DRCNet
Interview:
Michael
Badnarik,
Libertarian
Party
Presidential
Candidate
9/24/04
DRCNet begins its coverage
of drug policy and the presidential election season this year with
Libertarian
Party nominee Michael Badnarik (http://www.badnarik.org). We may
have a similar interview with Independent candidate Ralph Nader in the
near
future. While we have not asked major
party candidates Sen. John Kerry and Pres. George Bush for interviews,
we will
examine their drug policy records and relevant campaign platforms in
the weeks
to come. The Libertarian Party (LP)
has for years been a staunch advocate of ending drug prohibition, a
plank to
which it adheres to this day. In the
party's current position statement on drug policy, it says bluntly,
"Drugs
should be legal. Individuals have the
right to decide for themselves what to put in their bodies, so long as
they
take responsibility for their actions." While the LP advocates
drug legalization as part of a comprehensive and consistent
anti-statist
approach -- party planks also include ending welfare programs,
protecting
gun-owners' rights, opposing foreign wars and the war in Iraq in
particular,
opposing the Patriot Act and any other infringements on civil liberties
and
free speech, and opposing government regulations that interfere with
free
enterprise, such as minimum wages -- it has never caught hold with the
voting
public. In the last 20 years, the LP
presidential candidate has never done better than second among the
minority
parties or important independents -- typically Nader and/or Greens on
the
progressive left or the Reform Party on the populist right have come in
third,
except in 1988, when Ron Paul (now a Republican congressman from Texas)
beat
out Lenora Fulani and the New Alliance Party.
Except for businessman Harry Browne in 1996, no LP presidential
candidate
has since equaled Paul's showing with 0.5% of the popular vote. Browne, who ran again in 2000, saw his total
decline to 0.36%. Carrying the Libertarian
Party banner in this year's election is Michael Badnarik, a computer
consultant
and constitutional scholar living in Drug War Chronicle: The
Libertarian Party has long stood tall
against the "war on drugs."
Are you continuing that stance? Michael Badnarik: Absolutely.
Libertarians have a number of good reasons to oppose the "war on
drugs." The first, of course, is
based in the notion of self-ownership.
What you or I might choose to eat, drink, smoke, inject or
otherwise
ingest into our own bodies is none of the government's business. We own ourselves. The
government doesn't own us. Secondly, the "war on
drugs," by any reasonable set of criteria, has been an abject
failure. Any drug you care to name is
just as available now -- perhaps even more available -- as it was when
"war"
was declared on it. Billions of dollars
in government spending and millions of arrests and imprisonments have
failed to
achieve anything resembling "victory." And
they'll continue to fail. Finally, there are the
unintended consequences and side effects.
Drug war prisoners constitute a large minority, some say a
majority, of
the Chronicle: Clearly,
drug abuse can be harmful. What do you say
to people who argue that
avoiding the harms of drug abuse justify drug prohibition? Badnarik: We
could argue all day about whether the "war
on drugs" would be justified if it minimized drug abuse.
The fact is that it doesn't. As a
matter off fact, the evidence militates
toward concluding that in encourages drug abuse. The
"war on drugs" has encouraged a
trend of ever more potent, dangerous drugs which are more addictive and
more
likely to engender an abusive response in their users.
Marijuana is engineered for higher THC
content. Opium evolves into morphine and
then heroin. Coca leaves become powder
cocaine, which becomes crack. All of these changes are
due to the imperative to maximize profit and to create drugs that give
more "bang
for the buck" in terms of being able to fit a given number of doses
into a
smaller space to facilitate smuggling.
Then, when someone discovers that he or she has a drug problem,
they're
afraid to seek help. They've been deemed
criminals. They're afraid of being
arrested -- so they go on with their self-destructive behavior rather
than
risking it. Chronicle: What
do you see as the primary harms of the "war
on drugs"? Badnarik: I've
listed a number of them above. To me, the
basic, primary harm is that it
gives government more power over the individual. The
other harms are the side effects,
intended and unintended, of that basic problem. Chronicle: If we
were to end drug prohibition, with what
sort of drug control regime might we replace it? Badnarik: The
only sort of "control regime" I'm
interested in is the market.
