I've decided to start a new segment on this blog. My wife and I don't exactly have the same political views. She took the World's Smallest Political Quiz and her results were closer to Constitutional Conservative than mine, which were 100% Libertarian. As such, there are many things we agree on, but a few that we disagree on very passionately. I've been thinking of doing this segment for a while, and I finally got her permission this week.
I'd like to start with the drug war. The reasons for starting here are fairly simple: last week I watched a documentary called The House I Live In, which is all about the negative consequences of the war on drugs. This is a topic I've been mulling over for a while (I'm sure you can remember me mentioning it way back in my first post about Orange is the New Black), and finally setting aside time to watch that documentary solidified my desire to write a full post about it. Why call it "Arguing with my wife"? That's simple as well: she has completely different ideas on this topic that I'd like to also present in this forum so that I can deal with them a bit more eloquently than I ever can when the two of us are arguing.
As many of you know, there were drug laws before the "official" start of the drug war under President Nixon, but most of them were racially motivated and most were ignored if you were a high class white person. Until the 1930s, marijuana wasn't even illegal in the United States. In fact, hemp production was encouraged in the 19th century. You can see in the timeline that the reason for banning marijuana use was largely motivated by the influx of Mexican Immigrants in the 1920s and people's fear of these immigrants. Today, marijuana is largely recognized as less dangerous than alcohol, which has been legal to use for anyone over the drinking age since the repeal of prohibition.
Other drugs follow a similar path: opiates and cocaine were outlawed around the turn of the 20th century due to fear of Asian and Black communities, but their recreational use continued with high class society mostly unabated. Prior to those bans, many products used these drugs as ingredients, including Coca-Cola, which originally was made with cocaine.
Now, whether there were dangers to these products should have been for people and markets to decide, or at the worst these products could have been subject to age restrictions and labeling regulations as we have now with tobacco and alcohol products. Instead, the government instituted an all-out prohibition against many psychoactive drugs.
This is the point where my wife and I begin to disagree. I see this idea of prohibition as ludicrous. For starters, we already tried prohibition with alcohol, and I don't need to go into details about just how much of a terrible idea that was. Why then would anyone think that drug prohibition wouldn't garner similar results? Almost a century later, and what do we have to show for all of our efforts to ban recreational use of psychoactive drugs? We have hundreds of thousands of people currently in prison serving some drug related sentence. How has that affected usage rates of drugs in our country? It largely hasn't. What I can't understand is why we would treat psychoactive drugs any differently than tobacco products, or alcohol? The recreational use of the drugs is harming no one other than the person using them, yet we seem to think that it is the job of the federal government to protect people from themselves by ripping them away from their families and putting them in prison just because they wanted to get high.
My wife, on the other hand, believes that this is fairly simple. People make choices knowing full well the consequences, and if they get caught and put in prison, that's their own fault. She completely refuses to here my argument that the laws are ludicrous in the first place. In fact, I used the analogy of chocolate ice cream because it's one of our favorite desserts to share. I asked her if chocolate ice cream was banned tomorrow if she would continue to consume it, to which she said, "Yes, probably." She then clarified that, if that were the case and she were caught, she would expect to be put in prison. Frankly, I don't know how to argue with that kind of logic.
That being said, I attempted to appeal to her in a different way. What if the people who are using or selling drugs have few, if any, other choices? People who grow up with parents who were put in jail because of the drug war are often trapped in low-class neighborhoods with little to no economic prospects. They may have gone to the local government schools where they received incredibly sub-par educations (maybe next time I'll cover this topic as it's fairly huge). Many will drop out well below the functional literacy rate, leaving their job prospects incredibly impaired. Even those who graduate will find it difficult to escape the neighborhood as few colleges will accept them and their schools likely have no vocational tech programs. These individuals are left with no real choice but to turn to what they know: drugs.
This argument didn't work, either. She went back to, "I don't need to feel sympathy for people who make the choice to do something illegal and then find themselves in prison." I finally tried the argument that the drug war is bad because of how it enables police brutality, which I wrote a bit about a few weeks ago. I tried telling her about Radley Balko's work on the increasing militarization of police. She didn't seem to mind that local police can obtain and use tanks and armored personnel carriers, and when I tried to tell her about cops raiding incorrect houses or killing dogs for little to no reason, she simply told me that I was focusing on a few high profile cases and not the vast majority of cases that go off without any problems like that. I tried to argue on this point, but then she told me to stop talking, and now I'm here. I was thinking of doing another full post about the growing military mentality in police, but I think instead I'm just going to recommend Radley Balko's book.
I hope my arguments here were more clear and easier to follow than those I attempted to make with my wife. Let me know if I've changed your mind in any way. If you feel as my wife does, please don't hesitate to comment; I'm always looking for views that challenge my own and keep me thinking.
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