What Have We Been Drinking?

The use and abuse of alcohol causes incredible amounts of damage to individuals, families, and society itself. Everyone knows that, but few people really consider all the details. Let’s think about those.

Drinkers often suffer a loss of work productivity, either from drinking or from hangovers the next day. They may develop or exacerbate weight issues by consuming the empty calories in alcoholic drinks. Excessive drinking can cause medical problems through damaging the liver or other organs. The loss of judgment that comes from drinking can lead to any number of bad results from poor decisions – from bar fights to dangerous stunts to unwanted pregnancies.

Families, of course, suffer from all the problems of the individuals. In addition, they can be damaged by the drinker turning violent, spending too much money on drinking, and patterning poor behavior in front of impressionable children. Perhaps the most drastic damage comes from drunk drivers, who can devastate or destroy an entire family with one alcohol-induced accident.

Society has to deal with all those problems writ large. The medical issues increase medical and insurance costs – likewise the drunk driver accidents. Hangovers have a noticeable effect on our Gross National Product every Monday morning. Police have to deal with the aftermath of the bar fights, the stunts, the accidents. Even the raw materials for alcoholic beverages divert agricultural resources away from more nutritional products, thus raising food prices for us all.

And yet, very few people would suggest making this disastrously dangerous drug illegal. Why? Well, we tried it once. It didn’t work. It led to a massive increase in the size, wealth, and power of organized crime. It increased the levels of violence in the streets as those criminal mobs fought the police and each other. It led to horrible corruption in the police and government officials, who found it easier and more profitable to cooperate with criminals than to combat them. Most of all, it turned a large percentage of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals as they turned to illegal sources to get the alcohol they wanted. That had to lead to a lessened respect for the law in general – a small but significant step away from the rule of law, and into anarchy. All that…and we still had all the negative effects from alcohol consumption, since the law did little to actually stop people from drinking! In a few years, we discovered that the "cure" of Prohibition was worse than the disease it purported to treat - and we stopped.

It took fourteen years for our nation to realize that the Eighteenth Amendment was a mistake, and that prohibition of alcohol didn’t work. We’ve been fighting the “War of Drugs” for at least 40 years. How long will it take us to relearn the same lesson?

Legal Victims

It amazes me how many laws seem to be designed to hurt the victims. Let’s take a look at three examples.

Medically assisted suicide – Clearly the victim of a suicide is the person who wants to die. Most laws that specifically cover assisted suicide, though, provide punishment to those who assist, in an attempt to keep them from doing so. This takes away the last option from a terminally ill patient. A patient who has no chance for long-term survival and who is in constant pain is told that he must continue to suffer indefinitely. A person who can see his own mind slipping away day by day is told he must continue to the end, so his loved ones can experience the pain of his lack of recognition, so they can see him lose all that makes him a person. We don’t do such things to our pets – when they are beyond hope, when they can no longer live without pain, we end their lives. But we are not allowed to ask for such service for ourselves.

Prostitution – The only reasonable candidate I can find for a victim of prostitution is the prostitute herself. After all, most prostitutes give up all or most of their money to a pimp or madam. They are often the victims of violence from their customers, and cannot pursue legal remedies against them. They risk disease and unwanted pregnancy. Many of them are virtual slaves, kept in line through drug addiction, fear of deportation or abandonment in a foreign country, or simply the threat of violence, a threat that is often carried out. It seems to me, though, that all of these problems are the result of making the act illegal. If prostitution was legal, it could be licensed, inspected, controlled. The prostitute would keep the money she earned. They could receive medical care, and be legally protected from violence. There would be less financial benefit to enslaving women, so it would happen less. I don’t see prostitution becoming a respected profession anytime soon, but if it were legal, they would no longer have to be victims.

Illegal drug use – The victim here is the general public. Drug dealers have made inner-city streets into low-grade war zones. People die because they happened to be walking down the wrong street, or were standing near a window at the wrong time. People are robbed by addicts who need money to support their thousand-dollar-a-day habit – and sometimes killed by the addicted robber. As long as there is a demand for intoxicating drugs, though, there will be someone willing to supply them. Making it illegal makes it much riskier to provide that supply, but that merely causes the price to rise until someone is willing to take the risk. These days, the various criminal organizations have worked out ways to protect themselves – the only people really at risk of prosecution are the low-level distributors. Above that level, the criminals make incredible fortunes, with virtually no risk. I have heard it said, in fact, that these criminal groups provide financial support to candidates who promise to be “tough on drugs”; they keep the prices, and profits, high. If drugs become legal, then legitimate suppliers will enter the market. Production prices are comparatively low, and distribution networks are already in place – every corner drug store can be a supplier, or perhaps we could use liquor stores or tobacco shops. And the Mafia and other criminal groups instantly lose their greatest source of income, cutting back their ability to buy weapons, hire crooked lawyers, bribe police officers and judges, and even to pay their huge bands of low-level criminals. Obviously, there would be problems – but performing dangerous activities (like driving) while intoxicated is ALREADY illegal, so amending the laws to cover new intoxicants should not be difficult. Just as with alcohol, children should not be allowed to use drugs – but right now it is easier for a child to get marijuana than wine. Making marijuana legal allows us to use the same enforcement system already in place for alcohol. And so on…

There is, of course, one common thread among these laws. All of them are the result of translating religious restrictions into law. They were not enacted to protect the public from criminals; they were enacted to “protect” people from their own base urges – to protect people from themselves. As long as we keep legislating morality, we will continue to pay the price.