Joints and the Joint

There are many shameful and sordid facts about our country that we should reflect on regularly. This reflection need not be driven by self-pity or shame, but rather by a commitment to constant improvement.

Unfortunately, in a country whose wealth is only maintained by force or very real threats of force, self-reflection is an extremely touchy enterprise, as it often brings us face to face with our petty and evil sides.

Some of these facts? The United States is the only country in the world other than Somalia (which can only liberally be called a "country") that has not ratified a ban on landmines. The United States is one of three countries in the world to refuse to ratify the Children's Bill of Rights. The United States is the only country to use atomic weapons. The United States has more than 10 times the per capita wealth as Cuba, but far lower literacy rates and far higher infant mortality rates. And so on. And so forth.

But the issue that I'd love to see our President address personally, and challenge US to address, is the prison system. Land of the Free. Leader of the Free World. Right? But we have a higher percentage of our fellow citizens in prison than any country in the world.

So let's break this down. We don't just have the highest numbers of prisoners, we have the highest percentage as well, so it is true in every way to say that nowhere else in the world is one more likely to be in a cage than in our United States.

Now, let's consider why this might be. Well, it could be that our legal system is far more efficient than in any other country in the world, where presumably most criminals roam about unpunished, thereby artificially lowering every other country's incarceration rate. Maybe.

It could also be that every other country in the world lives in a state of near-barbarism, where so few crimes are legally defined as "crimes" that there is barely anyone is prison. In these countries, basically everything is "legal", so nobody's in jail. Maybe.

It could also be that Americans are more predisposed to criminal behavior, more predatory and sinful at heart, than the citizens of every other country on the Earth. Therefore, we're in prison more than all of those other countries, which presumably are teeming with pacifists and communards. Maybe.

Or, could it be (and of course, it IS) that we are a pettily tyrannical people who claim to be free even as we lock each other up more than any other society for reasons of purely private behavior that is judged unsavory by a moralizing minority.

The reason we lock each other up more than anyone else is drugs. Let's consider the rationale for drug laws. They are purely moralistic in their intent and their enforcement. In other words, drug "crimes" need not involve and violation of another's safety, liberty, or property. Instead, one is deemed a "criminal" for ingesting chemicals that the state has deemed taboo.

What could possibly be more personal, more private, more 4th ammendment-protected, than what you or I decide to put into our bodies in the privacy of our homes? Is the logic for the state criminalizing marijuana any less absurd than the criminalization of twinkies, breakfast tea, or...drumroll......tobacco? Alcohol?

We are legally protected in drinking and smoking ourselves to death, which we do in prodigious numbers. We should neither idealize nor trivialize, much less glamorize, this behavior, but neither should we deal with our vices by throwing each other in prison.

Federal drug laws are blatantly unconstitutional, as they violate both the 4th amendment (unreasonable search and seizure of person or personal effects) and the 10th amendment (all power not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution is left to the states).

Criminalizing the use of marijuana does not increase anybody's liberty or freedom. Criminalizing drunk driving, in contrast, is a legitimate exercise in negative liberty, where the state deprives a person of his liberty to drive drunk, because that liberty represents an unacceptable risk to other citizens' right to survive their commutes.

Criminalizing the private and personal use of marijuana, however, has no beneficiary. Nobody is made more free or more secure. Instead, some are deprived of everything and we all suffer the cumulative effects of existing in a tyrannical society where citizens are stripped of their freedom for the most intellectually and morally and legally and economically vapid of reasons.

To fully articulate the absurdity and tyranny of drug laws would take several more blogs, but this issue must be the centerpiece of an honest self-introspection by this nation. If we are honest with ourselves, what will we find?

The good news is that we are not predisposed to be more "criminal" than all other people in the world. The bad news is that, apparently, we get off on being jailers.