Prologue: Writing the Unwritable Post

So let's talk about torture.

It's been in the news for a while now, and has quickly become a defining issue of the last 9 years: legally, politically, and ethically. It fairly clogs the news cycles on some days – the media trots out questions and talking points, which ripple into the morning shows, local papers, and countless web sites:

• Is it right or wrong?
• Who authorized what?
• Who knew or didn’t know, and how much?
• Republicans versus Democrats.
• Which religious demographics support it or don’t.
• How America + Torture = Nazi Germany.

Tough stuff. And I’ve been ruminating on it the entire time; trying to decide if I could blog about it. I mean, it’s obviously a provocative topic – it riles and offends people, and triggers family-event-destroying blowouts – but it's dense, and impenetrably gray. I want to weigh in; I want to entice others to the public debate, and I want to enrich the public dialog. But it's a window that's hard to see through. Even in the brightest light of human outrage, the image beyond the glass is shadowy, and indistinct. How do we define torture? Is this it, or is that it? Why is it being used? Does it work? Look as I might, I can't get to a clear picture. And if there's one thing I like when I start a post, it's a clear picture.

When we discuss things like racism, or gun violence, or whether drugs should be legalized, there are plenty of folks with first-hand knowledge, and even more with second- or third-hand knowledge. Mention torture, and suddenly almost no one is an expert (even if they have an opinion). The folks “in the know” are people most of us will never meet. Many are deliberately hidden from the world, so even if you do know them, you don't know you know them. This makes torture a unique consideration to the common man. How do you genuinely contemplate something that you know nothing about? If you're a FrankSpot reader, you know that I lament that people generally opine (and take up fortified positions) in relative ignorance, but this topic is unique in that there really isn't any way for the average person to contemplate it with a foundation of experience. By default (and lucky for all of us), we lack the ability to speak on the topic from place of knowledge. Everything we think we know is anecdotal. That's one of the things that made it so hard for me to put words around this topic. What do I really know about torture?

But the story is still very much in the minds and in the media, and I’m drawn to it because it speaks to our fundamental humanity. I want to explore the philosophical notions that underpin the outrage, and the real world considerations of torture’s application and efficacy. Unfortunately, it more and more seems that every measuring stick is insufficient, and there’s a good chance that the only thing likely to be borne of the debate…is more debate. That poses a special and significant challenge for me: what do philosophers do with a conundrum like this? What if there is no final answer? No absolute right or wrong? No way to build true consensus? What if we just can’t solve this one?

These questions dogged me every time I tried to put words to page. What follows is my wholehearted attempt to make sense of it all.

Defining the Indefinable

What is torture?

As I mentioned above, the main problem with this discussion is that torture isn't one easily definable thing. It's a word open wider to interpretation and semantics than most in our language. Sure, there's a dictionary entry, but as I survey the outrage of everyone touched by the topic, it’s clear that that the “official definition” has barely informed the debate. It turns out, instead, that the notion of torture is as personal and subjective a thing as anything out there. People define it through a combination of religious, moral, and ethical beliefs, political affiliations, gut reactions, and their own sense of place in the world. So the dictionary entry doesn’t add any meaningful text to the discussion. What is torture? It’s whatever the debaters – the observer, the victim, the state enemy, the foreign government, the special interest group – want it to be. If we were discussing torture as a philosophical exercise, or a re-examination of unfortunate history, we could stop there. And it wouldn’t matter that we couldn’t reach a consensus. But the debate has changed: it is no longer a lukewarm ethics discussion, but an urgent legal issue. That brings us to the second problem:

The Legal Definition

In a society of laws (which I’m glad I live in, despite the sometimes rickety condition of our legal system), we classify specific behaviors as illegal. It makes sense if we want to surround ourselves with safety and order. But, there’s a catch, and it’s the same one that makes the torture debate so hard to resolve: what measuring stick do we use? This is an important consideration in any debate, and doubly so in this one. Laws require both a proverbial watermark as a starting point – a consensus-based standard to be used any time we perceive a transgression – and very specific wording. Like it or not, laws aren’t meant to be flexible; and well-written ones don’t leave much room for interpretation (even if they are dense with legalese and abstraction). That’s an important protection for us as citizens. (And yes, that creates a host of other issues, but I’ll save that for another blog entry.) Laws need to be specific if they are to be understood and enforced fairly. This applies to simple stuff – don’t take something from a store without paying for it – and deep, unwieldy stuff like torture. So, regardless of your personal feelings, torture needs a legal definition if we’re going to address it as a society. That means specifics, examples – dictionary entries. It means a legal consensus even when there is no philosophical one. And to be clear: it can’t be a moving target.

