Comments Elsewhere

Robert,

Certainly there is: to maintain the validity of our system of government.

A system of government is not more important than millions of innocent people’s lives and livelihoods. If maintaining the “validity” of the former requires destroying the latter, then the system of government deserves to be ignored, altered or abolished.

If democratically-elected legislatures pass laws, and those laws are not odious to the constitution under which they operate, then the laws should be enforced regardless of whether they are reasonable or just.

Why?

Enforcing an unjust law means using violence against innocent people in order to secure an aim that is unworthy of securing. Neither electoral majorities nor Constitutions have total authority over the people subject to them, and if they have legitimate authority it is only because of the justice of the policies they endorse. Laws or constitutions that endorse unjust violence against innocent people have stepped outside of the boundaries of their legitimate authority, and are no more legitimately binding than criminal compacts or pirates’ codes.

To do otherwise is to imbue some unelected body with the power to override the decisions of the legislature on matters specifically entrusted to the legislature.

It’s not a matter of an “unelected body” having some kind of special authority to veto the acts of the legislature. It’s a matter of the legislature not having any special authority to commit injustice against the innocent. Everybody — not as a “body,” but as free individuals — has the right to ignore or defy so-called laws that the legislature has no legitimate authority to enact: an “unjust law” is no law at all, and the idea that anyone is obliged to carry out an admitted injustice against innocent people is an affront to conscience.

I consider myself smarter and more informed than you. What decisions do you make for yourself, that I should get to override and change in your life, on the basis that I think your decisions are unreasonable?

Is this some kind of joke?

You have things exactly backward. Drug prohibition is founded on the premise that one group of people, who consider themselves smarter and more informed (the government, and perhaps the electoral majority behind them) are entitled to override the decisions of another group of people (drug users), on the grounds that the drug users’ decisions are unreasonable. Not only do they claim to be entitled to override drug users’ decisions about their own lives; they claim to be entitled to force drug users to comply with their judgments.

Demanding that “the people,” or the government, stop imposing their will on nonviolent drug users, does not involve overriding the decisions that they have made for themselves. It involves overriding the decisions that they have forced on innocent third parties, but those are “decisions” that neither “the people” nor the government had any right to make.