Protected: journalism article against war on drugs.

I wrote this in spring of 2007 for my journalism class junior year, as a fresh ‘anarcho-capitalist.’

I should mention that I no longer believe in self-ownership, and my idea of rights has shifted drastically from then.

I’m against the War on Drugs and leaning towards an agorist position. My reasons for being a strong advocate of the black market, even though drugs are not for me, are as follows.

Let’s start with the basics of ownership and rights. Each of us owns ourselves. If I don’t own myself, who owns me? If you own me, then by deductive reasoning you also have to be owned by someone else. This leads to a system where each person owns someone else arbitrarily, despite the fact that each person’s individual mind controls his or her body. It’s much more rational to say that I own myself and you own yourself. Ownership means exclusivity. If I own X, you cannot take X away unless I give it to you. Therefore we have exclusive control over our bodies. If we have exclusive control over our bodies, it’s our right to do whatever we want to do with our body. If we want to kill ourselves off, we have the exclusive right to do so.

You might think that this attitude is selfishness. But you’d also have to consider that coercing someone else into following your will is perhaps even more selfish than letting others do what they want with their bodies. Trying to force your anti-drug views onto someone else means that you’re placing your will above the other person’s, despite the fact that you have no right over the person’s choices.

Let’s go on to consider some basic economics of the black market. If drugs are prohibited, that doesn’t change the public desire for them at all. If drugs become more rare to obtain, the prices go up, which leads to drug dealers profiting and drug addicts becoming more poor. On the other hand, if drugs were commonplace and legal, the prices would lower and it would give drug addicts more choices which leads to drug dealers competiting against each other for profit. This then leads to even lower prices and the poor can afford them more easily. Banning drugs is not going to change the desire or addiction from them in any way.

Prohibition, the banning of alcoholic drinks, during the twenties increased crime tremendously. The people still wanted alcohol and went to illegal means to acquire it, and gangsters like Al Capone resorted to organized crime and violence. As Albert Einstein put it, “The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”

I’m not saying that we should just leave young kids alone to do drugs. We should give them the facts about how harmful they are and let them make their own decisions after that. There is nothing wrong with challenging their critical thinking skills at a young age. If a child or teen really wants to do drugs they can/will do anything to obtain them. Hammering in the “No, don’t do drugs!” idea into their heads disallows for critical thinking as opposed to teaching them unbiased facts and letting them make their own decisions for their own bodies.