Pay attention and you’ll see the ways we’re not free. Some of these predate the 1950s. If you have school-aged children, you can’t legally decide not to send them to school. You can’t, for example, have your 17-year-old kids work in your business instead of attending school. At best, you can home-school them, and even that option is limited in some states. Buying liquor is legal only from a licensed dealer, and in many states, licenses are often impossible to get. Forget about using marijuana or cocaine. If you want to get certain medicines, you must first get a doctor’s permission, even if all he does is listen to you ask him to prescribe it.

But many of life’s daily restrictions on freedom are much more recent. If you go to a restaurant, chances are that it’s one in which a state or local government has banned smoking. In my city of Pacific Grove, California, people can’t buy food at a Taco Bell or a Burger King because the city council decided a few years ago not to let those chains in. The government of New York City banned certain kinds of fats in meals, thus reducing the freedom of producers and consumers who want to produce or consume those fats. If you want to travel by air, the government insists that you get permission from a TSA employee, and to get that permission you must submit to a body search and, maybe soon, an X-ray so that a government employee can see your naked body. And don’t dare make fun of that government employee or you might go to jail.

Significant Gains in Freedom

It’s true that over the last 40 years there also have been major increases in freedom, economic and otherwise. Consider the draft. Americans of my generation, if they were unlucky enough to be male and healthy, knew that when they turned 18, the U.S. government could forcibly put them in the military. During the Vietnam war, in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed, that was a scary prospect. Another major increase in freedom was for black and white people who wished to marry. In many states anti-miscegenation laws were on the books as late as the 1960s.

On the issue of race another major increase in freedom came in the 1960s, when businesses in the southern United States were no longer forced to discriminate against potential customers who were black. This was a major increase in freedom both for businesses and for blacks, who had been prevented from engaging in mutually beneficial exchange. Unfortunately, the U.S. government did not just overturn the laws that had required discrimination but went further and prohibited discrimination on racial grounds. So the discrimination that had been required by law was now prohibited by law. Simple freedom of association was never tried.

There have been other increases in freedom, as well. Until the early 1970s, the telephone company had a monopoly on long-distance service and used that monopoly to set high prices. By the late 1980s much of that government-granted monopoly power had disappeared. Also, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated the airline industry, requiring an airline that wanted to fly between two cities to get permission to do so. Permission was often refused. The CAB also required airlines to file their fares before changing them, and competing airlines could protest these fares and often did so if they were “too low.” Starting in 1978 and finishing in 1984, the federal government ended these restrictions. Although the Federal Aviation Administration still regulates safety, the CAB was eliminated on December 31, 1984. Airlines have much more freedom to enter markets and cut prices, with travelers being the major beneficiaries. There was similar deregulation in surface transportation around the same time.

Recent Losses

But notice that most of the gain in freedom started in the late 1960s and concluded by the mid-1980s. Since then, most of the changes have been toward less freedom. Think of the increasing bureaucratization of life, most of which is due to government. If I want to cut off a tree branch that is more than four inches in diameter–even in my own yard–I must get the city government’s permission and pay for that permission. In the city of Monterey, California, someone who wants to install a new dishwasher must get government permission to do so. I’m sure that few people bother because the requirement is so hard to enforce, but it’s a requirement. Under a law passed in 2008 the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned that children’s books published before 1985 are not safe and cannot be sold unless the seller does expensive testing to make sure they don’t contain lead. This is so even though, as Walter Olson has written, “no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations.”

Credentialism is also reducing our freedom, and one interesting recent illustration was in President Obama’s speech to U.S. schools at the start of the 2009-10 school year. What received the publicity at the time was the controversy about whether it was proper for a U.S. president to address the students and for the U.S. Department of Education to put together exercises for the teachers to conduct after the speech on how the students could help Obama achieve his goals. What went unnoted was Obama’s statement that students should finish high school because otherwise they will not be able to pursue the careers of their choice. Obama gave seven examples of such careers: lawyer, doctor, nurse, teacher, architect, police officer, and military. Why is that remarkable? The reason people need a high school diploma to enter the first five of those seven occupations is that governments require them to. And the reason people need a diploma to be police officers or to advance in the military is not only that the employer requires it but that in both cases, the employer is the government. You don’t need a high-school diploma to write software because the government hasn’t gotten around to regulating that occupation–yet.

Let’s put the truth back in the expression “It’s a free country.”

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration.

Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

I had attended a Marijuana Policy Project event celebrating the New York State Assembly’s passage of a medical-marijuana bill. I told the audience I thought it pathetic that the mere half passage of a bill to allow sick people to try a possible remedy would merit such a celebration. Of course medical marijuana should be legal. For adults, everything should be legal. I’m amazed that the health police are so smug in their opposition.

After years of reporting on the drug war, I’m convinced that this “war” does more harm than any drug.

Independent of that harm, adults ought to own our own bodies, so it’s not intellectually honest to argue that “only marijuana” should be legal—and only for certain sick people approved by the state. Every drug should be legal.

“How could you say such a ridiculous thing?” asked my assistant. “Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect. If you do crack just once, you are automatically hooked. Legal hard drugs would create many more addicts. And that leads to more violence, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births, etc.!”

Her diatribe is a good summary of the drug warriors’ arguments. Most Americans probably agree with what she said.

But what most Americans believe is wrong. (For details, see the links here.)

Myth No. 1: Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect.

Truth: There is no evidence of that.

In the 1980s, the press reported that “crack babies” were “permanently damaged.” Rolling Stone, citing one study of just 23 babies, claimed that crack babies “were oblivious to affection, automatons.”

It simply wasn’t true. There is no proof that crack babies do worse than anyone else in later life.

Myth No. 2: If you do crack once, you are hooked.

Truth: Look at the numbers—15 percent of young adults have tried crack, but only 2 percent used it in the last month. If crack is so addictive, why do most people who’ve tried it no longer use it?

People once said heroin was nearly impossible to quit, but during the Vietnam War, thousands of soldiers became addicted, and when they returned home, 85 percent quit within one year.

People have free will. Most who use drugs eventually wise up and stop.

And most people who use drugs habitually live perfectly responsible lives, as Jacob Sullum pointed out in Saying Yes.

Myth No. 3: Drugs cause crime.

Truth: The drug war causes the crime.

Few drug users hurt or rob people because they are high. Most of the crime occurs because the drugs are illegal and available only through a black market. Drug sellers arm themselves and form gangs because they cannot ask the police to protect their persons and property.

In turn, some buyers steal to pay the high black-market prices. The government says heroin, cocaine, and nicotine are similarly addictive, and about half the people who both smoke cigarettes and use cocaine say smoking is at least as strong an urge. But no one robs convenience stores for Marlboros.

Alcohol prohibition created Al Capone and the Mafia. Drug prohibition is worse. It’s corrupting whole countries and financing terrorism.

The Post wrote, “Stossel admitted his own 22-year-old daughter doesn’t think [legalization] is a good idea.”

But that’s not what she said. My daughter argued that legal cocaine would probably lead to more cocaine use. And therefore probably abuse.

I’m not so sure.

Banning drugs certainly hasn’t kept young people from getting them. We can’t even keep these drugs out of prisons. How do we expect to keep them out of America?

But let’s assume my daughter is right, that legalization would lead to more experimentation and more addiction. I still say: Legal is better.

While drugs harm many, the drug war’s black market harms more.

And most importantly, in a free country, adults should have the right to harm themselves.

But Roberts’s argument implicitly assumes that government provides security. That assumption flies in the face of much evidence on the welfare/nanny state. It ignores the government’s sometimes-lethal iron fist that is only modestly hidden beneath its velvet glove. Government’s tragic track record shows that regulations and spending programs often make people less secure. And even when they provide security, they often do so by trading one risk for another, sometimes bigger risk. Consider three areas where this happens: drugs, education, and jobs.

Since 1962 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required that any new drug be tested not just for safety but also for efficacy. Economists have estimated that the efficacy requirement has added many years to the time between a drug’s discovery and its sale. Let’s grant that the requirement for proof of safety reduces risk. But the regulation that requires proof of efficacy does little or nothing to decrease risk and necessarily increases risk, sometimes lethally. Imagine you have a terminal disease and, without a drug that is currently being tested for efficacy, you will die in six months. Unfortunately, the drug won’t be on the market until after that. Imagine there is a 30-percent probability that it would extend your life. Has the government reduced your risk by forcibly preventing you from taking it? This example is not hypothetical. Economist Daniel Klein estimates that withholding new effective drugs causes at least 50,000 premature deaths a year. (See “Economists Against the FDA,” The Freeman, September 2000.)

