In my youth I was a full-fledged minimal-government Objectivist, and back then I would have rejected any idea that voluntarily selling, buying, or using drugs could be criminal. Pushing sixty, and having witnessed the crack cocaine-fueled crime epidemic of the late seventies and eighties, and reading of young women being effectively enslaved into prostitution through forced drug addiction, I see those views as oversimplified and naïve. Reality is usually more complicated than our theories about it, and as far as I am concerned real-world outcomes trump theories every time.
Few of us ever worry about being murdered, robbed or assaulted by pot-smokers or drunks, but crack cocaine, heroin, PCP, etc. are another matter entirely. When a drug is so powerfully addicting that the cravings and pains of withdrawal can override normal human consideration and restraint – or so mind-distorting as to render a person non-functional or violent – its users predictably turn to crime to get the money they need, creating a danger to the people around them. Certainly not every user, and not all the time, but commonly enough to affect the general level of safety in the community.
“Rights” purists might well say that until the addict actually tries to harm someone, it would be wrong to restrain him (or the dealer) in any way, and I suppose in some ideal world this approach works perfectly well. In the real world of imperfect information, easy victims, and manpower-limited police forces, it’s typical for a criminal to succeed with multiple, often escalating crimes before getting caught, if he gets caught at all. It seems pretty clear to me that allowing the sale or use of drugs so addictive that they regularly lead to criminal predation jeopardizes the most basic rights and safety of all of us, and that the presumptive right to sell or imbibe any particular substance must have lesser weight.
We are biochemical beings, and refusing to look at the possible worst-case implications in an age when ever more potent addictive drugs are being created is dangerously stupid. It’s perfectly possible that one day a drug will be invented so powerfully addicting that a single dose would create withdrawal symptoms that are deadly. The possibilities (indeed, inevitability) of its use for enslavement are obvious. And in a perfectly unregulated drug market, such a thing would be the holy grail of products for any ruthless sociopath, of which there are always at least a few.
The problem then is how and where to draw the line between drugs that pose a threat to the safety of the community and those that are mainly harmful to the individual taking them. Personally, I place pot on the OK side of that line, and crack cocaine well to the outlaw side (and I would insist that the user is just as much at fault as the dealer). But such judgments are always a matter of degree, subject to evidence and experience, and open to honest disagreement by reasonable people.
