Editorial:
Americans,
the
Drug
War,
and
the
Concept
of
Rights
3/13/98
Should people have the right to take drugs? This was the question asked last week in a call-in poll conducted by BBC-1 radio in England, a station which caters to young people. In other words, does an individual have the right to decide what does or does not enter his or her body, or does the government have the right to institute laws which prohibit the ingestion of certain substances? Certainly, a call-in poll is something less than scientific. Despite that, with over 20,000 respondents, the results were astounding. In the end, 84% of mostly young Britons claimed that the right to determine what they did or did not ingest was their own and not the government's. Flash back 200 years or so. Wasn't it Britain, and the British conception of the reach and the role of government which led to that little backlash called the Constitution? Interesting how times have changed. Ask your average American, young or old, if he or she has a "right" to ingest drugs, and you will likely get a blank stare. The thought would never have occurred to them. The Drug War, amidst all of its other harms, has turned the concept of rights on its head in America. It wasn't always this way. In the early part of this century, when the temperance movement was gaining political ground, it was widely understood that the Constitution, as written, would not support an exercise of governmental power over the production or sale of alcoholic beverages. To achieve a legal Prohibition of alcohol therefore required the most drastic of legislative acts: the amendment of the Constitution. Even at that, it was never imagined that the government had the power to prohibit the consumption of alcohol, or of anything else, by its citizens, and so such consumption was never outlawed. The Drug War does not rest on a constitutional amendment. And yet over the years, little by little, the laws which governed the production, importation and distribution of certain substances grew to include their possession and even ingestion. Until now, if you ask the average American whether or not he or she has the "right" to take drugs, they will likely think that you've taken a few too many yourself. But is it so crazy? Is it unreasonable to think that there exists such a right? The calculus changes if one begins to look at rights as they were intended. Your rights as an American -- as a human being -- are not limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. No, the Constitution is a document which was written for the purpose of spelling out the rights, or more accurately the limits, of government. So the question is really somewhat different. The question that needs to be asked is: "Does the government -- any government -- have the legitimate power to determine for an individual what that person may consensually ingest?" How far, exactly, does the power of government extend? Alexander Shulgin, renowned chemist, author and researcher into the nature and effects of psychedelic substances, argued that it extends only so far as the tip of his nose and no further when he said, "from the skin in, I am the sovereign. I am the customs agent, the police and the border patrol, and I will defend these borders with more passion and more fury than I will the politically-drawn borders of any nation-state." Is that radical? Does the belief that one's own body -- and that which would be knowingly put into it -- is the province of the individual rather than the state mark one as some kind of militant anti-societalist? Does such individualism make one a danger, a renegade, a thought-criminal? Or is it possible that the government, our government, the leadership of the land of the free, has so encroached on our personal sovereignty through the medium of the Drug War as to have incrementally but significantly changed the boundaries of the acceptable perception of freedom itself? Do I have a right to do that which the state has determined is not in my best interest? To smoke tobacco? To overeat? To skydive? To handle poisonous snakes? To ingest psychotropic substances? In the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, these were radical men. They believed in the rights of individuals and the strictly limited powers of legitimate government. Further, they knew that maintaining those rights and those limits would be a never-ending process, with government always seeking -- whether beneficently or malevolently -- to increase its reach into the lives of its citizens. But radical as they were, those men were right. Today, 84% of the young Brits who call in to a radio station believe that they have the right to determine for themselves what they will or will not ingest. Or, rather, that the government has no legitimate power to dictate such personal decisions by the use of force. They have taken the radical view that from the skin in, they are the sovereign. And they seem ready and determined to protect their borders. 200-and-some years after a group of revolutionaries denounced the Crown and drew up a blueprint for the freedom and liberty of a nation, the progeny of the colonialists have found that their former subjects were right all along. Ask almost any British teenager and you'll apparently find that they have a very good conception of the self evident rights of individuals. But ask an American, any American, whether or not they are sovereign over themselves, and you'll likely find that in the land of the free, the citizens are subjects once again. Adam J. Smith
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