"No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive."
"Man's desire to take mind-altering substances is as old as society itself," says British physician Theodore Dalrymple, "as are attempts to regulate their consumption." What is new and different, Dalrymple observes, is the position in which our contemporary society finds itself of having to "contend with the ready availability of so many different mind-altering drugs, combined with a citizenry jealous of its right to pursue its own pleasures in its own way."
Writing in the Spring issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Dalrymple rejects both the philosophic and the pragmatic arguments in favor of drug legalization. "The philosophic argument is that, in a free society, adults should be permitted to do whatever they please, always provided that they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and that they cause no direct harm to others," Dalrymple summarizes. "In practice, of course," he observes, "it is exceedingly difficult to make people take all the consequences of their own actions." Their drug use invariably does damage to others.
Dalrymple also dismisses the pragmatic argument, "that the overwhelming majority of the harm done to society by the consumption of currently illicit drugs is caused . . . by their prohibition and the resultant criminal activity that prohibition calls into being." He insists that "there are, unfortunately, drugs whose consumption directly leads to violence because of their psychopharmacological properties and not merely because of the criminality associated with their distribution. Stimulant drugs such as crack cocaine," says Dalrymple, "provoke paranoia, increase aggression, and promote violence."
Dalrymple denies the liberating effect often attributed to drugs. He emphasizes that drug use "has the effect of reducing men's freedom by circumscribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims," he explains, "such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism."
Dalrymple insists that most drugs contract, rather than expand, our consciousness. "One of the most striking characteristics of drug takers," he observes, "is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are generally forays into inner vacuums. Drug taking is a lazy man's way of pursuing happiness and wisdom," he continues, "and the shortcut turns out to be the deadest of dead ends."
Dalrymple denounces the idea "that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims." He notes that "a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow." Dalrymple concludes that the legalization of drugs would only make a bad situation worse. "Surely," he concludes, "we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last 30 years without looking for more such slopes to slide down."
