The cure is worse than the disease.
But is it conservative?

A few days ago, M. Simon wrote a post (“Brain Dead Republican Enhances Party Image“) that just stuck in my craw. A Republican congressman in Illinois (he’s co-blogger TallDave’s rep) has sponsored a new anti-marijuana bill to toughen penalties for with penalties of up to 25 years in prison for first-time offenses involving sales of “high potency” marijuana.
More of the damned war on drugs. It constantly escalates, demanding ever more draconian sentences, ever more troops, with potential drug profits increasing accordingly. Naturally, dealers and smugglers constantly search for creative ways to concentrate and strengthen their product — because shrinking the actual size of contraband is of paramount importance. (Heroin is less bulky than opium, methedrine is less bulky than benzedrine, powdered cocaine is less bulky than leaf, etc.) Simple economics dictates that tougher laws can be expected to lead to stronger drugs, which then create a demand for even tougher laws in the minds of people who believe in prison as an appetite deterrent.
Simon’s post led me to recall an ugly memory:

When I lived in Berkeley I will never forget getting all enthused about a local Republican who challenged a Democratic incumbent in the outer Bay Area, and I actually got involved in the campaign, only to have the wind totally taken out of my sails by a live call from Newt Gingrich — who urged the campaign supporters (me included) to do everything they could so this great guy could help Newt fight the war on drugs.
This was in the mid 90s when I was disgusted with the Clintons and otherwise all set become a newly minted conservative. I realized that even though I hated the left, I could never become a conservative.
Guys like Mark Kirk always seem to have a knack for appearing at just the right time to supply another reminder.

It is not my purpose here to bash conservatives or conservatism. Sure, I could write a peevish post pointing the finger at some of conservatism’s most iconic figures, like Ronald Reagan. There is no question that he did much to expand the war on drugs, and I always think of this when I hear him being wishfully spun as some sort of libertarian. There’s no question that Reagan was an economic libertarian, but on the drug issue, his libertarian streak was MIA.
But was Reagan’s drug war truly “conservative”? Is the drug war conservative? Is the prohibition impulse a conservative or is it liberal? Or do the usual political labels fail? Considering that many leading liberals have long favored the drug war, and many leading conservatives (such as William F. Buckley) have long opposed it, might it be time to take it off the partisan table?
Or would continued “bipartisanship” only allow it to fester and get worse, as it has over the years?
Is it helpful to look at the origins of the Drug War? Before 1914 (and the Harrison Narcotics Act, which was the granddaddy of all future drug laws), Americans could walk into any pharmacy and buy whatever drugs they wanted without prescription. (Including Bayer’s then wonder drug “Heroin.”) Drug dependent Americans might have been morally weak, but “drug addicts” were not yet the vile degenerate criminals they was when the Hearst newspaper chain got through with them, and there was no such animal as “drug pusher.” The Harrison Narcotics Act caused and accompanied a sea change in thinking. But was it conservative?
Let’s look at the Act’s author, Francis Burton Harrison. He was a Wilsonian Democrat — a solid progressive through and through:

A member of the Democratic Party, Harrison was elected to the 58th United States Congress, and served from March 4, 1903, to March 3, 1905. In 1904, Harrison ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of New York. Afterwards he resumed the practice of law. He was again elected to the 60th, 61st, 62nd and 63rd United States Congresses, and served from March 4, 1907 to September 3, 1913, when he resigned to become chief executive of the Philippines. His Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was eventually passed on December 17, 1914.
During his service in the Far East, Harrison was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1920 presidential election. He lost the nomination to Governor of Ohio James M. Cox at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Naturally, the liberal New York Times led the way:

Before the Act was passed, on February 8, 1914 The New York Times published an article entitled “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are New Southern Menace:Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks” by Edward Huntington Williams which reported that Southern sheriffs had increased the caliber of their weapons from .32 to .38 to bring down Negroes under the effect of cocaine.

Another champion of the HNA was Wilson’s Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Another progressive, socialistic Democrat, he was the ultimate busybody. Sure, he was a deeply religious fundamentalist who opposed teaching evolution, but to call him a “conservative” by that standard is about as reasonable as making Mike Huckabee a spokesman for all conservatives. Besides, Bryan is “credited with turning around an entire [Democratic] political party,” and his speeches have been described as leading “in a direct line to the progressive reforms adopted by 20th century Democrats.”
Turning to the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, it was mostly the brainchild of Harry J. Anslinger, and championed by William Randolph Hearst.

Although it would appear that Anslinger was a conservative who truly believed marijuana to be a threat to the future of American civilization, his biographer maintained that he was an astute government bureaucrat who viewed the marijuana issue as a means for elevating himself to national prominence. The two positions are not necessarily incompatible.
Some of his critics allege that Anslinger, DuPont petrochemical interests and William Randolph Hearst together created the highly sensational anti-marijuana campaign to eliminate hemp as an industrial competitor. Indeed, Anslinger did not himself consider marijuana a serious threat to American society until in the fourth year of his tenure (1934), at which point an anti-marijuana campaign, aimed at alarming the public, became his primary focus as part of the government’s broader push to outlaw all drugs.[7]
Members of the League of Nations had already implemented restrictions for marijuana in the beginning of the 1930s and restrictions started in many states in U.S years before Anslinger was appointed. Both president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Attorney General publicly supported this development in 1935.

How conservative was this movement? I don’t know. FDR was anything but a conservative, and as to Hearst, I think it’s fair to call the man a populist yellow journalist and a supreme self-aggrandizer. At any rate, by the time of the Marihuana Tax Act, he was a solid FDR Democrat.
Obviously, there have always been conservatives who supported the drug war, but it’s my considered opinion is that in terms of its historic origins, the drug war is more a product of progressive statism than conservatism.
It’s been around so long that I suppose a conservative case can be made for keeping it. But that idea didn’t impress William F. Buckley. Nor does it impress me, although I can hardly call myself a conservative.
Can the drug war be broken free from conservatism as an issue? Can it be divorced from politics?
Or is it like an incurable chronic disease which will always be around? I realize that many conservatives dislike irony, but I do find it ironic that waging the drug war is itself like waging a war against a chronic disease. The demand for drugs is a symptom.
And the “treatment”? Imprisonment. Hardly what physicians would call “conservative treatment.”