LIBERALISM'S BRAIN ON DRUGS

Where Does Drug Policy Fit Into The Debate On Liberty?

At some point, everyone ought to throw his or her political
theory-whatever it is-up against the wall of reality to see if it sticks.

I ran smack into that wall when the state shackled Mark, one of my
best friends, and hauled him off to a dank, violent, maximum-security
prison for a 17-year stay. His crime: possession of a spoonful of
cocaine, some of which they said he intended to distribute. The judge
had recommended he be sent to a prison that focuses largely on drug
treatment, but it is hopelessly overcrowded. So there Mark sits in
Hagerstown, Md., his letters reflecting a mind slowly losing its
tether as violence and mayhem swirl around him.

I've always believed that we live in a fundamentally liberal society
that can trace its way back to enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson,
Madison, Locke, Mill and Rousseau. Sure, the past 24 years of the
Reagan, Bush and even Clinton regimes haven't been kind, but one
bedrock principle still seemed intact: If not equality and
fraternity, we'll always have liberty. And so, as guards frogmarched
my friend out of the courtroom shackled hands to feet, I wondered how
confining that man for 17 years jives with my understanding of our
nation's values. Is imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people an
acceptable policy result of a liberal, pluralistic democratic society?

Or, is the drug war proving libertarians correct about the potential
for abuse of government power?

The principal disagreement between libertarians and liberals
regarding the expansion and protection of liberty goes something like
this. Libertarians argue that the state, broadly understood to
include both state and federal governments, is the greatest threat to
individual freedom. Therefore the best way to guard liberty is to
restrict the power of the state to the greatest extent possible,
leaving it only to protect two "freedom froms"-the freedom from force
and the freedom from fraud.

The rest, they say, will work itself out.

Liberals counterclaim that the libertarian critique ignores the
reality of other organized forms of power-such as corporations,
private militias and intractably racist state governments-that can
infringe on an individual's freedom. They argue that freedom can only
exist fully against the backdrop of some measure of equality and
opportunity. Liberalism therefore calls for the expansion of state
power based on the belief that such power should be used to create
space for and protect individual rights and freedoms.

In other words, liberals expect their elected government to provide
freedom from oppressive nongovernmental forces and to help guarantee
equal access to real opportunity.

But what if the government itself becomes the oppressor?

Eric Sterling, a Reagan-era-drug-warrior-turned-reformer who now
heads up the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, refers to what he
calls the "drug war exception to the Bill of Rights." Unlawful
searches and seizures are not permitted-unless cops are searching for
drugs, which are not legal property and therefore not protected.

No self-incrimination-unless it's a drug test. No cruel and unusual
punishment-unless you were caught with cocaine.

And so our two greatest bulwarks against tyranny, checks and balances
and the Bill of Rights, are out the drug war window.

Today, one of every eight black men between the ages of 25 and 29-the
cohort Mark falls into-is behind bars. The U.S. incarceration rate
not only ranks number one in the world, but also some eight times
higher than Western European nations.

In "An Analytical Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy," Peter Reuter, a
conservative critic of the drug war and the director of the
University of Maryland's Center on the Economics of Crime and Justice
Policy, and David Boyum, a health policy consultant, have come to
some radical conclusions.

"As currently implemented, American drug policies are unconvincing,"
Reuter and Boyum write. "They are intrusive divisive and
expensive, with an approximate $35 billion annual expenditure on drug
control yet they leave the nation with a massive drug problem,
greater than that of any other Western nation." Reuter and Boyum call
for, among other proposals, eliminating criminal penalties associated
with marijuana and drastically increasing emphasis on drug treatment
instead of incarceration.

In an April essay in the Washington Monthly, William Galston, a
leading philosopher of liberalism, challenged liberal thinkers to
question how their conception of freedom might shape a liberal political view:

Edmund Burke famously observed that Americans "sniff the approach of
tyranny in every tainted breeze." Even today, the extraordinary value
Americans place on individual liberty is what most distinguishes our
culture, and the political party seen by voters as the most willing
to defend and expand liberty is the one that usually wins elections.

Conservatives have learned this lesson; too many liberals have
forgotten it. And as long as liberals fool themselves into believing
that appeals to income distribution tables can take the place of
policies that promote freedom, they will lose.

The questions before us are, what is the meaning of freedom in the
21st century, and what are the means needed to make it effective in
our lives? Those of us who oppose the conservative answer cannot
succeed by changing the question.

We can only succeed by giving a better answer.

At some point, that better answer must take into account the scope of
the state's authority to incarcerate its citizens.

Imprisonment is the antithesis of individual freedom.

With more than 2 million citizens locked up in American prisons and
jails, the time for a better answer is long past due.

I asked Galston: Is this state of affairs an acceptable result of a
pluralistic liberal system, or is there something fundamentally
illiberal about American politics today?

"You could reasonably take the position that the current policies are
badly flawed in principle and also leading to very negative
consequences," he says. "Certainly it's the case that the more
seriously you take liberty as the bedrock of a liberal society the
more seriously you have to take the deprivation of liberty."

He blamed the lack of drug war dissension on "the political traumas
inflicted on liberal Democrats in the '70s and '80s in the debate
over drugs and crime, when the party and liberals were tarred with a
brush-soft on crime, soft on drugs, maybe even encouraging a drug
culture." But he suggests that these wounds may be healing, and that
the public may be ready for a serious debate on drug and incarceration policy.

And none too soon. Silence from liberals in this debate is, in
effect, an endorsement for the status quo. It is time to stand up in
defense of liberty-not just equality and fraternity.