The Eaton T. Fores Research Center
Reading
Room
Drug War
And
Harm Reduction
Commentary
Drug Warriors And Their
Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller
Usenet citizens
generally realize that once an agument has reached the point where "the Hitler
analogy" is advanced, the discussion is over. Analogies have been taken to the
limit of absurdity and there is nothing more to say. That was my immediate reaction
to this book, which compares the systematic destruction of American drug users to the
systematic destruction of Jews in Nazi Germany. But I kept reading. Miller
builds his case slowly and carefully, and, at the moment you realize that the parallels
are indeed exact, your blood runs cold, and you experience terror and dread -- for your
country, for what you thought were its values, and for freedom itself. The
simplicity with which ordinary people can be signed up for campaigns of destruction
against their neighbors is utterly terrifying. Miller follows the five-step process
by which ordinary citizens are removed from the social and economic life of their nation,
deprived of property, and finally deprived of life itself: identification, ostracism,
confiscation, concentration, and annihilation. Mandatory drug testing has so
permeated society that it is essentially impossible to become employed without undergoing
it. But if drug use produces the obvious deficits in performance that we are told it
does, then why are special laboratory tests required to identify drug users? If a
person's job performance is exemplary, what does it mean when we fire that person because
of molecules detected in his urine? American drug users are identified and pushed
out of society and the economy. What is the next step? This book will wake
you up to an obscenity that has been going on right under our noses for decades.
History shows that it is not too late to shake off our collective slumber and set things
right. An absolute must-read for anyone interested in the long war America has been
waging on a group of entirely ordinary citizens.
Our Right To Drugs
by Thomas S. Szasz
Around 1920, when
the self-appointed guardians of America's moral integrity -- the William Bennetts of
another age -- succeeded in hanging another of their moralisms around the necks of those
who wanted nothing to do with them, it was understood by everyone on all sides that
nothing in the Constitution gave the government the right to tell citizens what sorts of
materials they could ingest. Undermining the Constitution was, in those days, still
serious business; and no one believed that the prohibition of alcohol -- a single material
-- could legally be effected without a Constitutional Amendment empowering our
intentionally low-powered government to do so. Yet only half a century later, the zeitgeist
was ripe for the legislative prohibition of hundreds of "substances," and since
that time we have not had a Court corageous and effectual enough to point out the glaring
illegality of drug prohibition -- indeed, in many ways, our national life now revolves
around scapgoating drug users for all national problems, and waging an ever-broadening
"war on drugs" that has seen prison space quintuple just since 1980. The
estimable Thomas Szasz looks upon this with the free-market views of a libertarian, but
also with a quintessentially American love of freedom that cannot but be horrified as it
watches one freedom after another taken from us in the name of "health." For
Szasz, the "Therapeutic State" is filling the void in human life left by the
decimation of religion under the ceaseless attacks of science. Science is, however, of no
value in facing ethical questions -- the central questions of human life -- and so it
seeks to deny the person as moral agent, exploiting the normativity of the medical idea of
"pathology" in order to make "health" a sort of value-free value.
Always a brilliant polemicist, Szasz is in fine form here as well.