And think of other drugs that government regulators try to prevent you from taking—drugs like marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and heroin. Here the issue is a trade-off of risks. One could argue that if the government makes the penalties harsh enough, you will decide not to take these drugs and will therefore avoid the associated risks. But stopping the analysis there is to engage in single-entry bookkeeping. We need to examine the other side of the ledger: the risks that government creates. For those who decide to use the drugs anyway, their risk is much greater—and the higher risk is due to government regulation. They face two new risks they wouldn’t face if the drugs were legal. The first is the risk of getting an impure drug. When drugs are illegal, providers do not have the same incentive or ability to provide high quality and establish a good reputation that they would have if the drugs were legal. Many people who die from illegal drugs do so because they don’t know the potency of the drugs or what they are spiked with.

The second is the risk of going to jail. One of the few effective anti-drug ads run by the federal government was the one that showed a drug user running from the cops. But notice that this risk is entirely government-created: if drugs were legal, there would be no risk of going to prison just for using them. And the risk of going to prison is not one of those little risks. As the drug warriors correctly point out, going to prison could wreck your life.

One might argue—and many do—that we should not be sympathetic to those who take illegal drugs and go to jail. To this I have two answers. First, those who make the argument cannot also argue for drug laws on the basis of saving people from harm because they have revealed that they don’t care about those people being harmed. Second, when I ask even strongly anti-drug audiences what they would do if they found illegal drugs in their teenager’s room, they never say they would report their child to the police. So they do seem capable of being sympathetic to at least some people who risk going to prison.

My second example of where government creates risk is the schools. Most schools in the United States are government-run, and parents are forced by law to enroll their students at these schools, at private schools, or in home-schools. Government schooling is not cheap: it now costs about $7,200 per student, which is about $2,500 more than the average tuition at private schools. But because government gives it away “free,” only those who value private schooling very highly will choose it for their children. If private school tuition is $4,700, for example, you won’t buy it unless it’s worth $4,700 more than the value of what the government school provides.

What does this have to do with risk? When you drop your child off at the government school, you have little control over what happens to him or her. Within broad limits the government can do a lot to your kid: teach him things you’d rather he not know, such as how to put a condom on a banana; teach him things that are not true, such as the idea that the industrialists of the late nineteenth century were “robber barons”; and, in thousands of little ways, deaden your child’s inherent love of learning. I’d call that a pretty big risk. Of course, all this can and does happen in private schools. But with lots of private-school choices, which you would have if the government exited the business and cut taxes to reflect its lower spending, the risk would be much less.

Harm from Forced Higher Wages

Finally, consider jobs. Government regulations give unions the power to force people to join or to at least have the union represent them in wage bargaining. Unions use that power to bargain for wages higher than they could have otherwise. At those higher wages new workers are less likely to find jobs and must settle for lower-paying jobs in nonunion sectors of the economy. When there’s a downturn in the economy, employers, facing unions that want to preserve higher-paying jobs for their more senior members, lay off the more-junior workers. Absent the unions’ legal monopoly, the employers and workers could have bargained for lower wages that preserved more jobs. So the loss in freedom due to government-granted union privileges goes hand in hand with a loss in security for younger, less-experienced workers.

Big government is a big lottery, and as in all lotteries, your expected winnings (which equal the probability of winning multiplied by the prize) are substantially less than the price of the ticket. But there is a fundamental difference between the big-government lottery and the typical game of chance. In the latter, the participants choose to play; in the big-government lottery everyone is forced to play.

Benjamin Franklin once said that those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither. They’ll also get neither. If my major goal were security, I would want, even more than I do, freedom from government.

American criminal law does not prohibit suicide. De jure, it is legal to kill yourself. De facto, if you do so, others may be punished, and punished harshly. Our legal system often holds innocent individuals and institutions responsible for the “self-murder” (as it used to be called) of persons whose suicides they were supposed to prevent. This perversion of the law is destroying the moral and legal fabric of our society.

For centuries, suicide was a grave sin and a capital offense. The suicide as well as his family were harshly punished by both ecclesiastical and secular-legal sanctions. Today, the successful suicide is exonerated of self-murder with an automatic posthumous diagnosis of mental illness, and his family may be enriched by imputing guilt for his “wrongful death” to innocent third parties. The unsuccessful suicide (“suicide attempter”) is also automatically considered mentally ill; he is stigmatized as insane, deprived of liberty by psychiatric incarceration, and subjected to involuntary psychiatric “treatment.”

