by Craig Jones
Among the things difficult to understand about contemporary Canadian conservatives is their public silence on the costs, consequences and harms of drug prohibition.
Here is an instance of state-sponsored social engineering par excellence which has outlived the other social engineering catastrophes of the 20th-Century: National Socialism, Eugenics and Stalinism.
Where conservatives deplore social engineering that offends principles of liberty – particularly if it touches on private property – they seem uninterested when it comes to state-sponsored intervention into what citizens ingest and how they alter their consciousness, or on how the state’s role in limiting individual liberty socializes to the community the costs of preventing people from potentially harming themselves.
Conservatives who champion principles of less government and more freedom seem – with a few exceptions in the National Post – willing to quietly tolerate more government and fewer freedoms where drug use is concerned.
As a matter of historic record, drug prohibition arose from a 19th-Century belief in the efficacy of state-sanctioned social engineering through punishment and criminal stigmatization. Prohibition was the project of a handful of moral entrepreneurs in the Anglosphere driven by moral panic around the pace of modernization, the socially dislocating consequences of industrialization, and the impact of changes in the racial composition of North American society. The 1908 Opium Act – which entrenched in law social engineering through punishment – established the philosophical template upon which drug policy has subsequently been grounded.
The 2007 National Anti-Drug Strategy re-commits the Canadian state to punishment and criminal stigmatization, ignoring a century’s worth of research on the relationship between drug use, mental illness and drug trafficking, while simultaneously endorsing more government and less freedom for individuals – with hardly a whisper of protest from Canadian conservatives.
Less government and more freedom also takes a back seat where the costs and consequences of drug prohibition are concerned. Here, no amount of waste, no record of failure, no catalogue of prohibition-induced harms seems to dissuade conservative policy makers from pursuing more of what isn’t already working. Where illicit drugs are concerned, so it seems, social engineering is permitted and individual liberties are violated.
Drug prohibition, since 1908, has focused predominantly on supply suppression and criminalization – with predictable results to anyone schooled in elementary economics. Yet conservatives seem blasé about the entirely predictable outcomes: more government in the form of police enforcement and criminality, and less freedom in the form of an ever-expanding intrusiveness of enforcement authorities.
The other consequence of drug prohibition, also predictable, is greater criminality – particularly organized crime. That drug prohibition produces spasms of anarchic violence in which traffickers war with each other and gun it out with authorities, and which only grows the role of government and limits the freedoms of individuals, seems to get a pass from conservative defenders of less government and more freedom.
In the war of ideas, conservatives are well armed – but they seem to lack the power of their convictions where drug prohibition is concerned. They cannot seem to surrender their desire to socially engineer the behaviour of certain individuals even though they are committed, in principle, to the protection of their liberties. They cannot confront the obligation implied by their belief in less government and more freedom where drug prohibition is concerned – even as drug prohibition produces more harm than it prevents and grows the power of government and organized crime. And by remaining silent on the social costs of prohibition, they refuse to follow the logic of their principles to the natural conclusion.
Drug prohibition, the last great social engineering catastrophe of the 20th Century, creates more government and less freedom. It offends every principle of individual liberty that conservatives allegedly stand for. In theory, at least, conservatives should be its most vociferous opponents.
Craig Jones is an independent researcher and policy analyst with a doctorate in political economy from Queen’s University