, while I’m really sympathetic to getting rid of prescriptions, there are a lot of dangers to that. Not the least of which is antibiotics losing their effectiveness due to overuse.

Note that most drug dealers are users themselves and pretty small time. The “big time” dealers are more distasteful but the vast majority of drug dealers don’t exactly make much money at it. And it’s hard to feel too upset about them since they often view it more as sharing of a sort.

Interestingly, I an skeptical of the “no positive rights” aka libertarian rights argument. I also favor small, well enforced regulations in a variety of areas. Yet I consider myself a libertarian. I take the label to be more about relative social liberalism and relative economic conservatism with an emphasis on significant decentralization and reduction of power of the government than we currently have.

At libertarian gatherings, you get a mishmash of people best unified by that concept, not a relatively esoteric ethical argument about rights than many noted libertarian thinkers (Friedman, Hayek, Epstein, etc.) would never buy into anyway.

Freakonomics had a fun chapter on why so many drug dealers are living at home, or in otherwords, are making poor wages. The vast majority of drug dealers are making terrible wages with only dreams of bigger business. Even mid-level dealers aren’t that common compared to the workers at the base.

One thing that I think fools people is that drug dealers often have a lot of money stored in cash stashed away somewhere. This is a function of the black market. At the street level, a person is buying hundreds of dollars with of drugs with cash and selling at a mild to moderately increased process. If you need to buy 500 dollars worth of a drug to get a $50 profit margin on the turnaround, that means you need to have 500 dollars of initial investment saved up somewhere. Drug dealers are often trying to build up this pool of available money to buy more drugs to make a modest profit. Then when they are caught with large amounts of money (that the police sensationalize for their benefit), people mistakenly assume that drugs made them a ton of money. That’s not necessarily the case.

Yeah I agree. I also agree about someone flashing a roll of hundreds. It seems impressive until you think what the typical American brings into their bank. Most Americans just don’t handle a lot of cash. When you consider the overhead and so forth it’s even less.

I realize my previous post might be a bit unclear. Libertarianism often is divided into two main branches. There are the natural rights theorists and the utilitarians.

Most, though not all, of the natural rights theorists argue that rights are only negative – that is people only have rights to not be treated in certain ways. This is sometimes called libertarian rights theory in ethics. It forms the backbone of their arguments against state coercion. While I’m a libertarian, I don’t believe in this. Nor do many other libertarians.

It’s worth noting that the utilitarians make up a substantial portion of influential libertarians. Milton Friedman is arguably the most famous libertarian of all, and he didn’t buy libertarian rights theory.

Likewise, many libertarians favor some set of government regulations. The anarcho-capitalists or even the “nightwatchman state” libertarians are only a small piece of the pie.

I think libertarianism is better defined more loosely in terms of a certain kind of social liberalism and economic conservatism that focuses on personal liberty. If you find yourself agreeing a lot with the ACLU and Chicago School of economics, for instance, then it probably is apt to call you libertarian. For what it is worth, I always thought William F. Buckley had a strong libertarian streak running through his thought. His stance on the drug war is a manifestation of that.

Jason, while I can appreciate an utilitarian defended Libertarianism I’m not sure most of the Libertarian positions I see can really be defended easily via utilitarianism. (I’m here thinking of some of the arguments about universal health care)

Admittedly many Libertarians do seem more tied to J. S. Mill (from whom my own quasi-libertarian gusts come from) than others like Locke or the like.

We have long since lost the drug war to organized crime and waste valuable time and resources going after dime bag dealers and users.

I’m all for legalizing, regulating and taxing.

Someone recently noted that the great success in some ares of criminal science involves keeping it illegal but rejecting the strategy of the DEA of going after the major traffickers. The DEA then puts enormous pressure on local law enforcement to act as a “testimony mill” for capturing bigger fish. That is they pressure local police to capture petty criminals so as to turn on the bigger fish and so on up the chain. The evidence is overwhelming that this doesn’t work due to supply and demand.