Pro forma, suicide has been decriminalized. De facto, suicide has been “criminalized” by turning the non-prevention of self-murder into a tort (civil-law offense). Contemporary mores and civil law define colleges, for example, as standing in loco parentis to college students; the students are cast in the role of standing in loco infantis to college personnel; and the substitute “parents” have the duty to prevent the child-students’ suicides and suicide attempts.

A report in the October 15, 2004, issue of the Wall Street Journal was titled: “Some colleges try zero-tolerance toward suicide attempts.” Normally, we use the term “zero-tolerance” in connection with illegal acts, such as trafficking in prohibited drugs. Here the Journal casually uses it in connection with acts that are not only legal but usually are not “suicide attempts” at all.

We learn that at the University of Illinois, for example, the “frontline . . . of the [suicide prevention] program consists of about 1,000 people—from dorm staff to deans—who are required to file a formal suicide report any time they hear about or witness a threat or attempt.” What is there to prevent Alice from denouncing Elizabeth, claiming that she has talked to her about suicide? Of course, Alice is considered to be protecting Elizabeth, not denouncing her. And Elizabeth is being given an “option”; she is not punished.

A female student at the university picks up a power cord from a light fixture and wraps it around her neck in front of her boyfriend. He calls 911. University officials tell the student: “Meet with a mental health counselor for four sessions or don’t bother coming back to school the following semester. . . . [T]he university has a zero-tolerance rule with suicidal behavior.”

The university is an old institution. Through centuries—when the pupils were much younger than they are now—the student’s suicide was not the business of fellow students, teachers, or university administrators. Why is it now? Because formerly the student who killed himself sinned. Now we say he was sick. And we don’t punish illness. However, we do punish physicians who treat a sick patient “negligently”—and we have turned universities into therapeutic institutions for their students.

Paul Joffe, the psychologist who heads the University of Illinois’s suicide-prevention program, explains: “We may have had a program of ‘invite and encourage,’ but the students had their own program of ‘resist and refuse.’” In fact, college suicide-prevention programs have nothing to do with preventing suicide: they are charades that give the illusion that the “responsible” parties are behaving responsibly. In the process, they punish the students. “I’d rather get sued for saving a kid’s life than for ignoring a kid’s life,” declares William L. Riley, the university’s dean of students. In practice, “saving a kid’s life” from suicide typically means that he is stigmatized and locked up as mad.

As matters stand, the college’s liability for the student’s suicide is a given. This is a recent cultural and legal development. Epitomized by the tobacco litigation, American civil law is standing the classic free-market principle caveat emptor on its head: Caveat vendor!

The law classifies suicide as a “wrongful death.” Formerly, the term “wrongful” qualified the conduct of the person who killed himself. Now, it qualifies the conduct of the individuals and institutions that fail to prevent the suicide from killing himself—while he is assumed to have been temporarily insane.

The Illusion of Protection

Colleges cannot compel students to attend classes, much less to learn; they can only fail them. Mutatis mutandis, colleges cannot compel students to report to mental-health professionals, much less to undergo “counseling”; they can only suspend or expel them. The assumption behind such “therapeutic” coercion is that it is an effective method of preventing suicide. There is not a shred of evidence for this. In fact, evidence indicates that coercive psychiatric suicide prevention increases the incidence of suicide.

Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison—enthusiasts for suicide prevention and the authors of the major psychiatric textbook, Manic-Depressive Illness—write: “[Some psychiatrists] found that 7 percent of the patients in their sample had committed suicide while in a psychiatric hospital. [Others] reported an even higher rate: 27 percent of manic-depressive patients killed themselves while under hospital care.” (Emphasis added.) If incarcerating individuals in insane asylums (and prisons) cannot prevent their killing themselves, how can college personnel prevent the student suicides?

The testimony of individuals subjected to psychiatric incarceration is relevant in this connection. French writer Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) declared: “I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to slit his throat.”

We deceive ourselves about the basic, unchanging and unalterable facts of life. Every period—childhood, youth, adulthood, old age—has its travails and tribulations. One of the most difficult periods is youth and young adulthood, when the individual—no longer a child, but not yet a mature adult—is expected to complete the difficult voyage from carefree childhood to responsible adulthood. This voyage may be eased or hindered by others—parents, siblings, teachers—but, in the end, each person must make it on his own. The wonder is that so many do make it, not that some don’t. Treating university students as potential mental patients will insure that many more won’t make it. Sadly, that may be the intended, not the unintended, consequence of all psychiatric policies preventing mental illness and promoting mental health.

