President Clinton took some flak in
the closing weeks of his administration when he told a Rolling
Stone interviewer, “I think that most small amounts of
marijuana have been decriminalized in some places and should be.”
The negative reaction was so strong
that a Clinton spokesman said that the president was not endorsing
decriminalization. You figure it out. I guess it all depends on what your
definition of “should” is.
Shepherd Smith, president of the
Institute for Youth Development, responded, “Decriminalizing
‘small amounts of marijuana’ is simply a euphemistic way of
saying it’s fine to smoke it, just don’t sell it. So we now
have the president of the United States on record again saying to young
people that smoking marijuana is basically OK.”
Oh really?
Let me rush to the former
president’s defense. Since when is it an endorsement of an activity
to say that it shouldn’t be treated as a crime? There are many
things that are perfectly legal to do that would best be avoided. Bungee
jumping is the first example that springs to mind, but there are many
others. Did you ever hear anyone say, “By making bungee jumping
legal, we are sending a message to our kids that such risky behavior is
OK”? Some people enthusiastically endorse bungee jumping. Search
the World Wide Web and you’ll find people who call it “the
ultimate rush.”
But is it accurate to say
“we” — meaning Society or The Country — are
telling kids that they should bungee jump? I don’t think so.
Some people just don’t get the
point of a free society. The freedom to do something doesn’t mean
you ought to do that thing. How basic can you get?
Yet we seem to want to teach our
children the opposite lesson: if something is legal, then it is OK to do it.
And that leads to the view that we should legalize only those things we
want people to do. That’s just nutty.
Under what used to be known as
“liberalism” (today we say “classical
liberalism”), people were free to do anything except that which was
expressly (and justly) prohibited by the law, such as murder, robbery,
rape, and the like. On the other hand, government could do nothing except
that which was expressly (and justly) permitted to it. To use the imagery
of political philosopher Stephen Macedo, government power constituted a
few islands in a sea of liberty.
All that has changed now, thanks to
the gang that appropriated the word “liberalism” about a
century ago. Today, continuing with Macedo’s analogy, liberty
constitutes a few islands in a sea of government power. We are quickly
heading toward a situation in which, as someone once put it, everything
that is not forbidden is required. In other words: total government. The
price is the liberty, self-responsibility, and dignity of the individual.
Contrary to the attitude of so many people today, that is no small price.
As Charles Murray, author of What It Means to Be a
Libertarian, self-responsibility is what keeps our lives from being
trivial. Everyone pays lip service to self-responsibility. But what is so
misunderstood is that self-responsibility requires freedom. Try imagining
one without the other. It’s like trying to square the circle. It cannot
be done.
The American political system has
been seized by the idea that there are areas in which individuals may not
be permitted liberty and self-responsibility. Drugs are one such area. A
hundred years ago people were trusted with the freedom and
responsibility of self-medication. They could freely buy opiates and
marijuana; Coca-Cola contained cocaine. A small percentage of the
population harmed themselves with those substances. But there was no
drug problem. The drug problem was born the day government began
passing laws depriving people of freedom and responsibility. Those laws
gave us black markets with their attendant violence, organized crime, and
law-enforcement corruption. They did something worse — if worse
can be imagined. They infantilized the American people. The results were
predictable. The sphere of freedom and self-responsibility sphere shrank
radically — a point where no one is responsible for anything
anymore.
If you treat adults like children, many
of them will come to believe that that is what they are.
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow
at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va. (www.fff.org), and
editor of
Ideas on Liberty magazine.
