The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom

0:00My new book is titled, The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom. Let me say two things about it at the outset. Number one, the book has its beginnings in the Mises Institute. And two, this is a book that I never expected to write. It was almost 20 years ago now that through the Mises Institute, I discovered Murray Rothbard and quickly became a hardcore libertarian. Absolute drug freedom is the only consistent libertarian position, and I had no trouble seeing the importance of maintaining that position. Perhaps the first book I read on the subject was The Economics of Prohibition by Mark Thornton. Although I had contributed articles to the free market as far back as 1996 and first wrote for Mises Daily in 2003, it was not until 2009 that I wrote anything exclusively about the subject of drug freedom.

1:08After reading an article by the philosopher John Gray titled, The Case for Legalizing All Drugs is Unanswerable, I could see right away that the problem with his unanswerable argument was that it was strictly utilitarian. It was not an argument based on the freedom to use drugs for freedom's sake. I immediately wrote a reply that was featured as a Mises Daily article in October of 2009, and that is the first article that's in this book. But that's not the only connection this book has with the Mises Institute. At the Austrian In the 2010 Scholar's Conference, I gave a lecture with the provocative title of The Moral Case for Drugs. There I argued two things. One, that it is neither the job of government nor the business of any individual to prohibit, regulate, restrict or otherwise control what What a man desires to eat, drink, smoke, inject, absorb, snort, sniff, inhale, swallow or otherwise ingest into his body.

2:25And two, that there is no ethical precept in any religion or moral code that should lead anyone to believe that it is the job of government to prohibit, regulate, restrict or otherwise control what a man desires to eat, drink, smoke, inject, absorb, snort, sniff, inhale, swallow, or otherwise ingest into his body. A revised version of my lecture was published later that year in the magazine Freedom Daily with a better title, The Moral Case for Drug Freedom. So why did I never expect to write this book? Because I am a conservative Christian Libertarian, I don't smoke crack, I don't snort cocaine, I don't shoot up heroin, I don't pop ecstasy pills or smoke marijuana. However, because I am a conservative Christian Libertarian, I don't think it's any of my business if you do any or all of those things. The problem with most Christians, conservative or otherwise, is that they're not libertarians.

3:44I guess they never heard my Mises Institute lecture is libertarianism compatible with religion. But anyway, even worse is that many Christians are die-hard prohibitionists. That is, they want to use the power of the state to enforce morality and stamp out vice. Naturally, this includes drugs from marijuana on up. Although I can remember questioning the whole idea of drug prohibition and victimless crimes when I was just, for lack of a better term, a libertarian-leaning conservative, my hesitation in writing anything negative about drug prohibition was due to the pathetically predictable negative reaction I knew I would receive outside of libertarian circles, and especially due to the hysterical reaction I knew I would receive from some of my conservative Christian brethren.

4:41But once I got started with those first two articles I mentioned, there was no turning back. The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom is a collection of 19 essays written between October 2009 and July 2012 on the constitutional, moral, philosophical and practical aspects of the U.S. government's failed war on drugs. After I had written about 15 articles on the and the general theme of the drug war, I thought it might be good because of my unique perspective as both a conservative Christian and a hardcore libertarian to collect everything I had written into a book like I had done for my essays on Christianity and war.

5:31But this is not a religious book. There is in fact only one essay in the book written from a religious point of view, and That's called Should Christians Support the War on Drugs, which was an LRC article. As I mentioned previously, one of the essays was a Mises Daily article, and one was published in the magazine Freedom Daily. Of the other 17, one was published in the New American Magazine, and that was a chore to get that published in that conservative magazine. One was a column at lewrockwell.com, as I mentioned, and the balance of the essays were initially written as commentaries for the Future Freedom Foundation. Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future and Freedom Foundation, contributed a foreword to the book. After a summary of each essay in the introduction, I merely present the I included the essays in chronological order in the form as they were first published.

6:36So all of the essays are actually available online as well. I conclude in the last essay that the war on drugs should be ended because it is a war on the free market, a free society and freedom itself. About the cover. The image on the cover was drawn by political cartoonist Paul Kallstein, who was tragically struck down the 50th year of his life in 2003. I discovered the image quite by accident and immediately contacted the copyright holder about using it, and he graciously gave me his permission. I'm not quite sure that he realized exactly what was going to be in the book, but I have the email where he gives me the permission, so I haven't heard from him since, so I don't know if that's good or bad.

7:36The book has been well received. David Gordon did a review, as did the New American Magazine, which kind of surprised me. I did a few interviews about the book, including with Mike Church and Robert Wenzel and Scott Horton. No churches have asked me to speak about the book. I'm still waiting for those invitations. I haven't stopped writing about the evils of the drug war. Since the book was published, I've written three more essays on the subject, and I have two more planned for later this year. This is because it is impossible for anyone to really believe in individual liberty, the free market, the Constitution, limited government, and a free society, and at the same time be a proponent or defender of the war on drugs.

8:30Republicans try, but of course they don't really believe in liberty, the Constitution and a free society in the first place. But if my unique perspective won't entice them to read my essays, then I offer this statement from Ludwig von Mises, certainly no drug user. I offer this statement for them to consider. Here's Mises. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous habit-forming drugs, but once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. Thank you.

9:28Thank you very much.