For the subject, suicide is, ipso facto, a solution for the problems he faces. For the psychiatrist, suicide of the Other—not his own, which is frequent—is a disease to be treated and cured. That disjunction is the source of much perplexity in psychiatry, much profit in law, and much unnecessary suffering for the public.

Suicide is an act, not a disease. Preventing suicide—like preventing drunkenness—is the responsibility of the college student, not the college administration.

Drugs can exercise a powerful hold over a human being. What other lesson is possible from the arrest of actor Robert Downey Jr., yet again, on drug charges?

His life is a tragedy: a gifted actor, with access to the sort of money and fame of which most people only dream, succumbs to drugs and ends up in jail. His latest arrest came only three months after being released from prison.

One should wonder how drugs can have such a stranglehold over a person. But there’s an even more important question: why was the government threatening to put Downey in prison for another five years?

Downey has made a mess of his life. But he has harmed no one else. Why jail him?

The Drug War is usually debated in practical terms. And it is extremely hard to justify on those terms.

The Drug War has had only indifferent success in reducing drug abuse. Consumption has varied over the last two decades without any relationship to enforcement efforts. More than 80 million people have tried drugs—despite increasingly Draconian penalties. Some 15 million people used drugs last year.

Most are casual users who can and do ultimately quit. Undoubtedly, the threat of prosecution and prison has discouraged casual use, but casual use is of the least consequence. Three-fourths of present drug users, like Downey, are employed. Corporations, law firms, government agencies, and legislative bodies are full of people who once consumed drugs. Even presidents-to-be have smoked marijuana without obvious harm.

Where the drug laws are least effective is in deterring addicts, the 3.6 million people like Downey estimated to be dependent on drugs. “The threat of prison has been eliminated for me,” observed Downey after leaving jail the last time: “I know I can do time now.” If the drug laws won’t stop someone like him, who has so much to lose from doing drugs, then whom will they stop?

Perhaps the greatest failure is that the Drug War does so little to prevent drug use by kids. Demand for marijuana has fallen a bit over the last five years, but the demand for ecstasy has doubled. Half of teens have tried illicit drugs. Nine of ten say it is fairly or very easy to obtain marijuana; nearly half say the same of cocaine.

The peculiarities of prohibition have actually encouraged consumption by children. Persistent lies about the impact of drugs—from “reefer madness” on—have undercut the government’s credibility. The application of reduced criminal penalties to juveniles has encouraged drug gangs to rely on kids. And the legal ban has driven drug sales into the hands of the sort of people who have no compunction about selling to kids: For all the criticism of alcohol and tobacco companies for allegedly marketing to kids, students do not wear beepers and sell Marlboro cigarettes or Seagram’s liquor in most schools.

While the Drug War has had its least impact in halting the most serious problems—abuse by addicts and kids—it has come at great cost. The government has spent $75 billion over the last five years, 25 times the inflation-adjusted spending on Prohibition in the 1920s.

There are now two million people in federal and state prisons. One-fourth of state and 60 percent of federal prisoners are serving drug-related charges, yet three-fourths of them had no prior convictions for violent crimes. An incredible six million are in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. In short, government is jailing a steadily rising number of people for hurting themselves and no one else.

We are also losing our status as a free people. Corruption bedevils police forces, court systems, the customs service, and even the military.

The lack of complaining witnesses—drugs are self-victim crimes, in contrast to rape and murder—means that dealers and users can be prosecuted only through police-state tactics. That means increasing wiretaps, intrusive searches, racial profiling, confiscatory property forfeitures, propaganda-laced television shows, militarized law enforcement, and mindless mandatory minimum sentences. Although the Supreme Court recently tossed out traffic stops for narcotics, lawyers routinely talk about the drug exception to the Fourth Amendment.

Innocent Victims

The problem is not just an abstract potential for an improper search. It means lives: drug raids on the wrong address or based on unreliable informants have filled body bags with innocent victims.

Fighting the war has generated other “collateral” casualties. Although there are people who consume drugs and then commit crimes, alcohol is the most crimogenic substance. Drugs like heroin and marijuana are more likely to make people passive. Most of the violence associated with drugs is drug-law related—marketing disputes that cannot be resolved in normal, peaceful ways.

The problem spreads overseas. Countries like Colombia stagger from pervasive corruption and unrelenting violence caused, ultimately, by America’s Drug War. Absent the U.S. drug ban, the drug trade would offer normal profits and attract normal businesses. Today, in contrast, these societies are truly at war.

