All Posts Tagged With: "drug prohibition"
Drug Decriminalization Has Failed?
Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.” (He’s starting to repeat himself.) In his May 9 column, “Ron Paul’s Land of Second-Rate [...]
24Aug2011 | David Boaz | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America
William L. Marcy has written an extensive and cogent historical critique of the U.S. war against the cocaine trade originating in Latin America. As the title indicates, he shows how this counterproductive war has led to a thriving drug industry in the Americas. Marcy criticizes U.S. policy for conflating the drug war and the Cold [...]
25May2011 | Ivan Eland | 0 comments | ContinuedThis Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
Americans really like to get high, and they’ll go out of their way to do so even when the government threatens to punish them. That’s the theme that comes through strongest in Ryan Grim’s This Is Your Country On Drugs, a look at the relationship among Americans, the drugs they use, and their government. The [...]
24Nov2010 | Jacob H. Huebert | 1 comment | ContinuedDrug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition
In perhaps no other public-policy question is the United States more hopelessly in the grip of a conventional wisdom that is utterly and egregiously wrong than drugs. Most Americans, no matter their political affiliation, are adamant supporters of the “war on drugs.” Try suggesting that the war might be stupendous folly and you’ll most likely [...]
9Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedDrugs, Economics, and Liberty
Only a few people would dispute that narcotics can harm people, whether that harm is in the form of damage to the body, mental and physical dependency, or threats to social relationships. However, there is not nearly as much consensus as to what the correct public response to narcotics use and sales is. Ideas range [...]
20May2010 | Walter E. Williams | 39 comments | ContinuedFreedom, Drugs, and the Workplace
Imagine that you work for an employer whom you respect, and you like your job. Then you find out that your employer uses marijuana for a medical condition. On further inquiry, you learn that he uses it completely legally and, as far as you can tell, it doesn’t affect his performance as an employer. Should [...]
1Jul2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Medicalization of Everyday Life
In my October column I discussed the concept of medicalization and its role in modern societies. In this column I propose to answer the question: How are we to understand the contemporary confusion about what counts as a disease? Medical classification—the linguistic-conceptual ordering of phenomena we call “diseases” and of the interventions we call “treatments”—is [...]
1Dec2007 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedOn Not Admitting Error
According to a September 2006 report in the New York Times, Afghanistan’s opium harvest has increased almost 50 percent from the year before and reached the highest levels ever recorded. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (sic) explained: “It is indeed very bad, you can say it is [...]
1Mar2007 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – September 2004
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright Princeton University Press • 2004 • 304 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling One of the most profound insights of economics is that the activities of billions of people can be coordinated without central direction and without most of these [...]
1Sep2004 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedUnequal Justice for All
Drug prohibition is stupid social policy for many reasons, most obviously because forbidden fruit tastes sweeter; that is, because one of the easiest ways for a young person to assert his autonomy is by defying authority, especially arbitrary and hypocritical authority.
1Jul2003 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedTaking Drug Laws Seriously
One of the referendums in the November election “would have put thousands of drug offenders [in Ohio] into treatment programs instead of prison.” The amendment was supported by many libertarians and friends of libertarians. Propaganda for it was generously funded by billionaires Peter Lewis, George Soros, and John Sperling. Voters rejected it by a ratio [...]
27Jan2003 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It
Among regular readers of this publication, the notion that America’s drug war brings more harm than good is hardly a news flash. But while the message of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It may not be unique, its messenger, Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, [...]
1Sep2002 | Paul Armentano | 1 comment | ContinuedAfter Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century by Timothy Lynch
Cato Institute • 2000 • 193 pages • $18.95 Reviewed by Kevin B. Zeese As the title indicates, this book takes an adult approach to drug issues. While most politicians argue over the mix of drug war funding—interdiction, eradication, law enforcement, treatment, or prevention—After Prohibition avoids merely moving around the furniture on the Titanic and [...]
1Jun2002 | Timothy Lynch - Editor | 0 comments | ContinuedPolitics and Prohibition
Writing in the December 2001 Atlantic Monthly, Judge Richard Posner called for an end to the “war on drugs.” He is among a small but growing number of eminent scholars and officials who openly advocate that the state get out of the drug-prohibition business. Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. have long pressed for [...]
1Mar2002 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedA Man’s Home Once Was His Castle
Few photos have inspired as many words as that of a young Cuban boy face to face with a MP-5 machine gun. The Associated Press photo of federal armed agents seizing Elián González from his Miami relatives aroused outrage among many Americans and—perhaps ironically—several congressional conservatives. And while the photograph was unique, the act it [...]
1Oct2000 | Paul Armentano | 0 comments | ContinuedProgress in Pain Relief
“Among the remedies which it has pleased the Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.” —Thomas Sydenham, M.D. (1680) The authors of the textbook of pharmacology used when I was a medical student (during World War II) stated: “The opium alkaloids have no [...]
1Sep2000 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Drug War’s Assault on Liberty
Lance Lamberton is a communications professional who was the deputy director of the White House Office of Policy Information in the Reagan administration. Special thanks to Jerry Epstein of the Drug Policy Foundation of Texas for his assistance in researching this article. Copyright 2000. In determining the proper boundaries of government action consistent with a [...]
1Aug2000 | Lance Lamberton | 4 comments | Continued-
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