I recently listened to my friend John Payne speak before old guard conservative club The Pachyderms on the topic of drug legalization. John did a fine job, and I agree wholeheartedly with all his points, yet he pushed some ideas that only irritated the audience, and missed some opportunities to resonate.
Hence this primer. In order to avoid constantly using the sentence starter “To the social conservative…” I am going to write that role from the first person. I will assert what objectively appears to be their viewpoint, and not use this as an excuse for hyperbolic parody. Take this as an entry in the Ideological Caplan Test.
How To Sell Drugs to Vroman the Social Conservative
Rule #1. You MUST convince me you are a member of my tribe or I will simply write you off completely. If you do not emphasize STRONG conservative credentials, I will just assume you are spewing bald faced lies. You need to establish common values as priority one, or nothing you say will register.
Rule #2. NEVER portray addicts as sympathetic in any way shape or form. Drug use is a serious sin, and any argument that hinges on the well being of drug users is a non-starter.
The argument that prison is ineffective at ending drug use doesn’t matter, because the decision to use drugs shows a fundamental moral weakness, and thus its highly unlikely that the individual will sober up by any means, and even if somehow they did stop using, they are and will always be highly suspect. I actually want to proactively punish these people, regardless of whether this will change their behavior. Drug users are sociopathic hedonists, and I want to punish them for this character flaw in and of itself, the fact they are using drugs is just an easily detected external indicator. If I somehow could prove sociopathic hedonism innately, I would still call for society to condemn such people, even if they gave no outward sign.
“Treatment is better than prison” fails on me for multiple reasons.
A) I think these people actually deserve prison
B) Treatment smacks of socialized medicine, and even if I privately agreed treatment was replacing a less effective and more expensive alternative, I will never publicly endorse a new welfare program.
C) I do not believe treatment will work as advertised, and if addicts are going to be permanent wards of the state in either case, I am offended by the idea of them being coddled by social workers, rather than what I fantasize to be the stripped down and efficient prison system.
[I am also underwhelmed by the 'treatment over prison' argument. -Real Vroman]
“Prisons are horribly abusive places/ convicts have a hard time reintegrating into society.”
I have no sympathy for addicts and dealers. While I probably won’t advocate official torture or execution of drug criminals (unless I’m in a particularly righteous demagogue mood), I have a fairly “so be it” attitude towards whatever short and long term consequences they may suffer.
“The punishment is excessive for non-violent crimes”
I will always assume the worst about anyone involved with drugs. Just because they happened to be convicted of possession or distribution, doesn’t mean they weren’t getting away with burglary, or worse, in the mean time. I assume that every drug user is robbing to get their fix, and that every dealer has killed at least one competing dealer or bystander, but that they won’t always be caught for those crimes.
Sometimes I will also say that harsh punishments on a few, to deter use by the many, is justifiable, and am uninterested in any data on how weak the justice system is as a deterrent. However, mostly, deterrent or not, I simply am happy to see drug users punished for its own sake.
“Increased law enforcement efforts lead to rising fixed costs for dealers, which incentivizes more concentrated products, leading to more prevalent incidences of overdoses” [ie the Alchian-Allen theorem. When the risk premium goes up, dealers want to minimize transactions for the same quantity of drugs, so users end up with more per dose, whether they are expecting it or not.]
See also:
“Legalization would allow dealers to openly advertise the ingredients in their products and be publicly held responsible by the market. Thus users would have a much better idea what they are ingesting, and overdoses would become very rare.”
This doesn’t phase me in the least. While I would like for no one to die of drugs, once someone has taken steps to become a user, it doesn’t particularly bother me if accidents befall them.
RULE #3 It takes a LOT of police state to scare me.
Stories of no-knock SWAT raids to serve routine warrants with tragic unintended outcomes do not sway me. I might be a fan of the PATRIOT act! There’s a high likelihood I have a “guilty until proven innocent” or “cops only arrest criminals” mindset. I will glom onto counter-anecdotes of individuals who were caught red handed with drugs that were not convicted due to legal technicalities, and internally justify any 4th amendment violations in other cases as “balancing the scales”.
Even if the victim had absolutely nothing to do with drugs and it was a total error on the SWAT team’s part, I will internally assume that you are cherry picking examples. I mean if cops screw up and accidentally shoot someone in the process of serving a warrant for a murder investigation, and some other party ends up being proven guilty of the crime in question, that doesn’t imply we should legalize murder. Unless there are fewer people in prison for murder than there are lethal victims of sloppy police work, then its on net a good system.
So two million people in jail for drugs, and a handful of botched raids? Sounds like drug cops are nearly flawless!
You might score some points if you delve into the expansive wiretapping and financial scrutiny that the drug war spills over into the white collar world. Talk about asset forfeiture, but be VERY careful to only mention cases of persons who were never found to have anything to do with drugs. Make it very explicit the cops are just opportunistically stealing. Be bold enough to tell your audience “This could happen to you!”
RULE #4 Don’t try to tell me drugs are not as dangerous as I think they are. I will just call you a liar and drag you into a meta-debate over quality over sources. I don’t believe that alcohol is worse than marijuana, and I might even be an alcohol prohibitionist too, now that you mention it. Besides, we both know there are some drugs that really are quite dangerous, even if there are anecdotes of high level functioning addicts, and yet you still think all drugs should legal. Thus, the physical danger posed by drugs to their users shouldn’t be a necessary part of your argument. Move on, for both our sake! I won’t listen!
