The Drug Problem Part 9: the real world
The law has to be concerned with a number of things. I have never suggested that the law should be divorced from morality. However it also has to bear in mind personal choice and pragmatism.
In an ideal world there would be no drug addicts. No one would take drugs, certainly not hard drugs. Likewise there would be no medical consequences from the abuse of drugs. I have never taken drugs (for this purpose not counting alcohol as a drug or medical prescriptions as drugs) and would not intend to do so whether lawful or not. Nor would I ever encourage or be happy about any relatives or friends taking them, even assuming they were lawful.
However, as you may have noticed, we do not live in an ideal world. People like to get high, (nothing wrong with that in principle) and some prefer drugs to alcohol. Human beings are designed to seek pleasure and excitement and escape from problems and drudgery. People are always going to take drugs. The law therefore has a number of choices. First among these is seeking to ensure that it pursues realistic achievable outcomes that are consonant with prevailing public views.
This is not just a question of being able to enforce the particular laws. Making a law prohibiting something is an exercise in coercion. There may be very sound reasons for prohibiting it. However where the conduct prohibited is that of adults and is conduct which affects themselves rather than others, there would normally have to be some cogent and compelling reason in order to justify the prohibition. An example would be adults who engage in sexual activities which involve inflicting injury. There is a public interest in avoiding the infliction of serious injury, and likewise a public interest in ensuring that injury is not inflicted using alleged consent as an excuse. (Whilst accepting the proposition that householders defending themselves should be given the benefit of every doubt, this is one reason why it would always be impossible to give householders carte blanche to do whatever they liked to burglars: first of all, have the parties involved ever considered this would extend to torture? Moreover no doubt every murderer would take the body of his victim to his home and allege that the dead person had tried to break in). What the law has to balance is the important principle of freedom of choice against the moral and social imperatives of the use of coercion to prevent activities.
Moreover it is always important that to some extent the law tries to at least not become wholly divorced from popular feeling. Otherwise the law generally is brought into disrepute. This is one of the baleful consequences of prohibition in America. When professionals, businessmen, people from all sections of society, are taking drugs, when it is even difficult to get many politicians to say that they have never taken them, drug use is sufficiently widespread that it is plain that a large section of the public feels they ought to be given the opportunity to choose.
I could conceive of the argument for prohibition of drugs if the prohibition was likely to work. All the prohibition does is exacerbate the problems. The various articles in this series have highlighted the individual ways in which this is. Whether you look at the way illegality funds organised crime, the content of the drugs, the high prices that drugs fetch being illegal and the consequent crimewave as addicts fund their habits, and the desirability of monitoring individuals medically to see the effect of drugs on them, all that the war on drugs does is cost a fortune in police time and expense which will never produce a winning result. At the same time the situation with the drugs is worse than if there was no such prohibition in place.
These articles are not written from the perspective of someone who wants the lawful right to have a fix whenever he wants. It is written from the perspective that in lots of ways it is plain that the war on drugs is doomed to failure and that making drugs unlawful has a whole host of undesirable effects. Yet sadly politically talking about drugs is a bit like emperor's clothes in the old fable. Nobody dare be seen to be soft on drugs, and hence nobody dare speak the truth.