Legalize Drugs and Prostitution

It would have been almost enough to vote for Ron Paul just because he wanted to get us out of Iraq and to legalize drugs. Unfortunately, he came with enough baggage that I could never quite bring myself to seriously support him.

But as an article in the LA Times points out, the war on drugs has set us back $2.5 trillion since its inception and shows no evidence of progress. This is serious money to be spending on futile public relations.

One of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Lysander Spooner began his 1875 book Vices are not Crimes as follows:

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime - that is, the design to injure the person or property of another - is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

The argument against drugs is that some people will fall into the habit if drugs are legal. Possible, but the fact is that we give up regulation, taxation, and provide incentives for drug pushers to promote the substances. The moral argument against prostitution is pretty weak, since there are lots of women in degrading relationships based on sex and this isn't illegal. The crime that supposedly gravitates naturally around prostitution is mostly related to drugs, so this is circular.

For a small fraction of the expense of the "war on drugs," we could offer free treatment for any addict who chooses it. We could also treat addiction as a terminal disease, when the addict is indigent and refuses treatment, and provide enough of whatever substance they want so they can over time kill themselves. They're going to do it anyway, and this would be more humane.