Can government outlaw drugs? - imaginary debate between nineteenth century libertarian Herbert Spencer and conservative James Fitzjames Stephen

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by Maurice Cranston

Can Government Outlaw Drugs?

STEPHEN: You will always be remembered, Spencer, as an authority on social problems. What do you think could be done about the problem of drugs, which is critical in America today?

SPENCER: Quite simply, the traffic in drugs should cease to be a crime.

STEPHEN: I do not agree with you. That traffic has to be prohibited. Drugs are an evil substance.

SPENCER: It is not the function of the state to correct every evil. It does more harm than good by attempting to. I spent a great deal of energy in my time trying to persuade the British government against interfering with the trade in liquor for what it considered noble motives.

STEPHEN: But drugs are vastly more harmful than liquor. Drugs are bad even in small doses, and they are almost instantaneously addictive.

SPENCER: Tobacco has been shown to be both harmful and addictive, but I do not see government prohibiting the trade in that.

STEPHEN: The harmfulness of tobacco is comparatively minor, and drugs produce addition of an intensity which far surpasses that of cigarettes.

SPENCER: The arguments for tolerating tobacco are equally arguments for tolerating drugs. I observed in the nineteenth century that men, having rid themselves of the despotism of kings, were rapidly moving toward the despotism of governments, and today they seem to have gone all the way. Whenever men see a social problem they think the answer is to have the government make a law to deal with it.

STEPHEN: There are very good reasons for laws against the trade in drugs, and virtually every country in the world has them. Here in America the Administration has been forced to declare what it calls a war on drugs.

SPENCER: I observe that despite this "war," thefts, robberies, muggings, and drug-related murders have made the streets of many American cities unsafe.

STEPHEN: That is because a person who is, in what they call the "street language," hooked on drugs will do anything to finance a fix.

SPENCER: But the point remains that the government is failing to do what it exists in order to do, namely, to protect the safety and the liberty and the property of citizens. By trying to enforce morality, which is not a government's business, it fails to do its proper job.

STEPHEN: The government is not being asked to enforce morality in any lofty sense. It is simply trying to stop the consumption of evil and injurious substances.

SPENCER: If an individual wants to dope himself, the government has not the duty, nor even the right, to stop him. It was once a crime in England to attempt to commit suicide. I am glad to observe that since our time that law has been repealed. But I am afraid that the general tendency has been to increase such laws, rather than repeal them, the Divine Right of Kings having yielded increasingly to the Divine Right of Governments.

STEPHEN: But the government is doing what you admit to be its duty to restore safety to the streets by suppressing the traffic that leads to all the crime.

SPENCER: It is not suppressing it. It is only trying unsuccessfully to do so. As you rightly remark, drug addiction is so intense that those who want the substances will get them, legally or illegally. Hence, the only result of forbidding a legal trade is to introduce an illegal trade.

STEPHEN: Would you simply legalize the drug traffic, even if that would lead to an increase in drug abuse?

SPENCER: I would decriminalize it.

STEPHEN: That is only another word for the same thing.

SPENCER: The word "legalize" seems to me to confer too much respectability on the enterprise. Society is right to disapprove of drug abuse, as it is to disapprove of suicide or drunkenness or prostitution. These things are morally wrong, and it would be very unfortunate if a community had no shared sense of right and wrong. But society must uphold morality by its own unwritten laws. The state is concerned with morality only insofar as it is concerned with the enforcement of justice. Society itself must protect and preserve the rest of morality.

STEPHEN: Unfortunately the unwritten laws of society are hardly effective today. Moral and social disapproval may modify behavior among church-going groups and high-thinking educated people, but it has no effect on the actions either of smart hedonists among the rich or of racial minorities among the poor, the kind of people who use drugs.

SPENCER: Do not forget, Stephen, that some people used drugs in our time, too. I dare say medical prescriptions were needed for some of them, but drugs were cheap and easily obtained, and certainly they provoked nothing that could be called a "social problem."

STEPHEN: That is because there were too few addicts to constitute a social problem. In the nineteenth century there were two main sorts of addict: artists like Coleridge and De Quincey who felt the need to stimulate their imaginations in order to do creative work, and nervous, idle women who found drugs a means of calming their nerves at one time and exciting them at another. Ordinary people were satisfied with liquor, and many did not even touch that.