Drugs and Legalization in the West at the Dawn of the Third Millennium
ABSTRACT
Pop and corporate media are keen on presenting the question of intoxication as a battle of worldviews, in which one is perforce summoned to take sides: either with the prohibitionist disciplinarians or with the anti-prohibitionist Liberals. It is here argued that this purported clash of philosophical postures is somewhat specious. Rather, the debate on drug prohibition reflects the confused cohabitation of the escapist desires of modern dropouts (the have-nots, the disconsolate bourgeois, and the dispossessed of the Third World) and the governments’ wavering tolerance for a modicum of mind numbness. Students of this topic, however, will recognize the problem for what it is: namely, that prohibition is merely a dubious palliative against the chief ill responsible for the plague of addiction, namely the desperation arising from poverty. And it is on the erasure of poverty that all moral tension and attention should be directed. In no case –this being the plea of this piece—should reformers desist from denouncing the Libertarians’ call to legalize drugs as a policy that is, in a practical sense, incongruous, and from the moral standpoint, perplexing.