Let’s stop on that for a second, just to make sure we’re all on the same page. Torture – from a legal standpoint – has to be strictly defined. That means one clearly stated description of what constitutes torture. It can include a laundry list of citations and examples, but the definition has to be finite. It has to end. If you look to the law, you’ll find that there’s already a legal definition in place. That’s a key problem with the current debate: people keep forgetting (or ignoring) that definition in favor of their personal outrage, and want to categorize as torture treatments that currently fall outside the legal definition. In itself, that’s a noble pursuit. Something has rankled us, and we want the law to be rewritten so that thing can’t happen again. But, the problem is further complicated here by the public's need to punish someone: it’s not good enough to rewrite the law for tomorrow. People want to bend the law to create a retroactive illegality. An interesting idea, I suppose, but impractical at best, a path to absolute ruin at worst. As a rule, we don’t criminalize past behavior, only future behavior. Call it a conceit to the linear, forward-only nature of time’s passage – and to our basic inability to predict which of today’s legal behaviors would land us in the electric chair tomorrow. It’s a basic protection we have to embrace: what you did yesterday might become illegal tomorrow, but you won’t be prosecuted because it was legal when you did it.

Now some people argue here that the Bush administration’s lawyers deliberately exploited the finite nature of legal language to “get away with” treatments that don’t violate the letter of the law – but still cross into unethical/philosophically shaky behaviors we’ve retroactively classified as torture. They’re right, but skirting the law isn’t actually illegal. As despicable as it seems in this context, “going around the law” is just another part of the legal process. Those lawyers aren’t the first or only ones to do it. It happens every day, sometimes in our favor, sometimes to our detriment. That is a conceit to the vagaries of our language, and a basic fact of life. I recently wrote a post about the drive to legalize drugs in America, and I posited that every regulation (or law) breeds loopholes. This is the same problem. If you don’t list smacking someone in the head with a rolled up magazine as torture – or have intersecting laws that constrain any of the constituents of that treatment – then it’s legally not torture. And guess what – it’s not just lawyers and government officials who exploit that fact. Almost everyone you know does too (in some form), and so do you. It’s obviously not in the same vein as torture, but the principle is the same. We have imperfect language, so we have imperfect laws. The best – and some would say smartest – thing we can do, is use history and better language to help us redraw ineffective and incomplete laws. In this case, we can rewrite torture laws to include what was done to those alleged terrorists; add as many new clauses and behaviors as we like – dig into history books, and even popular fiction, and litter the legal definition with examples. We’ll be behind the curve, but we can be assured that those specific tactics will be illegal the next time they are used.

Which brings us to:

The Three Killer Questions: Efficacy, Intent, and Degree

Despite the basic disagreements about what specifically constitutes torture, there is one common belief that seems to resonate throughout the national debate, and across many international borders: torture itself is bad. It's something only bad people or bad countries do. Proof of that belief is found in treaties and pledges, and in the outspoken condemnation of those who torture. But just below the surface, beneath the philosophical condemnation of the act, lies the tricky question of efficacy. Does torture ever work? If you follow the national headlines, or read books like Daniel P. Maddix’s The History of Torture, you probably get the idea that it doesn’t. And if the national uproar is an indication, we don’t want it to work.

But there’s an important question that lingers, even if it’s fully obscured by the shining spotlight: what if it does work?

