Iain Murray, in drug-warrior mode, is upset at Reason magazine for saying that a family whose house was torched by a drug dealer whom they’d been trying to get out of the neighborhood were more casualties of the drug war. He compares the drug dealer to the sniper, and accuses Reason of a double standard because in the case of the former, they say that the sniper is solely responsible, whereas in the case of the latter, they pin part of the blame on drug policy.

I don’t see the double standard, because the two cases are different. There’s no discernable policy that caused the sniper to snipe (at least not based on evidence seen to date), but clearly, if drugs were legal, it’s unlikely that that particular person would even be a dealer, since he’d probably be off engaged in some more lucrative (illegal) activity. The dealer has a reason for his action (though not an excuse or justification) that stems from the brutal incentives put in place by drug laws. At least it can be said of him that there is a rational (albeit evil) purpose to his targeting those individuals. The sniper is killing people randomly. There is a difference.

But in the comments section, some related issues came up. Iain claims that there’s no problem with outlawing drugs, because “society wants it.” I disagreed, stating that I thought that most or all federal drug laws are unconstitutional under (among other things), the Tenth Amendment.

The reason that we have the Bill of Rights is to protect us from things that society may “want,” like rounding up people of a certain ethnicity and interning them, or silencing a group of people with a certain point of view. The “interest of society” is not sufficient to deprive people of their rights, and while I have no desire to do so, I have trouble seeing how I don’t have an intrinsic right to burn vegetation and suck it into my lungs. They’re my lungs. If I go out and commit some actual crime as a result, then justice should be served, but the simple act of ingesting a substance is not, or at least, should not be, a crime.

One of the problems with federalizing this (and indeed, in federalizing many crimes, as currently seems to be the trend, unless we can get a Supreme Court that will roll back this overreach) is that there’s no way to do any social experiments.

The drug warriors take it as a given that drug laws minimize drug use and harm, purely on a theoretical basis, since there’s little empirical evidence to support it. There is an assumption behind them that drug laws suppress drug use, and that absent them, many more would take drugs. They may be right, but it’s difficult to know, because we dont have any labs in which to test the proposition in any kind of controlled way.

One of the beauties of the original concept of federalism was that the states would serve as such social laboratories, and could try different policies in accordance to their culture and the will of their own people. It probably is constitutional for a state to regulate (and even outlaw) drugs–the liquor and tobacco example provides plenty of precedent.

But because Washington has taken away the prerogative, we have no opportunity to do such experiments, and see what really is the best solution to this pressing social problem. Regardless of their opinions on the effectiveness and justice of drug prohibition, self-identified conservatives should be concerned by the fact that, as in many other policies, we have an overbearing government in Washington that has decided that one size fits all.