RULE #5. Don’t make reference to successful decriminalization efforts in foreign countries. I have no respect for other countries, or if I do, I will still automatically write off their liberalized drug policies as a face-palm exception from an otherwise stalwart ally.
Since its impossible for you to comprehensively cover every detail about their policy and its effects, I will fill in the blanks with the worst case scenario. If they have reduced crime, I will imagine they have reduced productivity as well, or have an outrageously ballooned welfare state. Depending on whether I judge that country as limp wristed and permissive, or iron fisted and oppressive, I will reinterpret any statistics on reduction in addiction rates as people being reclassified as ‘disabled’ or ‘disappeared’, respectively.
Further arguments against international interdiction efforts will almost certainly fail on me. If I am willing to swallow the flimsy bullshit reasoning behind the Mesopotamian Campaign, then I will certainly find great comfort in the comparatively solid internal logic of funding death squads in Columbia and Panama to contain their manifestly evident drug trade. If some aboriginees get massacred in the process, well, they are far away and brown.
What MIGHT work:
-Comparisons to Prohibition. The necessity of a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. The obvious preferability of Budweiser vs Smirnoff over Capone vs Moran. The huge reduction in crime on the supply side when a comparative advantage in product quality, distribution logistics and advertising becomes the dominant strategy, over comparative advantages in violence and willingness to risk incarceration.
-The drug war spawns two kinds of police corruption: The over-zealous cop and the dirty cop. The former is a true believer in the cause and will cut corners to convict people he “knows” are guilty. I probably won’t openly be an apologist for this kind of behavior, but stopping it is not a high priority. The latter, the police officer who has given in to the temptation of the lucrative drug trade is impossible for me to ignore. I may like cops in general, but I hate drug dealers more.
-Appeal to state’s rights. Repealing federal drug laws would still leave room for individual states to replicate the exact same pejorative system if I really want it. In the mean time California heathens can have their medical pot and accelerate their descent into degeneracy.
-Having a 1-2% prison population return to the workforce. Explain how legalization lowers the price such that an addict can fund their habit via unskilled labor. You could also point out that according to government’s own statistics, for example in 2008 prior to the financial meltdown, 9% of Americans were addicted to drugs, yet the unemployment rate was merely 4.5%, which implies that even if 100% of unemployed people were addicts, that 50% of addicts were gainfully employed. Thus there is tremendous dead weight loss by having literally millions of productive people banished from society.
-Also, the price reduction would greatly reduce the crime rate from the consumption side, since robbery is an insanely high risk occupation, and there is no evidence to think that addicts are less risk-averse than the general population, given opportunities to fully satisfy their habits in peaceful transactions. I may have delusions that purely anti-social crime from deranged individuals will increase. The only thing that might change my mind is pointing out the remarkably consistent addiction rates across enforcement eras and regions. ~10% of human beings are addiction-prone, and the legal system is almost totally impotent to move this number, and lack of trying does not exacerbate it.
So, I probably will remain obtuse and just refuse to acknowledge your arguments, but you can at least make me really uncomfortable and look irrational to objective listeners.
Good luck spreading the word, Mr. Payne!
Jack Chism, libertarian-leaning conservative that he is, shared with me why he had recently turned around on the drug war. You touch on it here, but it’s worth elaborating, and perhaps using as a primary strategy.
When drugs are legal, addicts hurt themselves. When drugs are illegal, addicts, drug traders, and law enforcement officers hurt law-abiding people.
The violence in mexico by drug gangs, the violence in US cities by gangs and addicts, corrupt cops — it points to one conclusion: the war on drugs has caused a breakdown of civil society and the rule of law that would be easier to reclaim if drugs were legal and regulated through blue laws.
And for the record, there are conservatives who think that prohibition was not a total failure. Also, states’ rights arguments won’t work on all conservatives — some think that the federal ban is better than allowing some states to legalize such sin — but it’s a good approach for the ones it will work on.
Any time you start talking about the War on Drugs, you will tick off the people who make money from it or otherwise benefit from it, and those people are generally the conservatives. Is it any wonder you encounter such resistance from them when you threaten their very livelihoods? It’s time for a change.
We can talk about the War on Drugs all we want, but until we wage war on the DEMAND for drugs, there will always be suppliers. No severity of consequence will stop people from making money supplying drugs, so the only effective means to curb this issue is to curb the demand. This means better education about drugs, addiction and alcoholism that must start at an early age and continue throughout life. People forget that addicition isn’t a selective disease – it is a human condition that has plagued our kind for thousands of years.
But today, things could be different. With electronic media and the ease of communication it provides, we already have the best weapon possible in the War on Drug DEMAND, the question is, when will we start using it?
There’s an excellent article on curbing demand relative to the War on Drugs here:
http://recoveryfirst.org/the-real-war-on-drugs.html/
As long as you support legalization, I applaud your attempt to make money curing addicts. I will also applaud those who make money by competitively reducing costs and improving quality of addicting substances.
Thank you so much for this post, I’d just like to say that I can’t see a resolve to the war on drugs any time soon. There is always talk about what can be done as well as attempts made to stop it but there is always a loop hole someone finds.
My relatives are quite conservative and I’ve found that pointing out the problems caused in Mexico by drugs being illegal here is quite effective. It’s something they don’t really consider. The costs both direct and via crime and corruption from drug cartels meeting the demand here are part of what keeps their economy from moving forward as it could- and thus keeps the stream of illegal immigrants looking for work coming in.