I know that’s a scary question. It sets people’s hair on end, and makes people reach for antacids, or their bibles, or the television remote. But, what if torture isn't the ineffective black hole of the popular belief? Sure, you can point to what happens when you torture an ignorant someone for information: they’ll say anything to stop the torture, and none of it is worth the breath it arrived on. But what happens when you torture a person who actually has the information you need? This is an interesting point that comes out of the Bush administration: they say that “harsh interrogation” produced actionable intelligence. Regardless of your personal feelings, if it’s true, then it’s a fact that counts in the reality of the world, and has to count in our debate. And it begs the larger question: how much is a life, or a handful of lives, or a way of life worth? How far would/should we go to secure something important for ourselves? What happens when talking simply doesn’t work, and when the clock is already ticking? I know this is dangerous water, but aren’t these questions valid parts of the debate? Some people argue that the loss we stand to suffer (personally or nationally) is insubstantial compared to the moral breach we commit when we abandon talking in favor of inflicting pain. They could be right. I think it's probably a question for the ages, and certainly for the people that have already lost something or someone because of our adherence to principle over the need for positive results.

Lets focus on that for a moment: why does anyone use torture? I’ve been exploring the efficacy question, but I haven’t really touched on the purpose question. Like efficacy, it’s an important thing to explore.

As I’ve absorbed the national commentary, I’ve noticed that there are lots of different ideas about why we used those interrogation techniques in the first place. A good portion of people accept that they were used to obtain information – some about yesterday, but most about tomorrow. Some people think it was to extract confessions – like the Viet Cong used, a way to demoralize the prisoner’s parent nation – or to exact punishment, or gleefully inflict pain on inferior races. They evoke images of World War 2 Japan and Nazi Germany. Provocative stuff, to be sure; more importantly, a prompt to discuss intent – to examine if and how the intent of the torturer factors into our considerations. Does a lack of sadistic intent count in the torturer’s favor? Is it a more acceptable practice if torture is used strictly to garner information, and not applied with malice or hatred? If it’s an unfortunate escalation, in situations where gentler methods don’t produce the needed results? If it’s applied clinically, dispassionately?

And what about degrees? As we build our new legal and national definition of torture, does degree count for something? Should we compare types of harsh treatments? Is that informative as we draw our lines? Is a slap as bad as genital electrocution? Is a flushed holy book as bad as pliers-based fingernail extraction? Is being forced into a naked human pyramid, or being deprived of sleep, as bad as being beaten lame with batons and 2x4s? If we take degrees into consideration, don’t we run the risk of more unethical treatments slipping through the legal cracks? If we ignore degrees, aren’t we opening the doors of interpretation so wide that our “enemies” can complain that restricting access to cable TV and alcohol in prison is just as harsh as crushing their fingers in drill presses? How do we factor in the common sense comparisons without opening the door too wide, or shutting it too tightly, and without ignoring something key? Is there even an answer?

Sudden Epilogue: A FrankSpot First

So, I’ve just asked a bunch of questions, and I know it seems like I have a lot more ground to cover. But I’m not going to cover it. As unlikely and abrupt as it seems, I’m going to end here – after two months, and 2500 difficult words. As I predicted in my prologue, I haven’t found any answers on this. Not for myself, not for my readers, and certainly not for the national debate. Instead, after all this time and typing, I’ve become exhausted by the topic. I’m truly at a loss to draw some profound overarching conclusion, or make any valid suggestions on how to address the ongoing issue. I can’t even answer most of the questions I’ve raised here. At least not definitively, and not in the space of a single post. The most I can do is ask my readers to keep this post in mind as they add their voices to the debate. I hope they’ll remember that religion, ethnicity, age, political belief, and level of education impact how people feel about torture; so do being touched by loss, or war, or terrorism, or fearing for the lives of people loved. I hope they’ll remember that the law is an important tool – especially in this debate – but one that shouldn’t be used for revenge, or to apply retroactive justice. And I hope they’ll remember that – even without one we can see from here – the pursuit of an answer is still important. As we strive, we grow; and as we learn, we change. Hopefully, all for the better.

Peace.