The sick also pay a price. Although the federal government allows use of morphine to treat pain, it refuses to do the same for marijuana. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that for some people—suffering from AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, and other conditions—marijuana is currently the best medicine available.

In short, the practical costs of the drug war outweigh any practical benefits. But the case of Robert Downey raises an even more fundamental moral issue.

Why should someone be jailed to prevent him from hurting himself? The moral argument for punishing a thief or murderer is clear. But it is not clear for a drug user, especially when the vast majority of users are as responsible as any drinker.

The few who are “enslaved” by their habits still don’t deserve jail. If Robert Downey can’t do his job, then fire him for cause. If he drives a car while impaired, then punish him for DUI. If he takes a drug that impairs his judgment and he hits someone, then imprison him for assault. But don’t jail him simply for using drugs.

The prolonged presidential election overshadowed an even more important result of last November 7—an obvious desire to find an alternative path to reduce drug abuse. Voters supported access to medical marijuana, endorsed treatment over punishment, restricted property forfeitures, and, in California’s Mendocino County, approved limited marijuana decriminalization.

There is no easy solution to drug abuse, but one thing is clear: our present policy is an immoral failure. Drug abuse is a health, moral, and spiritual problem; it should not be a criminal problem. As former DEA agent Michael Levine puts it, it is time to “call off the hounds.”

As I was driving to the pharmacy not long ago, I heard a “public service” radio announcement, crafted by some California state agency that wants to frighten kids off cigarette smoking. I did not record what was said, but the substance went like this: “If you try that one cigarette, you are certain to get hooked for life. So don’t do it.”

The ad is a flat-out, bald-faced lie. It reminded me of another public service ad, aired a few years ago on television, attacking drug abuse—the one with the cracked egg being dropped into a frying pan, while the voice-over says, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.” That, too, was a lie.

Not that everyone who took a puff on a cigarette managed to leave it at that—many, indeed, went on to become steady smokers. Nor again is it the case that all folks who tried drugs managed to escape getting hooked on the stuff. But many others fall into the category of “been there, done that, left it behind.” The statement “all swans are white” is made false by just one black swan. What if there are hundreds and hundreds of them?

That evening I was visiting some friends, four men and one woman. One of us is under 50, and only one is a regular smoker. Yet each of us had smoked cigarettes on and off during the last 30 years. I myself have always been a sporadic smoker, going without any cigarettes at all for months, then having one or two every other or third day, then none for six months. I recently gave them up altogether. My female friend smoked a few at 14 and then never any again. Another of the guys smoked for a while, then quit cold turkey and has never even tried it again. Same with yet another one who now smokes a cigar occasionally.

What’s the Motive?

We discussed these ads, and we couldn’t figure out why on earth these kinds of lies had gotten on the air. Surely no one could think kids were so stupid as to fall for them! One suggestion that came out of the discussion made sense to me, although at first I was hesitant to even consider it: these ads have nothing to do with actually trying to persuade kids not to start smoking. The folks who design them know that kids can tell when they are being bamboozled, and these ads clearly fall on deaf ears, given how dishonest they are. Adolescents know well that some folks who try smoking do not continue, that some do it rarely thereafter, and that others pick up the practice good and hard. They also knew a few years back that not all those who smoked pot or even harder drugs fried their brains. They are smart enough to dismiss those public service ads as nonsense, plain and simple. Hardly anyone is fooled or frightened.

So what gives, then? Well, either those who make the ads are incredibly stupid or just plain wicked. Let us dismiss the former—folks like the ones who set about to concoct these ads are not stupid. So they are, sad to say, probably wicked. That is to say, they want to seem to be doing something, so that their expensive campaign continues to be funded by desperate politicians and supported by even more desperate parents who want something, anything, done to stop kids from smoking.

Yes, this is a cynical hypothesis, but when nothing else works, perhaps cynicism must be given its proper due. Since the cost of the wickedness is probably quite high, it would be good to put a halt to this charade. It teaches kids that many of our lawmakers are frauds who are perfectly willing to perpetrate out-and-out deception just to appear useful. Like the 55 mph speed limit of a few years ago, which even the highway cops couldn’t take seriously (and which therefore encouraged people to take law less seriously), the antismoking ads will probably achieve little more than to undermine kids’ respect for government.

Which, come to think of it, will be of value, given how misguided governments have become.