Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
-Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly
Following Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, Vice published an article with a title that well described its purpose. In “Legalize Heroin!”, Lucy Steigerwald gave an argument for why the prohibition of even a drug like heroin, surely on the baddest of the bad list of recreational pharmaceuticals, should be ended:
In the aftermath of Hoffman’s death, Jeff Deeney, a former drug addict who now works as a social worker, wrote a piece in the Atlantic that calls for treating heroin like a health issue, not a criminal act. All the nasty effects of this drug—and all the reasons not to do it—are magnified by the threat of prison, the stigma that leads to shame and secrecy, and the increased risk of HIV and infection that comes with sharing needles. According to Deeney, if Hoffman had access to a space where it was legal to shoot heroin and where doctors could supervise users, he might still be alive. Why doesn’t the US have any such sites, though Vancouver, Canada, does? Why the hell isn’t Naloxone, the much-touted miracle drug that stops opioid overdoses, not available over the counter? Why isn’t it passed out in urban health clinics like candy? Out of the 1.5 million people arrested for drug crimes in 2012, 82 percent were for possession, and 16.5 percent of those were for cocaine, heroin, or associated drugs. Did those arrests do anyone any good?
One reason legalizing pot is more popular than legalizing heroin is that far more people smoke than shoot. At least 100 million people in the US have done marijuana, while the number of frequent heroin users has stayed under half a million for decades. But use (which isn’t necessarily addiction) has nearly doubled since 2007—one survey calculated that 669,000 Americans had done heroin in 2012, compared with 373,000 in 2007. (This may be because some former pill addicts move on to heroin, as Hoffman did).
That’s what prohibition (which includes policies that levy draconian punishments for pill possession) does—it causes rippling effects in human behavior. It does not stop drug use, though it may change a user’s drug of choice. Regardless, it’s time to give up trying to scare addicts into getting healthy and do what Portugal did in 2001 and decriminalize all drugs. Laws can’t stop people from using drugs, they can only make drug use a more harrowing experience for addicts who have to deal with jail time and police harassment and products that, thanks to a lack of oversight, may contain dangerous chemicals.
This country needs to grow up and realize that the legal system is a hammer, and drug users and addicts are not nails. End the drug war. End it all.
Yes, legalize heroin! Liberty, though, must be coupled with responsibility, and that means those who use must accept the consequences of their use.
In reaction to Hoffman’s death, The Economist’s M.S. has argued against such a laissez-faire, laissez-passer approach to drug policy. Instead, he argued that the damage done by addiction to drugs is a cause which should come to the attention of each nation, and that public policy should do more to prevent deaths from drug abuse in “I Guess I Just Don’t know”:
We don't know how to stop great artists from destroying themselves in one way or another. But we do have a good idea of how to stop more people from destroying themselves specifically with heroin injection, which has a higher fatality rate than most controlled substances. As with most drug problems, the solutions involve decriminalisation and universal access to treatment programmes, including alternative blocking drugs like methadone and buprenorphine. In the case of heroin, there is also another proven way to reduce harm: setting up safe injection rooms monitored by health-care staff, and—for registered addicts who cannot or will not comply with treatment regimes—providing heroin itself for free.
Switzerland and the Netherlands pioneered this "Heroin Assisted Treatment" (HAT) approach in the 1990s, and both countries adopted it as national policy in the 2000s. Heroin use has steadily declined since; by the 2000s the Dutch incidence of new heroin users had fallen to essentially zero, and the aging population of addicts from the 1970s and '80s continues to shrink. The average age of Dutch heroin users rose from 34 in 1997 to 45 in 2009.
Decriminalisation of marijuana use has also played a role in shrinking Dutch heroin use, since it separates the use of cannabis from the use of harder, more restricted drugs. HAT trials have since been run in Spain, Britain, Germany and Canada. The evidence consistently shows that HAT drastically reduces heroin-related crime, since addicts don't need to steal to get money for their fix, and it slashes heroin-related deaths and HIV infection, since addicts are shooting up under medical supervision.
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More interestingly, HAT is also correlated with lower overall heroin use. This is in part because free government heroin tends to drive out private-sector providers. Most addicts will end up shooting up in safe rooms monitored by public-health staff, where they will be encouraged to enroll in a treatment programme or, if they fail or refuse treatment, simply receive free heroin. This gradually erodes the market for dealing heroin for profit; as they say in the tech world, you can't compete with free. The result is what you see in the Netherlands: the slow disappearance of heroin use.
The problem with Heroin Assisted Treatment is that by participating in such programs, the government becomes more than an impartial referee to society - there to ensure that the formal rules of the game are obeyed - becoming an active participant which influences the society towards certain ends. There are certain ends towards which the government must become a participant in society to achieve, but there should always be a strong presumption - the presumption of liberty - that the government should just be an impartial referee. In many cases, concern for the people’s welfare may be a good reason surpassing the presumption of liberty, but in the case of the heroin, the vast majority of those who have suffered on account of it are those whose voluntary decisions have lead to that situation. Since they have lead themselves to their own doom, they must be left free to enjoy the fruits of their imprudence.
So, while governments should certainly legalize heroin, they should not offer specific care from those who have abused it. If people are to be free to do drugs, then they must be trusted as free-willed adults who can moderate their appetites. As Theodore Dalrymple has incessantly argued, addiction is not a disease. Neither it is infectious, nor have willed attempts to free oneself from actual diseases ever worked, yet such attempts work all the time for addiction. so the costs of becoming addicted to heroin are well internalized to the user.
We would certainly find it absurd to provide anything close to the Dutch and Swiss level of welfare services to alcoholics, and rightly so. Public services simply should not indulge such forms of human weaknesses, which are not diseases, but poor decisions which inflict the vast majority of their harm upon those who made the decisions, and those who associate with them.
Robust liberty must be benefits with costs. Incentives matter. The system of natural liberty is so successful because people will tend to pursue that which is conducive to their prosperity, so when the government interferes with the costs associated with any activity they skew the incentives associated with that activity. In addition, by saving people from the costs of their actions, the government is treating them as people who do not deserve the full consequences of their actions, and so is creating a situation for the government to act as superiors to people, knowing their own good better than they do, within society
Just as someone is free to use heroin, so he must be free to become a slave to it just as people are free to watch pornography and to ruin their marriages because of it. Liberty can only last in an environment of responsibility. Exceptions can be made to ensure a basic standard of living, but those exceptions should be made about general standards of living rather than the specific bundle of consumption goods someone decides to enjoy. The provision of care to addicts of specific drugs is not a program about the general standard of living people enjoy, but a direct effort to solve a specific problem. A specific problem, it should be added, which is more than predictable for people thinking about starting to use heroin.
So, while the government should not attempt to block people from obtaining heroin, anyone who would use it should do so with the knowledge that they stand at risk of traveling down a path of self-destruction.
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