Back in 2000, I worked for an interesting fellow named Bill. He was mostly a standup guy – straitlaced, religious without being a fanatic, educated by years of honest work, and a great debater. He was also a self-taught constitutional scholar, who carried a pocket-sized copy of the constitution with him everywhere he went. It was worn and dog-eared, and heavily marked up with yellow highlights and multicolor underlines. It was his conversation starter: if he wanted to talk to you about guns, he'd read you a portion of the second amendment. Religion: first amendment. And so on. It was a peculiar hook, but it seemed to work – at least on me. We had dozens of great conversations, and sometimes even broke new ground for each other. I was always challenged to look with new eyes at topics that were at least important to society of the day, if not the grist of seminal American debates. It was during one of these conversations that I first heard talk about legalizing illicit drugs. I have to admit: at the time, I hadn't given the topic much thought. I wasn't a drug user, I didn't know any drug users, and hadn't ever considered legalizing something that was already illegal. So I choked. I didn't know enough to talk beyond the standard fallback platitudes you'd expect when opening a dangerous topic. But Bill was always prepared. He pulled a thick folder out of his desk, and said, "Read through this, then we'll talk." I did just that. The folder was a veritable gold mine of information: the background of the Harrison and Controlled Substance Acts, the role of racism in the criminalization of some drugs, the impact of drugs on culture, the legal costs of prosecuting drug crime, and the ubiquitous War on Drugs that started under Richard Nixon, and gained renewed life under the Reagans. It was a good primer for me, and it armed me to go back and express my first opinion on the topic. It was no surprise that he took a pro-legalization stance – there was a barely perceptible "this is why anti-drug laws are unconstitutional" slant in the reading materials he proffered, so I expected that. But what did surprise me was how incomplete his analysis really was. Yes, he'd gathered lots of data, and clearly had read everything in the folder, so he came out like a shot on why drugs should be legalized. But when I challenged him, most of his arguments fell flat. There was some modicum of logic behind his position, but – like what happens when you ask a devoutly religious person where Mrs. Cain came from – he was quickly and utterly confounded by my counterpoints, and visibly struggling to cling to his ideas. Despite that, there was no clear winner in the debate. We moved on with an agreement to disagree, then never discussed it again. I didn't think much about it after that.

Fast-forward to 2009...

The Legalization Argument...Again

What happens when a bunch of lifelong marijuana advocates have access to the internet, and a web savvy guy takes up the mantle of President? No, this is not the beginning of a killer FrankSpot joke – which, I assure you, would have split your sides. It's a legitimate question. And here's the answer: more than a thousand stoners reach out to the Prez, and suggest legalizing pot as a way to jump start the flagging economy and pump up the federal tax coffers.

"What? Are you kidding me? Wow. How...stupid."

Yes, I was shocked. (And a little less open minded than I would have liked, which is another example of me not living up to the ideals I espouse here, and another opportunity to redouble my efforts on that front...) Here we have a world leader poised to talk directly to the electorate – someone genuinely engaged with, and interested in, the common man's issues – and the sum of some people's interaction is, "Legalize it, maaaan."

Like I said: Wow! Way to represent the needs of your neighbors and children. Way to fix the country. Way to go, boys.

Unfortunately, this newest legalization suggestion didn't fade away at the end of that day's news cycle. Instead, it pushed the war on drugs back into the spotlight, and sparked a new national debate. And although I'm a big advocate of debate, this one rankled me instantly. Not because of the "clever" stoners who touted legal pot as a way to fix the ailing economy, but because it brought out all those folks who pedal the legalization of all illicit drugs as a national cure-all. "Make 'em legal," they shout, "and you can tax 'em, regulate them, put drug dealers out of business, secure the borders, end crime, empty the prisons!" ...and give every Jack and Jill a free pass to shoot up and let the world go to hell around them. Again: wow. Talk about a bad idea. To quote a source I can no longer properly cite: "This is the worst idea in a world of bad ideas..." Why? Read on.

Legalization as Miracle Cure (Or: Doesn't Anyone Actually Think Anything Through in This Country?)

