The Moral High Ground

I would like to thank Kenneth R. Gregg for reminding us all that yesterday was Lysander Spooner's birthday. Spooner holds a strong place in my heart because of the subject, the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs, that most interests me. When you are involved with this issue, as an activist or a scholar, your opponents insist that they hold the moral high ground. Even to bring up the subject, let alone make the kinds of arguments that I believe to be the truth, is branded an immoral act.

I will always be grateful to Lysander Spooner for his essay Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty because it so thoroughly refutes the claim that the prohibition of drugs is a moral policy. Written at a time when the temperance movement was increasingly turning to coercion by the state as a means to their ends the work speaks to all forms of prohibition and I consider it to be the most important argument for the legalization of drugs. Besides the facts that drug prohibition is expensive beyond reason, destructive of our basic liberty preserving institutions, racist in practice, and totally ineffective in achieving its stated goals, it is also a fundamentally immoral endeavor. If you do not believe the last part of the above sentence then read the essay.

Vices Are Not Crimes is also important as a policy proposal. If our government would act on Spooner’s ideas and stop treating vices, which are matters of concern only to the individual, as though they were crimes, which are matters of public concern, then we would all live in much happier, safer, and more peaceful world.