E os que causarem danos à sociedade vão ser multados e podem ir para a cadeia, como os criminosos do trânsito?
Seria preciso debater todas essas questões.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
On the Legalization of Drugs
Living in a civilized society means accepting laws that we didn’t make.
The City Journall, 5 December 2012
Discussing
drug legalization with libertarians, as I did recently, can be a
frustrating experience. This is in part because they rarely say exactly
what they mean by “legalization.” Do they mean a controlled market that
would barely represent a retreat from state regulation and interference,
or an uncontrolled one, in which we would all be able to buy
methamphetamine or crack at our local store?
There
is a much deeper problem, though: their conception of what it is to
live in a civilized society. They seem to think of people as egoistic
particles that occasionally bump into one another rather than as
necessarily and essentially social beings. No doubt there are some
egoistic particles among us, but they represent only a tiny proportion
of the total. On the matter of drugs, libertarians argue that it is no
business of the state to tell citizens what to take or not to take, and
that doing so is therefore an oppressive curtailment of freedom. The
drug laws, they insist, don’t work in practice, because so many people
break them—with impunity or not, as the case may be.
Let
us draw an analogy with speed limits. They undoubtedly curtail our
freedom; they are undoubtedly unevenly enforced; and it is likewise
undoubtedly true that they don’t work, in the sense that there can
hardly be a single driver in the world who has not knowingly broken
them. Indeed, it is probable that most drivers break speed limits every
time they drive a car. But does that mean that speed limits do not work?
No. Does anyone suppose that if there were no speed limits, people
would not drive faster? You have only to drive on a German autobahn,
where there are no speed limits, to get your answer.
Now,
a libertarian would say that responsible citizens should be able to
determine for themselves at what speed to drive. It doesn’t take much
intelligence or judgment to do so. It must be remembered also, by
analogy with the frequent harmlessness of drugs, that most speeding does
not end in a fatal accident. Not all speeding is abuse of speeding,
therefore; and if while speeding a person causes a fatality to others,
he must take the consequences, financial and other. The prospect of
those consequences should be enough to cause him to adjust his speed to
what is sensible and safe; and as an adult, he is the best judge of the
speed at which he is capable of driving safely. If a man gets home safe
and sound, he has, ipso facto, driven at a sensible speed.
Alas,
this is strange philosophical anthropology. People are not—I am
not—like that. I can see that other people should not drive above a
certain speed, but I cannot see that I should not do so. They, of
course, have a mirror-image view: they think that they are safe and
that I am dangerous. But though we all consider ourselves safe, the fact
is that speeding makes us more likely to have an accident or to kill
someone.
Living
in a civilized society means accepting laws that one did not make
oneself, and that in any given situation may seem unnecessary; one has
no right to complain if punished for breaking them. I accept the law as
necessary even as I break it. One is not oneself the arbiter of
everything. In some circumstances, it is right to prevent potential
harms to third parties such as speeding and taking drugs produce rather
than to wait for them actually to occur. It is a matter of judgment, not
of principle, when those circumstances exist—and in my opinion, the
taking of methamphetamine falls well this side of justifiable
prevention.
Of
course, restrictions on freedom may become onerous, and petty
regulations may whittle away freedom altogether. But all freedoms are
not created equal; a hierarchy exists among them; and a restriction on
the freedom to intoxicate yourself or drive down Fifth Avenue at 100
miles an hour is not to be compared with a restriction on the freedom to
say what you think. Speech codes are therefore a much more serious
assault on liberty than are drug laws.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
