Daddy knows best, kids - part 2

So, on to drug laws. I suppose the best way to start any discussion of our government's "War on Drugs" is to point you to Wikipedia's article on alcohol prohibition in the United States. You can skip ahead to the "End of Prohibition" section if you want to get to the meat of the horrible effects alcohol prohibition had on the country; things like organized crime, racketeering, police corruption, and murder became rampant due to the massive black market opened up by the ban. The quality of alcohol dropped and the potency increased, due to its being more profitable to manufacture and transport high-test liquors (moonshine), causing illnesses and death.

Does this sound familiar? How often have you heard in the news stories about drug-related police corruption scandals, drug-related gang turf wars, mafia involvement in the drug black market, etc.? There is good reason to believe that most drug overdoses are due to the varying purity of street drugs - a user may prepare what seems to be a reasonable dose, only to discover (too late) that the batch of whatever drugs they purchased is much purer than they expected.

All in all, the bulk of the "drug problem" in this country is because of the drug laws, not in spite of them. Were these drugs legal to manufacture, sell and use, there would be no black market, no massive profits for organized crime. Dosages would be easy to determine, violent crime rates would plummet as they did after the end of Prohibition in 1933 (and they continued to drop for 30 years!).

To wrap this back into the point I made in part 1, can anybody explain to me why it's wrong to use drugs recreationally? I'm not asking about the legality, but the morality. I just don't see it.

Daddy knows best, kids - part 1

Here's a topic that's irked me for a long time: so called "vice" laws. I'll do deeper explorations on the individual items in later posts, but I wanted to do an overview of the whole mess for now. Vice laws generally boil down to three topics. Substance vice laws cover drugs of all kinds, including alcohol and tobacco. Sex vice laws restrict things like sodomy (which, by the by, covers anything other than coital sex between one male and one female) to prostitution to pornography. Gambling vice laws cover any type of business that facilitates gambling, be it sports booking, casinos, or bingo halls.

What is wrong with all of these laws is that they presume to enforce one group's moral code upon everyone through legislation. I covered the logical problem with this in my earlier post, Legality Vs. Morality. Gambling, prostitution, drug abuse, pornography, etc. - these are what we call "victimless" crimes. But riddle me this: what is a victimless crime? How can there be a crime if there is no victim?

Let's try the American Heritage Dictionary for a definition of crime - ah, I get it now. The good old AHD says the definition of crime, in this context, is:

"1. An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction."

So, you don't have to have done anything actually wrong to have committed a crime, just something illegal. Make a note of that - there is frequently a big difference between "right and wrong" and "legal and illegal", and this difference is nowhere more glaring and apparent than in the area of vice laws. The whole thing just smacks of the paternalistic "Because I said so, and what I say goes, because I know what's best for you and you don't" attitude that our wonderful government has developed over the last hundred and fifty years or so.

You know, I can see that I really don't have room to cover this massive topic in one post, so check back later. I'll cover each of these areas - drug laws, sex laws, and gambling laws - in that order over my next three posts.

Legality vs. Morality

I'd like to discuss the difference between legality and morality. Legal, according to Princeton University's WordNet, is, "established by or founded upon law or official or accepted rules." Note that the main indicator to legality is the fact that it is, of course, required by law. Moral, on the other hand, is defined by WordNet as, "concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles."

Morality is highly subjective (some groups find music and dancing to be highly immoral, while others see these same things as an integral part of their religious worship). Further, it is based on a specific factor that is lacking in the definition of legal: the component of choice and free will. To quote the historian William H. Prescott in his History of the Conquest of Peru,

"Where there is no free agency, there can be no morality. Where there is no temptation, there can be little claim to virtue. Where the routine is rigorously proscribed by law, the law, and not the man, must have the credit of the conduct."

The gist of this is simple: when you try to enforce morality with law, you remove the very component which defines morality in the first place. A person who does not use drugs because it is "against the law," therefore, is not making a moral decision - only an obedient one. In contrast, a person who illegally carries a concealed weapon when with his family in a crime-ridden neighborhood is not making an immoral choice, only disobeying a law that he believes puts his family in danger.

Here we come to the paradox that I see in legislating morality. I would posit that an act which discourages morality is itself immoral - which, ironically enough, means that those who try to enforce their moral views with laws are themselves behaving in an immoral manner.