The Price of Puritanism

One blessing the United States has always enjoyed is that of relatively secure and passive neighbors. Neither Mexico nor Canada has ever given us any trouble, which has left us uniquely free to create trouble for ourselves.

Mexico today, however, is probably the most dangerous country in the world. And the drug cartels are the source of the huge majority of that violence, ranging from the usual street-level thuggery to political assassination of politicians and judges, and everything in between.

In this equation, the United States is the customer for most of these drugs and therefore part of the problem. But the problem is not primarily the fault of the Mexican drug lords, but of our own obscenely hypocritical Puritanism.

The Puritans are remembered in our dominant paradigm as intrepid souls who fled the oppression of Europe to come to the New World, where there was religious freedom. And while the Puritans were surely interested in own freedom, as we all are, they were supremely uninterested in anyone else's freedom to disagree with them.

"Freedom" for the Puritans meant "freedom to be a Puritan". They did not take kindly to Jews, for example. Or witches. There is nothing unique about this bigoted self-interest, of course. But the Puritan legacy continues today, and it fuels the drug war more than all the stoners and gangsters in the world.

The Puritans were scandalized by pleasure. Comfortable clothes, for example, were frowned upon, so we can imagine how they felt about sex and drugs. It strikes me that the only reason that marijuana, for example, is illegal is that there is a remnant of Puritanism remaining in our culture.

Prohibition is as close as we can come to a perfect case study. Prohibition actually made far more sense than criminalizing marijuana because alcohol is infinitely more physically and socially destructive than marijuana.

That being said, there are a few truths about our experiment with Prohibition that no rational person can refute.

Firstly, Prohibition prohibited Americans from drinking, but it did not prevent them from doing so. When alcohol was criminalized, Americans didn't stop drinking; they simply became criminals.

Secondly, criminalizing alcohol meant that sellers of alcohol were now criminals. And criminals, regardless of time or place, regulate their trade with violence. And so Prohibition's biggest legacy was not sobriety, but organized crime.

Half of the profits of the Mexican drug cartels are reaped from marijuana. We can therefore assume that roughly half of the violence is carried out in the distribution of marijuana.

So if marijuana were legal, the criminals would lose half of their power overnight. Thousands of lives south of our border would be saved. Americans would save millions of dollars by ending the absurd practice of imprisoning citizens for marijuana "crimes". And we would reap untold millions more by taxing and legally distributing marijuana.

The only thing which prevents this legal, moral, ethical, and economic triumph is Puritanism. One marvels at the schizophrenia of a society that would rather indulge barbaric drug cartels and criminalize millions of its own citizens than to acknowledge and regulate the reality that most Americans are not scandalized by the private pleasure of their neighbors.

The final thread that the Puritans in this debate cling to is this argument: "if we legalize marijuana, everyone would start smoking marijuana all day every day".

Alcohol is legal. Do all of us drink all day every day? When Americans decide if they are going to try a drug, the legality of that drug is not part of their decision-making progress. Have you ever met anyone who said to you "I've never smoked marijuana because it's illegal"?

The decision to try or abstain from a drug, or a sexual encounter, or any type of new and potentially risky behavior, consists largely of an inner dialogue within one's self. If I choose not to use cocaine, it is not because the Puritans don't want me too. It's because I know better.

So the only conclusion is this: the Puritans hate free will. They don't trust themselves, and they certainly don't trust anyone else. They feel that the only thing saving us from barbaric hedonism and anarchy is a strict and unbending code of denial. They live out the belief that pleasure corrupts, and that we are helpless in the face of any temptation.

The Puritans don't want to live in a world where they can decide not to smoke marijuana. They want to live in a world where the full and awesome power of the state forbids them to do so.

In the final analysis, the Puritans actually cause the criminality and barbarity they so fear by vainly attempting to enforce their own dim view of mankind onto us all.