Majority = morality

M. Simon’s earlier post reminded me that morality is often not based on eternal and unchanging principles, but on whatever a majority happens to believe is immoral at a given place in time.

I left this comment:

No one who is sane believes drugs can actually be eliminated by laws. So, the goal is to drive the prices as high as possible and imprison users.
We are told that this “protects” the users against self harm, and in turn that society must be protected against the harm users commit because of the artificially high prices. This is delusional on both counts. First, because there is no way to protect people against self harm, and second because the harm to society results largely from the laws.

But drugs are immoral! Immorality as defined not by the Bible, but by the DEA’s controlled substances list!

I think we need to remember that this is a country which ushered in drug prohibition shortly before it overwhelmingly ushered in alcohol prohibition. Prohibition of alcohol was repealed not because the country had learned any “lesson,” but because alcohol was a majority drug. We are still living under the prohibition spell.

There is no denying that some (not all) users of drugs and alcohol do commit harm to themselves as well as to others. I have said until I am blue in the face that I think imprisoning people for harming themselves is irrational and immoral. I flat-out cannot understand whatever theory justifies that, no matter what drug (or even poison) might be involved. If some poor suffering creature deliberately drank Drano* and burned his esophagus, should he go to prison for that? Under what theory?

Preventing harm to others would seem to make more sense. No reasonable person would think people should be allowed to harm other people. Yet the genuine harms that substance users or alcoholics might commit against others are already illegal, are they not? And there are remedies for other, lesser harms that might not be illegal, such as being mean to people, behaving irresponsibly with money, being unable to hold a job, etc. Loser spouses can be divorced, and bad employees can be fired, etc.

What I have long wanted to have explained is how laws prohibiting the substances themselves are going to prevent or preempt any of the harms that substance users might commit? The laws raise substance prices to exorbitant levels and threaten the user with imprisonment, right? They don’t prevent him from getting and using them. However, by raising the cost, they inevitably make it more likely that the user is going to commit real crimes that genuinely hurt people, like burglary and robbery. Or wasting valuable medical resources in endless attempts to game the system to get drugs.

Or driving around with car bombs waiting to explode. Think I am making this up? Thanks to the drug war’s sub-war against Sudafed (which dramatically restricts the amount of cold medicine that can be purchased), the large meth cooking labs have for the most part been moved to Mexico. (And to television.) But meth users, being ever-more-resourceful, have developed a new method for cooking up meth by mixing small quantities of Sudafed along with a number of highly explosive chemicals in a 2 quart bottle. The method is called “Shake and Bake” and it is an extreme hazard to the public:

A new method of manufacturing methamphetamine, designed to get around laws restricting sale of the ingredients needs to make meth, is spreading across the country and law enforcement officials claim the new “shake and bake” process is even more dangerous than the old makeshift meth labs.
One wrong move and the concoction can explode into a large fireball, authorities say.

Also known as the “one pot” method, shake and bake meth is produced in a two-liter soda bottle. A few cold pills are mixed with common, but noxious, household chemicals and produces enough meth for the user to get a few hits.

Smaller, Mobile Meth Labs

The old meth labs required hundreds of pseudoephedrine pills, containers heated over open flames and cans of flammable liquids. The cooking process created foul odors making the labs difficult to conceal. They often sparked explosions.

The shake and bake method requires only a few pseudoephedrine pills, circumventing laws passed restricting the sale of large quanities of over-the-counter decongestants, cold and allergy remedies.

The new method requires little room. All of the necessary items can be carried in a backpack, making the process mobile. Drug users are making meth while driving around in their cars and throwing the used plastic bottles, containing a poisonous brown and white sludge, along the highway.

Extremely Dangerous Method

But the shake and bake method is extremely dangerous. If the bottle is shaken the wrong way, of if any oxygen gets inside of it, or if the cap is loosened too quickly, the bottle can exploded into a giant fireball.

Yes, the Sudafed crackdown has led to a better, much safer world!

A typical eample of what happened to one such unwitting terrorist:

Emptying all but the last few sips from a liter of Aquafina, he peeled off the outer layers of a lithium battery and crushed two packets’ worth of Sudafed. He sprayed starting fluid into the plastic bottle and added the final few ingredients, including a few tablets of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Then he commenced to shake the container like a maraca.

As he shook, gases produced by the chemical reaction caused the plastic bottle to expand. Johnson loosened the cap to relieve the pressure. The last thing he recalls seeing that night was the sparks that flared up from the innards of the lithium battery as it bobbed in the murky slush of chemicals and water.

Then the bottle exploded in his face.

“The sparks shot up in the bottle three times — like a Roman candle: poof, poof, poof,” Johnson recounts. “I was told if it catches on fire, you got to shake it out. Don’t throw it. Shake it out. I tried to shake it out, and it blew up on me. I was engulfed in flames.”

When he twisted the cap, enough oxygen evidently seeped in to initiate combustion: The sparks ignited the ether vapors from the starting fluid that were still floating around the cab of the Blazer, scalding his entire upper body, as well as the faces of his companions, who bailed out the front doors of the SUV as it skidded to a stop. With his clothes ablaze, Johnson jumped through the car’s rear window and rolled on the snowy asphalt until he was extinguished.

Sheesh.

I was already annoyed as hell over the Sudafed crackdown, but this “Shake and Bake” crap just takes the cake. These despicable fools are endangering innocent civilians (to say nothing of their foolish selves) simply because of the ridiculous drug war and its asinine Sudafed crackdown. As far as I am concerned, any doctor who writes a prescription for Methedrine (which is available by prescription) could be saving lives if he stops the damn addict from driving around mixing car bombs. Sure, it may be illegal to give drugs to an addict, but what about protecting innocent third parties from harm?

Isn’t it bad enough to have to worry about suicide bombers who are religious nutjobs without worrying about suicide bombers who are cooking up meth in their cars? This almost makes me wish I had never invented the term “sudafedayeen,” because I hate it when satire becomes prophecy. I mean, aren’t traditional religious fedayeen bad enough? Do we really have to have sudafedayeen?

Again, will someone explain how these drug laws prevent harm to society? I can’t think of a more clear example of how they create harm than the Shake and Bake phenomenon.

When I was a kid, amphetamines were unscheduled, and people used to go to doctors and ask for them “to lose weight.” No doubt there was harm then, but look at how much more harm there is now. Yet we are told over and over that the purpose of these laws is to prevent harm.

If we apply the harm prevention theory to the 1914 “big bang” of substance prohibition in America, the same stubborn question naturally arises:

What were the incredibly stupid and destructive things that legal (pre 1914) drug users did to themselves and others that justified putting them in prison?

I’m sure examples could be found. But in our 97 years of preventing incredibly stupid and destructive things, are things better than they were in 1914? I think they are far, far worse, by any measure. Granted that drug users do incredibly stupid and destructive things, the incredibly stupid and destructive things they do when drugs are illegal and expensive far surpass the incredibly stupid and destructive things they did when drugs were legal and inexpensive.

If preemptive harm prevention is what it’s all about, then can’t we at least be utilitarian enough to stop the Shake and Bake suicide bombers by simply letting doctors give them what they want? Otherwise, what will your loved ones do if the sudafedayeen blow you up? Sudafederalgovernment? Good luck with that.

But according to the majority view or morality, my logic is faulty. Harm prevention is a good thing, but not if harm is prevented by allowing immorality. Better for the meth cooker to blow up innocent people in his quest for illegal drugs than to allow him to get his fix legally.

I am skeptical about the goal being harm prevention.

* How silly of me to make that argument! Drinking Drano is not immoral. Why? Because Drano is not on the DEA’s controlled substances list.