Rainy Day Women

A funny thing happens to conservatives on the way to the real world; they become fascists. I've told people for years that, if "liberal" and "conservative" actually mean anything, then I'm a conservative.

Somewhere along the way, however, the parlance of our times was cast inside a hall of broken mirrors, and the terms "liberal" and "conservative" emerged bloodied and disfigured, to the point where "conservative" means "self-righteous prick / international outlaw" and "liberal" means "terrorist lover / probable pedophile defender".

For those of us old enough, or wise enough, to realize that "conservatism", if it is allowed to retain its actual meaning, is the most American idea imaginable, it is clear that the so-called War on Drugs is the ultimate exemplar of the wholesale hijacking and mutilation of the premise of conservatism.

Ideas and ideals that fade immediately in the face of a real test are worth less than the paper they are written on or the tongue they are professed by. Just as diplomacy is the art of engaging adversaries rather than friends, the idea of conservatism is redeemed only when one allows that fidelity to that idea necessitates the tolerance of behavior by others than one would never sanction for himself.

Freedom of speech does not stop when that speech offends people. If it did, it would be no freedom at all. Freedom of religion does not apply only to Evangelicals. If it did, it would be no freedom at all. The right to an impartial trial applies to those who are probably guilty for the very same reason.

The point here is that freedom is messy. It necessitates allowing other people to do things, to say things, that may strike you as reprehensible. There is a sense that has taken hold in this country that our freedoms are much more negotiable that the Constitution would have it. Unfortunately, many conservatives are the vanguard of this apostasy.

Here's an example: I have been pulled over by police officers about half a dozen times in my life. On two of these occasions, the officer asked if he could search my car. In the first instance I consented. In the second, I refused. I refused because I know the 4th amendment to the Constitution, protecting me against unreasonable search and seizure.

Since the officer had not told me either why he pulled me over or why he felt compelled to search my property, I invoked that quaint and supposedly sacrosanct protection. When I invoked this right, I was told that I could either be searched then and there, or I could be searched "at the station". In other words, my assertion of my Constitutional rights was an arrestable offense. More succinctly, rights are crimes. So, rights are to be rhapsodized about, but when they are asserted, they are taken to be evidence of guilt. Things don't get more backwards than that.

The War on Drugs is a vast and futile artifice built on an insidious and entirely un-American foundation of illegal search and seizure, legislation of morality, mass incarceration, and criminalization of disease, poverty, and personal choice.

This argument has nothing to do with the merit of using drugs. I am not arguing that people should use any specific drugs; I am arguing that the government has absolutely no authority, under the Constitution, to criminalize personal consumption of anything, and that the cost of enforcing certain peoples' ideas of rectitude is astronomical in blood, money, and liberty.

Federal drug laws are unconstitutional because the tenth amendment, which is just as studiously ignored as the fourth, states that all power not explicitly granted to the federal government lies with the states or with the people. That's easy.

So let's pretend that the federal government gave a shit about the constitution, and that all anti-drug laws were local in nature. Even if this were the case, the premise of criminalizing consumption of any product is incompatible with liberty, that idol that conservatives bow to but largely despise.

Legalizing drugs, or sodomy for that matter, does not mean that people are somehow condoning those actions; it means that they are refusing to give the government the authority to deprive fellow citizens of their property and physical freedom for the "crime" of engaging in private personal behavior that some find distasteful. To fail to recognize this distinction is an act of willful blindness that mocks the very idea of liberty.

There are things I would never do. I would never have sex with a man, for example. I would never shoot heroin into my veins. But, more certain than either of those claims, I can say that I would NEVER consent in putting a fellow American in a cage for doing either of those things, because it would be an utter waste of the $30,000 per year that it costs one taxpayer to lock up another and because, much more importantly, it shows a contempt for liberty that no free nation can long abide.

Why do we have so many people in prison in this country? Is it because such a large share of us are predatory sociopaths? Or is it because our tyrannical government has managed in criminalizing so much of our behavior, that I know literally zero people who are not criminals? Murder is a crime. Theft is a crime. Marijuana is a plant.

When we talk of willful ignorance and contempt for liberty, those trends are only magnified by the fact that we have attempted Prohibition, which stands as the starkest illustration imaginable of the futility of legislating personal behavior that does not infringe on the life or property of others.

What did Prohibition accomplish? Did it decrease alcohol consumption? No, it did not. Despite that fact that the government made clear that it disapproved of drinking and that it was willing to criminalize citizens for the supposed crime of tying on a buzz, drinking did not decrease. What does this prove? It proves that consumption of illegal substances has absolutely nothing to do with the legality or illegality of the substance.

To believe that making a substance illegal will decrease the consumption of that substance, one must believe the following proposition: There are millions of people who would use cocaine or heroin if it were legal, but are dissuaded from doing so because they refuse to commit a crime. There are millions more who have always wanted to try marijuana, but have refrained from fear of arrest.

Any person with an average level of common sense knows this to be an absurd line of reasoning. Does anyone know anyone who would try heroin if it were suddenly legal? Does anyone know anyone who smoke cigarettes primarily because it is not a crime? Does anyone know anyone who drinks alcohol because it is legal but who would quit were Prohibition to return? Does anyone know anyone who would smoke a joint on their lunch break if it were legal, but has never tried marijuana precisely because it is not legal?

When people decide whether or not they will try alcohol, or cigarettes, or marijuana, or cocaine, or heroin, or homosexuality for that matter, the relative legality of the act is not among their primary considerations. Prohibition proved that, as if common sense were not enough.

What Prohibition did accomplish was the ascension of organized crime. How? Well, when the government criminalizes an action that a huge proportion of the citizens will participate in regardless, the government simply shifts the supplier from businessmen to black marketeers. And, since alcohol distribution was now a criminal act, the distributor governed and regulated themselves with criminal methods such as murder and extortion.

Where do gangs come from? Where does out highest-in-the-world murder rate come from? They come from the government criminalizing wide swaths of the population for actions they choose to indulge in in the privacy of their homes, however distasteful others may deem those actions.

We say we live in a free country, but I am not free to do what I choose in the privacy of my home, plain and simple. We have more of our citizens in prison than any other "free" country on earth. If I choose to smoke marijuana in my home, the government can put me in a cage. Let freedom ring.

This argument has nothing to do with the merits of drugs. It has to do with liberty. It is insulting and absurd to argue, as many do, that this is a zero-sum game in which one must either surrender their privacy and their liberty to the government or consent to life in a nation-wide crack house.


Liberty is NOT about condoning the behavior of others. It is about depriving the government of the means to invade the lives, the property, the very bodies, of ones fellow citizens, unless that citizen has deprived another of life or property. Many excuse condoning the violation of others' rights with that age-old excuse "that would never happen to me; I haven't done anything wrong."

That attitude, when applied to the War on Drugs, assumes two things. It assumes that marijuana is more important than the Bill of Rights. And it assumes that governments know how to restrain themselves. Only someone on drugs considerably harder than marijuana could believe that.


Certain portions of the Constitution, like the 2nd amendment, are clung to with such obstinate literalism that one questions the sanity of its proponents. The same person who will insist that they have the "right" to own a machine gun will insist that I do not have the right to smoke a joint. They need their machine gun, they say, to guard against a tyrannical government. Guess what, morons, it's already here.