Solving the Problem of Drug Trafficking

When people you meet talk about solving the problem of drug trafficking, it’s a reliable indication that you’re talking to an idiot. That’s not necessarily the same as saying they are uneducated. Not at all. They may have accumulated a great store of personal knowledge and educational credentials, and thereby (perhaps) have fallen into the conceit of thinking they are intelligent – but they lack the ability to see the plain facts of the world around them and reliably reason with that information.

Drug trafficking, as well as drug use, drug possession, drug dealing, drug manufacture (and so forth) are no legitimate reason to kidnap someone under color of law and call it an arrest. There’s only one rightful controller of a persons body, including their choices of which substances to put into it or not – each of us as individuals. Nearly all of the social ills purportedly deriving from drugs are, in fact, a result of the laws against drugs.

You simply will not stamp out drug trafficking. The US federal government can not even keep drugs out of prisons. So long as a normal part of the human psyche longs for a transcendant experience, there will be market demand – and where there is market demand, there will be entrepreneurs, heroically fulfilling consumer demand despite the risks, such as the DEA.

Instead, ask yourtself how you can stamp out drug laws, in order to get rid of the huge amount of social problems such laws create. The Drug War has often been compared to alcohol Prohibition in the 1920’s. One of the key factors in bringing pressure to bear on the government to repeal Prohibition was the humiliation (for the politicians and bureaucrats with badges) of citizen juries refusing to convict people for alcohol related offenses. Although a judge may instruct a jury that they are legally obligated to judge only the facts of the case and not the law, this in fact not true. When serving on a jury, you can refuse to convict – and thereby see to it that justice is truly served, by refusing to put the stamp of your consent on the cruel enforcement of unjust laws.