Drug Prohibition Lessons from Our Neighbor

TimK — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:00:00 -0800

Jacob Hornberger in a post on his blog examines the increased drug prohibition in Mexico.

Yet, what has been the result of Mexico’s attempt to ramp up its efforts to win the war on drugs?

Ever-increasing violence. Ever-increasing murders. Ever-increasing torture. Ever-increasing beheadings. Ever-increasing kidnappings. Ever-increasing military and police budgets. Ever-increasing governmental powers over the citizenry.

In other words, the more ferociously they have waged the war on drugs, the worse the situation has become.

Has there ever been any better example than the War on Drugs of how futile government action is?

In Penn & Teller: Bullshit, season 2, episode 5 (get it at Amazon or from Netflix)—right after the “War on Drugs” episode—Penn and Teller take aim at government recycling. In this episode, they take a hard look at the arguments for recycling and deconstruct them, one by one. They also have another of their hilariously funny Bullshit! experiments, this time to see if ordinary people would be willing to recycle things like banana peels and lightly-soiled toilet paper. (Uh… How do you recycle that? What do you make out of it?)

After showing how most government recycling actually harms the environment and wastes resources, near the end of the episode, a recycling advocate comes on-screen: “Mandatory recycling is very helpful, making it the law that you have to recycle. 99.9% of the people stop at red lights, and when they know it’s the law, most people recycle.” To this, Penn retorts, “Yeah! When you have cops with guns, people do what you say.”

To borrow a line from the show: Bullshit!

99.9% of the people stop at red lights because they don’t want to get in an accident, not because they’re afraid of getting caught. Want proof? Just think back to the last time some idiot ran a red light and cut you off. Did you feel sorry for him that he might get a ticket? Of did you get mad at him for being a road hazard?

Last week, an 18-wheeler cut me off. Actually, it cut off the car in front of me. We had a clear green light—it had been green for some time. The truck clearly had had a red light. It pulled out across our path and made a left turn. The car in front of me slammed on its brakes. I slammed on my brakes. And the first thing I thought was, What the hell is he trying to do, kill someone? I was royally pissed, and with good reason.

At first, I didn’t think so much whether he wanted to get a ticket, because I knew that chances were, he wouldn’t get caught. That’s why many drivers also don’t stop at stop signs, because they don’t see it as a danger. From a young age, we teach our kids to take turns, and that’s all a 4-way stop is. Still, the 4-way stop continues to mystify many drivers. They don’t stop; they cut off other drivers; they don’t wait their turn. Why? Don’t they know it’s against the law? They probably do, but they also know they’re not likely to get caught, and they don’t think it’s dangerous to take the initiative and go, even if they haven’t stopped or waited their turn. People who do stop at 4-way stops probably do so primarily because they want to be polite to other drivers.

And that’s the point: We do what we do for personal reasons, not because some law tells us to. That’s why:

People stop at stop signs (or run them).
People stop at red lights, because “red means stop” is a social convention, and a driver knows that if he has red then someone else probably has green, and most drivers want to drive safely.
People still use illegal drugs, no matter how harsh the criminal penalties are.
Laws requiring people to recycle are unlikely to make anyone recycle who wasn’t already recycling before.

Even non-consensual crime laws—laws against assault, for example—can be explained in this way. Anti-assault laws only work when the victim chooses to report the assault, because the victim is one of the people in the play. The law can’t give her anything she didn’t have before or isn’t willing to pursue on her own. All the law can do is to give her a tool that she can use to get what she wants. No law can stop assault. Only victims (and would-be victims defending themselves) can stop assault. This is also why consensual crime laws—which have no specific victim—are bound to fail, and fail horribly.

I’m a big fan of Penn & Teller, and as a fellow libertarian, I love their political stuff. But they here have unwittingly bought into the myth. The truth is that no new law can bring you anything that you didn’t have to start with. It’s true of the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War on Terror. And it’s true of recycling, too. All these laws can possibly do is to slow progress and to increase government power at the expense of our liberties—civil liberties included.

And now you know why I distrust government power.

-TimK

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Drug Prohibition Lessons from Our Neighbor