The American government exists at the consent of the governed. Americans are the beneficiaries of a long liberal democratic tradition which places individual liberty at the height of our value system. This liberty has given us peace and prosperity at levels which were completely unknown to our ancestors. The War on Drugs is a direct threat to that long and illustrious legacy.
As John Stuart Mill wrote in the opening chapter of On Liberty, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”
Clearly, the War on Drugs violates this common sense rule in an attempt to legislate a socialist morality upon each of the individuals in the United States. The War on Drugs envisions individual Americans as government property. By self-medicating, American citizens are seen as damaging government property.
The United States government then spends billions of taxpayer dollars per year to protect that government property from the American citizenry. I am not government property and I object to being taxed to pay for a government program which treats me as if I were.
Thomas Jefferson wrote “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” It’s time that we Americans take back our rightful liberty from the clowns in Washington by restoring American law to compliance with the beliefs of our forefathers.
It is not as if we have not fought, and won, this battle before. Abraham Lincoln railed against prohibition in 1840 when he said “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” Our nation didn’t have the sense to listen to Lincoln and prohibition became law in 1920 — and it stayed that way until 1933. There is no meaningful difference between prohibition of alcohol and prohibition of other recreational drugs. We only did half the job in 1933.