So here we are, looking down at the game board of life, death, law, and social problems in America. And one of the biggest barriers on the board is this thing called illegal drugs. It's a monolith. It drives crime and murder, fills prison, and destroys families and communities. And no matter what you score in the pop-a-matic bubble (props to the makers of the game Trouble!), you won't be able to move enough spaces forward to cross it in your lifetime. That makes it even too big to ignore. Its ominous, seemingly insurmountable size makes it an issue that has to be addressed – definitively! On this, I think we can all agree. The problem starts when we start brainstorming the vaccine. Legalization, more and more, seems to be the "go to" move. And it's just a bad one. Don't believe me? You're not alone. That's why I'm writing. I want legalization advocates to see the Biblical "Where did Mrs. Cain come from?" problem with their plan. I want to loosen their grip on a solution that won't drive the results they're expecting. They can still choose to argue their point and push for their legalization solution, but it won't be because I didn't point out some of the giant flaws in the plan. Let's start with some of the common arguments:

• We're losing the war on drugs. Drug trade is at an all time high, and drug crime continues seemingly unabated.
• Our prisons are overcrowded, and arresting drug users just adds to the problem.
• The war on drugs is expensive, and that money could be better spent elsewhere.
• More people are killed every year by...

I can't argue with any of these statements. So I'm still in lock step with the legalization crowd. We both understand the problem, and agree that something needs to be done. But when we start talking about how to fix the problem, the legalization crowd goes down paths that I just can't follow. Let's look closer:

We're losing the war on drugs...
Yup. True. There are so many drugs, so many users, and so much corruption that underpins the whole thing. It's a tough nut to crack. But does that mean we should stop trying to crack it? I know some consider analogy to be a weak way to debate an idea, but let's use one anyway. It's hard to housebreak your dog. So, why not just allow him to poop anywhere? Silly, right? Yet, that logic is at the heart of many legalization arguments. You hear similar suggestions where illegal immigration is concerned. It's hard to stop, so let's just stop trying. Here's my question: when did we become a people who don't want to do something just because it's too hard? I know some of you will argue that legalizing is doing something. To some degree, you're right – learning to be helpless, then comforting yourself by adding some cursory rules around that thing you can't control is doing something – but is it the best solution? Is it any solution at all? Isn't it like trying to make a murder a little cheerier and bearable for the victims, instead of trying to stop murder outright? In effect, that's what you're doing here. Not fixing the problems caused by the drugs, but putting a thick salve on the wounds and hoping for the best. Put a pin in this one...I'm coming back to it a few paragraphs...

Our prisons are overcrowded...
Again, true. But the fault always lies with the criminal. Not society. Not the law. We have a very simple system. It's a system that my toddler already understands: if you break the rules, you get punished. Period. It's irrelevant if you don't like the rules. You have to follow them because that's what it is to live in a world of laws. No matter who you are, you should be able to grok this idea. You should be able to put blame for crime on the criminals themselves. They chose to do something they were told was wrong. How is that anyone's problem but theirs? Now, here's a twist: I don't think it's inherently bad to decriminalize something. In fact, I'd say it's a natural part of our legal evolution. Societies outgrow laws, and those laws have be dissolved. However, there's at least one rigorous test that has to be passed before we confer a legal status on something illicit: the decriminalization has to benefit society, not generate a new hazard. Otherwise, all we've done is given one group of scofflaws a free pass. Sure, the prison populations dwindles for a bit, but at what long-term cost?

The war on drugs is expensive...
Yup. It is. But is that really a reason not to fight it? Some expensive things are more than worth the money. Ask me if this is one of them...

More people are killed every year by...
This is a common and completely indefensible, invalid argument. Let's use the perspective of the stoners who wrote to the President last month.

"Alcohol kills more people than pot...so since alcohol is legal, pot should be too."

<Buzz!> Wrong answer! This argument is acutely flawed for several reasons. Here's the big one: pointing out that something legal is more dangerous than the illegal thing you're doing, is actually an argument for criminalizing that other thing, not legalizing your thing. If the goal of law is to protect and improve society, then you should act to prohibit things that hurt society. That's why murder is illegal. And rape. And theft. Let's play with more analogies, and you can decide if any of these make sense:

• Alcohol kills more people every year than burglary. So, since alcohol is legal, burglary should be too.
• Alcohol kills more people every year than assault rifles. So assault rifles should be legal...
• Alcohol kills more people than rape, so...
  

