Why the War on Drugs Is a War on Human Nature
Drug prohibition is making America ever more security mad and locked down.
... Billie Holiday’s riff on heroin: “If you think dope is for kicks and
thrills you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a
good case of paralytic polio and living in an iron lung. If you think
you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so
you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.” She goes on to say that in
Britain the authorities at least have the decency to treat addiction as a
public-health problem, but in America, “if you go to the doctor, he’s
liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops.”Humankind’s
thirst for intoxicants is unquenchable, but to criminalize it, as
Lincoln reminded the Illinois temperance society, reinforces the
clinging to the addiction; to think otherwise would be “to expect a
reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree and never can be
reversed.” The injuries inflicted by alcohol don’t follow “from the use
of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.” The victims
are “to be pitied and compassionated,” their failings treated “as a
misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace.”
... So again with the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20 billion a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state.
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