Comments Elsewhere

La Lubu: Rad geek, the argument you present privileges wealthier drug users. Because let’s face it, most heroin addicts are not going to be capable of holding down an average, everyday job.

La Lubu, I’m not suggesting that heroin addiction is a good idea, or that it’s not a problem. I’m denying that heroin addicts should not be thrown in prison for using heroin. If people claim to be concerned about the welfare of addicts then they should not suggest restraining them and locking them in a cage with a population of violent criminals. If people claim to be concerned about the welfare of people other than the addicts (e.g. victims of street crime, or victims of violence or neglect in the home, or whatever), then the issue for the legal system to address is theft, battery, neglect, etc., not the drug use.

It’s certainly true that many people cannot afford rehab on their own. That’s a damn shame, but it is not a justification for forcing rehab on them against their will. It’s a good reason to try to make it available to poor people (through financial aid, sliding-scale programs, etc.). It’s not a good reason to (a) lock them in prison or (b) threaten to lock them in prison unless they participate.

Your suggestion that I’m unfamiliar with the violence involved in drug trafficking, or with the the way that people are victimized by drug users in their family, is unfounded, and it’s frankly shitty of you to presume otherwise without any knowledge of me or my family. I’m well aware of the former, and my own family has far too much personal experience with neglect, abandonment, and physical abuse that was tied to alcoholism and other drug addictions. I’ve nowhere claimed that irresponsible drug use isn’t a problem; what I’ve claimed is that the massive government violence involved in drug prohibition isn’t a reasonable response to those problem.

Robert:

Nonsense. They have legitimate authority through the assent of the governed, not because of some intangible (and empirically unprovable) characteristic of their policies.

The “assent” of an electoral majority is certainly not sufficient for legitimacy. Even if the majority of the electorate approved of, say, the Nuremberg Laws, or the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that would be absolutely no argument for the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Laws or the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. And it would be no argument for enforcing either of them. Unless you are willing to accept a totalitarian theory of political authority, then you are, I’m afraid, stuck with recognizing that there are in principle some limits on what a government can enact, even if that government is backed by a majority of the electorate. (It does not matter whether the authority consists of 535 legislators, or of 50%+1 of the voting public; the point is that there are things that nobody at all has the right to do to other people.)

Now, you could claim, if you wanted, that some policies are more monstrously unjust than others, and only the really really monstrous ones should be refused on the grounds of their injustice. But then you’ll have to give some argument for why the massive violence involved in drug prohibition (including the violence of arrest and incarceration, and also the violence that results from driving the market underground) is only on “merely unjust” rather than “monstrously unjust” side of the ledger. Or you could claim, if you wanted, that any atrocity that’s backed up by an electoral majority under a democratic constitution really is legitimate, no matter how unjust it is. But if you want to argue that, then you’ll have to explain where you think that electoral majorities get the right to treat dissenters that way.

Me:

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.

Robert:

But it does. They decided to elect a certain set of representatives, and those representatives made certain laws, …. And so saying drug laws are invalid because we find them unjust — when the populace disagrees — is an attempt to override the legitimate choices of other people.

You’ve missed the point. You’ve also seriously misunderstood, or misrepresented, my position.

Your rhetoric about overriding the decisions of others is plausible only insofar as you’re referring to the decisions that people make concerning themselves. It would be, for example, presumptuous of me to try to override your decisions about what sort of education you should get, or where you should work, or what size of a family you should have, or how you should decorate your living room. I have no business making you change your plans about these things against your will, even if you would end up with a better education, or a better job, or a more rewarding family life, or a more attractive living room, as a result. But I have every right to “override” decisions that you are trying to make for me: if you are trying to force me to go to the college that you prefer for me, or take the job that you prefer for me, or decorate my living room the way you want me to decorate it, then I have every bloody right to “override” that decision, because you have no right to make the decision for me.

You cannot sensibly posture as wanting to let people alone to make their own decisions here while also endorsing the enforcement of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition just means interfering, by the use or threat of physical force, with people’s decisions about how to spend their own time and what to put into their own bodies. When I suggest that drug laws should not be enforced, the only decisions I am “overriding” are the decisions that the governing majority wants to impose on peaceful third parties against their will. And I don’t give a damn about whether or not the governing majority is left alone to push innocent third parties around. That’s not something they have the right to expect.

Further, I’d like to note that I did not claim that any law is void because “we” find it unjust. The claim is that laws are void if they are actually unjust, whether or not anyone finds them so. If I thikn the laws against slavery are unjust, and so defy them by enslaving my neighbors, that does not mean that the laws are void, and does not making enforcing them illegitimate. It just makes me monstrously wrong about the moral status of the laws in question. The issue has to do with how a law actually treats the people subjected to it, not how third parties look on happen to react to that treatment.