It's absurd to look at it that way, isn't it? So go all arguments of that nature when our goal is to protect life, limb, happiness, and freedom. A correct argument goes more like this (and forgoes any comparison):

• Alcohol kills people, so it should be illegal.

Or:

• Pot doesn't kill anyone, so it should be legal.

I wouldn't necessarily agree, but I'd give you points for forming a valid argument. It doesn't rely on the status of some other thing, but on the inherent merits of your subject. If you want to win an important argument, that's a good rule of thumb to use. Then we could talk about the validity of your point. (Now, just to be clear, I DO know the difference between pot and harder drugs. But in the context of this debate, it's not a valid delineation. If you're high, you've already been compromised – in judgment, attentiveness, coordination, and the ability to follow rules. The degree to which you've been compromised is irrelevant. You know that jerk you see on the freeway every day? The one who's always four seconds from rear-ending someone because he's texting, juggling his Tim Hortons' and morning butt, and took a little too much Benadryl before he left the house? What happens if we also let him blaze up 5 minutes before he slots himself into traffic beside you? I'm guessing that'll end badly more often than not. So, for the sake of this discussion, I'm lumping pot in with every other illicit substance.)

That said, let's get on to my point – why the legalization idea is unworkable.

Legalization Debunked (Or: You Don't Always Get What You Pay For)

So, let's legalize illegal drugs. Why not, right? The benefits are obvious:

• We can control them; the FDA will make sure they're safe, and of good quality, which will decrease accidental deaths.
• We can tax them. With the huge interest in drugs, that will be a small fortune, one that we can use for health insurance for kids, and to fix our roads, and create new jobs.
• No more user arrests. You can't be arrested for buying and using something legal.
• No more illegal drug dealers – drugs will be legal, so they won’t have anything to sell.

Good arguments, right? Nope. Not even close. They come from the same body of "research" and level of critical thought as the points made by my former boss. On the surface, they may seem to make sense – especially if you've lost a loved one to some form of drug crime or punishment, or are a lifetime democrat – but there's no substance; no depth; no tensile strength. Each argument is insufficient to address the complexities of a legalization scheme. They are dismissive of key facts about human nature, the general order of things, and the business of illegal drugs. They just don't make any real sense when you shine the light of critical thought upon them. They fail on almost every level:

Regulation Can't Work
Regulation is an interesting and tricky thing. Let's for a moment forget the complexities in preparing a drug for public consumption, and skip right to the very nature of a regulation. Regulations are rules – rules that, by default, govern who can sell an item, and for how much, and in what quantity, and on what day, in what venue, and to which consumers. These rules are the problem with regulation. Every rule you create is a rule to be broken, which, in turn is an opportunity for crime. Let's say a legal heroin fix at your local drugstore is sold like this:

• 5 cc
• $50
• Only to people over 21
• No more than once a day

In the legalization model, everyone says, "Hey, cool," and goes to the drugstore to buy a fix. But, what about the 20 year old who wants 50cc, twice a day? Oops, here comes illegal heroin again, which demonstrates that:

Crime is Fluid
The legalization model supposes that there will be no way for illicit drug makers, importers, and dealers (read: criminals) to make a living. I guess the legalization advocates just assume that all the folks on the supply side of the issue will pack up shop and go work at Wal-Mart. Well, as I just pointed out, EVERY regulation creates an opportunity for crime. And criminals know their shit. They're criminals because they like to be – they like the life it affords them. They're not a group of enterprising rogues who sell drugs as a form of social protest. Don't believe me? Look at DVDs. DVDs are legal, and cheap. Yet, there's a multimillion-dollar illicit DVD trade out there. Criminals realized that people don't want to wait for the official release, or don’t want to pay the studio price. We created a demand, and the criminals rushed to meet it. It would be the same here. That flexibility is actually at the heart of the failing war on drugs. So, yes, there would be a whole host of mainstream consumers who would buy FDA-approved crack. But there's an even bigger population who wouldn't. They're the folks who want higher doses, or more frequent fixes, or are too young to buy drugs legally, or who don’t want their local pharmacist or doctor to know they're stoning up every day. And if I know this, the criminals do too. It’s their livelihood. They can find the illegal outgrowths of every regulation you place. Unless the legalization movement says free drugs of any kind to anyone, in any dosage, and is willing to dispense them to kindergartners, then the problem hasn't shrunk even a little bit. And let's add this: what about all the new drugs? You know, the ones in this model that haven't yet been approved by the FDA, or that are too dangerous to ever be approved. Do you think anyone will want those? Do you think the criminals won't be out there making those? Of course they will. The Feds have stepped on their action, and they're not going down without a fight. At that point, they could cook up a drug with a 50% guarantee of death, and people would still buy it...

