"You may call an act an crime or what other name you will; yet it can never be against reason, seeing all the voluntary actions of men tend to the benefit of themselves..." ibid

DRUG POLICY

• It cannot be won as a practical matter. It is exactly like Prohibition. It is a victimless crime. Large amounts of profit ensure it can never be stopped.
• It is prohibitively expensive as seen by statistics just for the jailing, let alone the enforcement. It criminalizes many who would not otherwise be, therefore it is a policy that cannot be moral. It is estimated that 78 million U.S. citizens have used illegal drugs. Should they all be barred from public office? Should they all be incarcerated? Laws that criminalize more than every third adult are not a good idea.
• A policy that disproportionately jails so many young black men cannot be moral. It is a racist policy. By pushing the price of drugs, it leads to gangs and the economic collapse of legitimate work and values. It leads to more violent crime as users try to raise the great amounts of money needed for their habits. It destroys an entire segment of society, which should never be tolerated. If these were afluent whites in gangs, the drug laws would be overturned immediately. (Something like the decriminalization of Marijuana). 13 percent of drug users are black and 74 percent of all sentenced to prison for drugs are black. (Scientifc American, August 1999, page 25)
• It causes the US to interfere in, abuse and destroy other countries like Columbia and Mexico, which is clearly immoral.
• It causes US citizens to give up rights which they otherwise would not. It leads to enforcement procedures like the use of informers which has a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the country. The great money, an estimated 67 billion dollars a year, leads to the inevitable corruption of officials.
• Finally, the drug policy is immoral at its core. Everyone has the innate right to commit suicide. Therefore, any law enacted for safety or to protect the health of the users - like laws against suicide, smoking, alcohol, drugs - has no moral force. They are not permissible. It is simply some busybody telling you what to do. You wouldn't tolerate it from a jerk down the street, so you shouldn't tolerate it from a bunch of jerks down the street; Prudes imposing their rules on people they have no business bothering. Can it be moral to tell someone else how to live, when he is not bothering anybody? It is Big Brother. It is evil. If you are going to tell people how to live, why not be consistent and bring back Prohibition? Alcohol is much worse healthwise than most other drugs. If health is the issue, how can it be healthy to have citizens buy drugs from unreliable pushers, or fly-by-night labs, or use common needles? Impure drugs are not healthy. Are jails healthy? Since prisoners get drugs in jail, how have you improved their health? If you balance the supposed hypothetical good (health) from this busybody policy with the evident evil, no sane person could be for it. If you don't want your kids to do drugs, teach them, but do not imprison them; do not take away their rights; do not give up your rights.

SUMMARY PROS AND CONS OF WAR ON DRUGS

ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION

• DEPORTATION--QUARANTINE. For recidivists who are not likely to adjust to society, the old tried and true solution is the best: deportation. Reduce the penalty for the first two infractions, but on strike three strip them of their assets and passports, fly them to a receptive country, give them a pup tent, and airdrop them a pound of rice a day. This fulfills the goal of protecting society, it saves billions of dollars, and it is infinitely more humane. Their friends and families are free to join them. However, a mere change of air is not punishment and depriving them of their economic resources before shipping them is only pecuniary punishment. The significant punishment is that they can never leave (also that they must live with people like themselves, with no rules - life that is likely to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short). The advantage to society is that predators are removed. It is a free-form prison colony in the sense that Australia or Devil's Island were. The boundaries can be natural like the ocean, the desert, and the jungle. A few local bounty hunters can monitor the few routes out. The understanding should be that escapees will be executed.
• DEATH PENALTY. "Inhumane" is a word that simply means disapproval. Did the criminals treat their victims humanely? Then they are not entitled to consideration. Criminals are animals who have placed themselves outside the normal conventions - have created a state of war with society. They are animals that must be controlled. There is the issue that many murderers get paroled and 1/3 of these commit another murder. And there is the concern that many of them kill prison guards and other inmates in prison. They might also escape, or be pardoned and so on. We execute murderers to make a communal proclamation: that murder is intolerable.

  Capital punishment is not about the grief, rage, fear, or blood lust of the victim's family. It is not about rehabilitation or whether it will be 'good' for the murderer. It is not about prevention or deterence. It is about one thing and one thing only - JUSTICE. It may help the grieving family and an effective death penalty, swift and sure, obviously is a deterent, but society without justice cannot survive and should not survive.

  This also can be considered an economy measure. One of the major arguments against the death penalty has been that it costs more to execute a criminal than to incarcerate them for life. Now with appeal limited by federal law to one shot that will no longer be true (which explains the ABA's recent stand against the death penalty - they see a great loss of work ahead). A bullet costs as little as 2 cents, retail. All crimes that merit life imprisonment should be converted to swift and effective death penalty. The argument that it does not prevent crime is false, one-third of all murderers released kill again, besides we have never had an effective death penalty. For every 500 murders, only one criminal is executed. The only negative is that our justice system is so poor that we have a lot of false convictions. That is generally a separate issue which needs to be addressed in any case.

• ECONOMIC CRIMES PUNISHMENT should focus more on victim restitution, public shaming and absolute commitment not to allow them to profit from their crimes. Widespread identification of the criminal should prevent future criminal opportunities for them. A note on victim restitution: "this is but a satisfaction for the hurt done him; and extinguisheth the accusation of the party injured, not the crime of the offender." Hobbes
• JUVENILES. The age limit to be treated as an adult should be reduced to 12 years old and less privacy should be given to those over 8 years old than is now given.
• CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. We have the ability to inflict unlimited pain on people without physical damage. This was not true two centuries ago when flogging was common. We need to test the effectiveness of massive electroshock pain on the behavior of small-time violent criminals to see how much pain equals how many days incarceration. One problem is that jail time is just not punishing enough. At least shock can partially satisfy the public's need for retribution, so incarceration can be reduced or replaced. Again, we need to return to the tried and true, what has worked for 30,000 years. The principle is no pain inflicted without due process - otherwise there would be abuses.
• CRIMINAL ID. Ultraviolet sensitive but perhaps otherwise invisible tattoos should identify all felons. An ID number and code for the most serious crime committed should be sown on their forearms. This will help law enforcement, potential employers, potential mates and dates, and even bank loan officers to more rationally assess risk.

SOME BONEHEADED IDEAS

Governor Branstad of Iowa has proposed teaching computer skills to inmates. That's all we need, more computer criminals. Skills, yes. Skills that could be used for crime, no thanks.