Historically, government "control regimes" have produced
inferior results to those achieved by letting the market meet demand
and maximize
benefits. As a matter of fact,
government controls usually have an effect counter to the intended one,
with
numerous bad side effects. Chronicle: The
Libertarian Party's national office under
Ron Crickenberger, who died last fall, was very strong on pushing for
the end
of the "war on drugs."
Is the drug war still a major issue for the
party? What is the national office
doing? Badnarik: The
Libertarian Party adopted ending the drug
war as a "signature issue" a couple of years ago. A
lot of that was due to Ron's influence,
which is very much missed. In this
presidential election, foreign policy and civil liberties in a more
general
sense have taken center stage. However,
neither I nor the LP in general have abandoned our goal of ending the
drug
war. If anything, it's more urgent than
ever, precisely because the drug war facilitates the terrorism we now
find
ourselves at war with. Chronicle: What
are the outlines of the debate within
the party over the centrality of the "war on drugs" to the party
platform? Badarik: It's
been said that if you stick two
Libertarians in a room and ask them a question, they'll emerge from the
room
with three conflicting and mutually exclusive points of view. That's as true of the drug issue as it is of
any. However, I think that there are
certain points on which we agree. We
agree that the drug war is a failure. We
agree that individuals should be free to make their own choices -- so
long as
they don't inflict the consequences of their mistakes on others. Where we disagree
sometimes is on the relative importance of the drug issue to others,
and on the
best approach for achieving our goals.
Some Libertarians prefer to emphasize just marijuana, or just
medical
marijuana. Some Libertarians argue for a
"control regime" like that currently in place for alcohol.
Others want to tackle the whole subject, top
to bottom, with a no-holds-barred, immediate battle for total victory
over
prohibition. And some Libertarians want
to relegate the issue to a less prominent position in our platform,
program,
and public activities. These are all
ongoing struggles within the Party.
However, I believe that we're in general agreement on keeping
the issue
up front and continuing to do battle on it.
And we're winning, as the progress of medical marijuana
legislation,
decriminalization legislation, etc., indicate. Chronicle: The
"war on drugs" is open to
attack from across the political spectrum.
Why is the Libertarian position superior to, say, the liberal
critique
of someone like George Soros or the public health-centered critique
avowed by
harm reductionists? Badnarik: It
really comes back to the libertarian
critique of government in general, and to Lord Acton's dictum -- "power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The liberal critique and the "harm
reduction" critique still rely on government power.
They assume that "the right people"
or "the right policy" will remedy the situation. But
once you hand power to government, you
substantially lose control of how that power is exercised.
Victories are temporary. Everything
depends upon the whim of the
politicians and how much influence can be exerted over them at any
given time
to go in any particular direction.
Libertarians want to take the question out of the political
arena
entirely instead of trusting the transient wisdom and good intentions
of
bureaucrats and politicians to secure our rights. Chronicle: Since
Ed Clark got 920,000 votes and 1.1% of
the popular vote in 1980, the LP presidential candidate has never
received more
than 0.5% of the popular vote (Paul in 1988 and Browne in 1996), and
Harry
Browne saw his vote totals decline from 1996 to 2000.
Will you be able to break that ceiling and
what are you doing that is different from earlier campaigns to enable
you to do
that? Badnarik: I'm
not even going to try to predict the
outcome this November. Every election
has certain unique features, and every election presents the LP with
obstacles
and with opportunities. Will we bust the million-vote
ceiling this time? I don't know. My gut feeling is that we will.
Whatever the outcome, though, I know that I'll
have earned every vote I get, that those votes will make a difference,
and that
the people who vote for me will never need to be ashamed for having
done so. How well we do this
November depends upon a number of factors.
However, I am confident that we can get our message out, affect
the
outcome of the election and achieve a greater degree of relevance for
the Party
than any previous campaign. And, unlike previous
campaigns, we're collecting hard data on what works and what doesn't
instead of
relying on anecdote and subjective perception.
We're doing polls. We're
coordinating those polls with our media buys so that we can gauge their
effectiveness. This will be the
best-documented presidential
campaign in the LP's history -- and subsequent campaigns will be able
to avoid
making the same old mistakes over again.
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