Addiction is Still Addiction
Here's one that's underrepresented in every legalization discussion: addicts are still addicts. It doesn't matter where they get their drugs. They have a problem that's driven by a combination of the drug itself, and their own personality/body chemistry. It's not reasonable to expect that addiction will no longer be a problem just because the drugs are legal. I suppose the FDA could try to make all drugs less addictive, but oops, then we've created a new crime loophole – an illicit variant of every legal drug, that has whopping more addictiveness. And I'm not even going to dive into the problem of everyone around you being stoned at any given moment of the day. That makes me positively YEARN for my next 747 ride. (What's that you say? Pilots would never take legal drugs before a flight. Of course they would. You made it legal to do so. And people who take drugs tend to suffer from bad judgment – not necessarily before taking them, but certainly afterward. Maybe as part of this plan, we can test everyone for drug levels every morning before work. That wouldn't have any negative impact on our economy or society, would it? And before you talk about punishment for those who break the rules, if I hear you right, you're talking about a form of criminalizing drug use again...interesting catch 22, huh?).

Legal Drugs Aren't Free (Or: Where Does the Money Come From?)
Here's another one that the legalization crowd ignores: drugs aren't free. This is an important point, since the plan includes taxes on drug sales. What happens to the folks who can't afford to buy them, legal or not? Do you suppose they're just going to forgo their daily fixes? My guess is that they'll do what they do now: lie, cheat, and steal. Drugs are a powerful draw, and heavy drug users aren't deterred by empty wallets. The fact is that it won't matter if they're stealing to pay the pharmacist or the Columbian on the street corner. People are still being victimized to support a drug habit.

Flash Forward: The (Crime Free?) World of Tomorrow

So: now we've legalized drugs. In the ideal model, we've changed the face of the most common drug user. Instead of a gaunt trembling junkie cowering in a dark alley, it's the honorable Reverend Godfearing and his wife, Prudence, snorting coke with Mr. and Mrs. WASP from the country club. And they're not doing anyone any harm, so all is good, right? But let's look out the window:

Oops! Look at that. The problem is still there. The criminals didn't go straight after all – they're smiling across the border as drug mules deliver their quadruple-strength cocaine (now with fresh pine scent!) to the US border guards who want to buy bigger sailboats than they can afford on public servant salaries. And the kids who aren't old enough to buy and use all those newly legal drugs aren't saving up to get high on their 21st birthday. They're under the bleachers getting high today on the ULTRA-POT that was grown in the house across the street – the one with the garbage-bag covered windows, and daily foot traffic that's on par with that of an urban shopping mall. Welcome to the safe, clean, crime-free world of legalized drugs.

Okay, maybe that last paragraph was a little more Harlan Ellison than it should have been. But I wrote it so to drive home my main point. You can't win the war on drugs through legalization and capitulation. You can't regulate the problem away, and there's no level of concession to the destructive nature of drugs that has any positive impact. It's a zero-percent solution, even before you invoke the more obvious unmitigated problems in the plan, like its impact on employment and poverty, quality of goods and services, or public health and the cost of medical insurance. In the end, the whole notion of legalization leads nowhere good. Crime rebounds, prison populations stay high, and our society pays an even higher price than it pays today. As the national debate continues, I hope the fundamental truths I've described here start to ring in everyone's ears. I hope that the smartest of us, especially those who hadn't thought deeply about the subject before the conversation went public, will realize the folly of legalization as a salve, and lead us down a better path.

Then, hopefully, this will never come up again.

Thanks for reading. Peace.