The success is to reform our probation system and have mandatory drug tests and only put people in prison for a few days if they are found using. This has several effects. First off it keeps people out of prison where they are turned into hardened criminals. (It’s cheaper too) It also ends the “drug war” as we now have it. But more importantly it leads to these people being the peers of potential criminals. It’s one thing to have someone disappear. It’s quite an other to have people you know as friends have to go home at 8 in the evening because of curfew and then to see them go to jail for a few nights if they use drugs. The evidence is overwhelming that this also has a greater deterrance on drug use than any other program.

That’s what I’d like to see put in place.

Clark,

Personally I’d love to see our country get away from taking drugs to solve physical problems with our bodies. I know that’s not going to happen, at least any time soon. When it comes to the use of drugs, my feeling shifts from two points. On the one hand, I trust myself to understand what I need for my body and would prefer more control over the choice of medicine. On the other hand, I don’t trust others to do the same. It’s a rather strange feeling. I don’t think it is wise to allow too much control over medicines, particularly addictive ones, to patients. I’m sure pharmaceutical companies would not be too happy about it because of the huge lawsuits they will have to deal with when people overdose and die.

As I prefer to use drugs as little as possible, I don’t have any quarrel with the way the system is currently run, with the exception that I would do all I could to limit the amount of pharmaceutical commercials on TV. I can’t tell you how tired I am hearing about lipitor.

In the case of Michael Jackson, he was given medicine he never should have gotten. The drug “perpefol” or whatever it is called, is apparently (at least according to the “experts” on my television) only to be used in hospitals during like heavy duty surgery. Apparently Mr. Jackson was having real trouble falling asleep. Understandably, seeing how drugged up his body has been for the past 25 years since the Pepsi commercial went kabloey.

Sorry I’ve not kept up. The vacation from philosophy has been nice. I’ll be back posting hopefully next week.

I disagree about the drugs issues in that I think there is a lot of benefit to taking drugs. However there is often a marginal rate of return. That is some new drug has marginal utility over an existing (often low cost) drug. Unfortunately many doctors don’t understand this.

That said though I also think that the government needs to invest more money on research on “off label” uses for drugs out of patent and so forth, not to mention substances like Vit-D and so forth. Unfortunately the incentives is to develop new drugs since that’s the only way to leverage most of the money for testing.

So our system is screwy, but the issue really isn’t drugs.

Your point about patients is good too. While in some countries, like Mexico, patients do largely control things. But this has dangerous implications such as abuse of antibiotics. Plus we just have to accept that most of the population is both ignorant and have relatively little common sense. So it’s annoying to those of us who do research and who can make more informed decisions.

Clark,

You might be interested in reading about Portugal’s experience with drug legalization. It’s been a nearly-unqualified success, with usage rates down and treatment rates up. Google “drug legalization portugal”.

The drug culture and demographics don’t exactly correlate between the U.S. and Portugal, but their experience I think is something of an indication that liberalizing the U.S.’s punitive drug laws would be a step in the right direction.

Why is there not a war against for instance the pharamaceutical industry and its incestuous relationship with the psychiatric establishment.

You have people supposedly trained in psychology dealing with people often severely – and it’s worthwhile pausing to reflect upon how severe that damage can be – by socioeconomic disadvantage, domestic violence and abuse, all the rest of it, but doing nothing to guide these people to a better life because it’s so much easier and career-enhancing to foist some ludicrous diagnosis on them, prescribe them drug after drug, and generally railroad them into a permanent mental health black hole rather than get them up on their feet.

Most drug users come from a similar background. There are loads of people doing drugs – creating the market – who have been failed by a psychopharmaceutical industrial complex who teach them that medicating yourself is the only option. The psycho-drugs don’t work so these people medicate themselves illegally.

I realise that’s only part of the equation – and doesn’t include Wall Street or City of London financial high rollers living on cocaine highs, even though the consequences of that are now clear as well.

While I think the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs is exaggerated, it’s also clear they have a huge effect on those who suffer the most. And the alternatives tend not to work terribly well.

I agree that a lot of alcohol and drug abuse is self-medication I tend to disagree that those self-medicating do so because of the failure of psychiatric drugs. In most cases these people would do better with Zoloft rather than binge drinking or the like. I do agree that for many some therapy would help as well. Illegal drugs can only help so much and often bring lots of other effects that make things worse. Further in some cases they may make mental illness worse. (Although I don’t know off the top of my head studies on that – just my experience with people caught up in drugs)

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