People have used drugs to control their minds for as long as we have known how. We do this for many reasons, from recreational highs, to performance improvement, to increased sociability. In any case, only the owner of the mind in question should decide what goes in it. There is a human tendency to want to control the minds of those around us to ensure that no one in our community is a threat to others or isn’t working hard enough to support those around them. Governments take advantage of this with various policies, some of which are intended to make us more productive taxpayers, but all of which serve special interests. Prohibition of any substance is premised on the idea that your body is government property, and you do not have the right to decide what goes in it. Possession is never a crime.
The prohibition racket is very prominent in modern governments because there are many beneficiaries. In most places, alcohol is the dominant recreational drug and the industry behind it spends plenty of money keeping the competition away by paying off politicians who reinforce the false premises, faulty logic, immoral enforcement, and outright lies of prohibition. In the case of marijuana prohibition (as well as for numerous other natural drugs with healing properties), the pharmaceutical industry has an enormous incentive to keep cheaper (sometimes free) and more effective drugs illegal. Keeping drugs away from people who want them is an impossible and endless task that “requires” vast resources to be diverted to police and those who equip them. These groups all have an interest in supporting prohibition and many have no problem lying to the public or hiring politicians to do it for them.
Prohibition policies, once enacted, become entrenched very quickly, not just because of the financial incentives, but also because it is such an easy racket to maintain. People will always do drugs. Enforcement is a matter of what society will tolerate and the only real check is the conscience of the enforcers. Real crimes require victims, but prohibition is based on calling a victimless behavior a crime so that police have an excuse to sacrifice their morality. Once there is a critical mass of enforcers with socially-accepted enforcement policies, there is nothing to stop them from planting drugs on their victims, making it very easy to keep prohibition profitable.
One assumption of the drug war is that some drugs are illegal because they are dangerous or unhealthy. In other words, because doing drugs might ruin your life, if you’re caught with them, the government will ruin your life. In many places, most common drugs that aid productivity are allowed. If a drug is unpopular enough that it can be demonized, but widespread enough that banning it can be profitable, it will probably be made illegal.
To the extent that drug use is a legitimate problem, nothing makes it worse than charging in to point guns at everyone involved. This drives the market underground, creating new problems of violence and addiction. People who can’t control their use are less able to get help. It also drives up prices for the addict, encouraging financial destitution. Some will say prohibition is futile because it doesn’t achieve its stated objectives, and many governments can’t even keep drugs out of prisons. They are missing the point: prohibition works exactly as intended and is a very profitable racket.
Chapter 7 Section IV From FREEDOM! by Adam Kokesh
I am the author of FREEDOM!, a book endorsed (I mean banned) by the US Department of “Justice.” You can get a copy here. I’m running for Not-President in 2020 on the platform of the peaceful, orderly, and responsible dissolution of the United States federal government. You can find out more here. You can find an event near you here. Whoever has the top comment on this post after 24 hours can claim a free signed copy of FREEDOM! by sending me a message with their address.
