Pubdate: Tue, 17 Jul 2001
Source: WorldNetDaily (US Web)
Copyright: 2001WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.worldnetdaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/65
Author: Myles Kantor

THE WAR ON DRUGS AS A MARXIST JIHAD

Private property is conventionally construed as an external good: homes, 
cars, marshmallows. Ownership becomes a dominion over something discrete 
from oneself.

While private ownership of homes, cars, and marshmallows is certainly 
essential to a free society, it remains subsidiary to the paramount 
property right of self-ownership. As John Locke observed, "[E]very man has 
a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself." 
James Madison similarly wrote that man "has a property very dear to him in 
the safety and liberty of his person." Without this fountainhead, all the 
mansions, Masseratis, and marshmallows in the world mean nothing.

Suppose one lives on an island where he enjoys any conceivable luxury: an 
in-door racquetball court, Turkish bath, the entire Rifleman series shown 
in an IMAX theater. The only drawback to this land of splendor is that he 
may not leave without the permission of the island's head of state. If 
after reading Intruder in the Dust and Light in August he wishes to visit 
the land that inspired Faulkner's prose, someone else's opinion is 
determinative.

This ostensible paradise is thus a prison. Its plenitude does not negate 
the expropriation of self-ownership (aka enslavement) it perpetrates 
against the resident. In Andrei Sakharov's words, "A free country cannot 
resemble a cage, even if it is gilded and supplied with material things."

The supremacy of self-ownership having been illustrated, let us turn to the 
War on Drugs, which is a regime of laws and concomitant coercion deployed 
against the consumption of particular chemicals.

Murray Rothbard noted the separation of property rights and human rights 
reduces people to "ethereal abstractions," and public discourse about drug 
prohibition generally overlooks its palpable, oppressive effect on 
non-aggressive bodily - that is, proprietary - choices. We hear about 
efficacy strategies, reinforcement programs, etc. To discuss these matters 
presupposes the legitimacy of the enterprise.

The enterprise in this case is nothing short of a Marxist jihad since the 
War on Drugs is fundamentally a war on the paramount property right of 
self-ownership, prosecuted with much greater intensity than the 18th 
Amendment's War on Alcohol. (To examine the drug war's subversion of 
constitutional norms and militarization of law enforcement, see After 
Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, ed., 
Timothy Lynch.)

Marxism, of course, is less than smitten with private property. The 
Communist Manifesto refers to making "despotic inroads on the rights of 
property" and "the abolition of private property"; the "Address of the 
Central Committee to the Communist League" affirms, "For us the issue 
cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation."

By criminalizing an innocuous indulgence, the drug war perpetrates 
abridgment of our most personal property. The expropriative underpinning of 
drug prohibition would apply equally to the prohibition of high-cholesterol 
foods or tobacco products. ("Pizza and cigarettes promote unhealthy living, 
so they must be stamped out.") In short, drug prohibition implies a mandate 
for government to prohibit anything.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "No man has a natural right to commit 
aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the 
laws ought to restrain him." The drug war forecloses this quintessentially 
American vision with systematic dispossession and inflation of central power.

Today's drug way tyranny cannot comport with the Founders' design or a free 
society. Simply put, we own our bodies or we don't.

Myles Kantor [send him mail] edits FreeEmigration.com and lives in Boynton 
Beach, Florida
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