The Times They Are A Changin’

As many of you know there is no love lost between me and “conservatives” over the issue of Drug Prohibition. So I went looking (via search engine) through “the American Conservative” for more material to use for a post. And what I found was the unexpected. An article entitled The Right & the Drug War. Its subheadline was Conservatives are the last prohibitionists, but that’s changing. Well I have been harping on the first part of that sentence for a long time. But the last part was news to me. Their take on the issue deals with fundamental issues of policy that Pat Robertson brought up almost two years ago.

Missing in the conservative approach to the issue has been an understanding of the grave threats prohibition poses to the social institutions that cultural conservatives, including the Christian right, hold dear. If Robertson foreshadows a coming shift in the Silent Majority’s sentiments, this void will finally be filled. Despite the prominent critics among their ranks, everyday conservatives have consistently revealed themselves in polls as more hostile to decriminalization than liberals and moderates. A socially conservative turnaround on the issue would change everything. Just as many moralists who championed temperance turned against alcohol prohibition after seeing the social destruction it unleashed in the 1920s, today’s social conservatives could play a defining role in ending drug prohibition.

The drug war embodies secular leviathan like few other government efforts. The federal anti-drug crusade began with Woodrow Wilson’s signing of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, escalated with Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, and tyrannically expanded to cover previously legal psychedelics and other substances during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Bill Clinton increased marijuana arrests and drug task force spending, greatly accelerating the Reagan-Bush drug war. Under Obama, the policies have once again enjoyed a boost: his 2009 stimulus bill included major hikes in drug enforcement spending that had dwindled under George W. Bush.

If alcohol prohibition qualified as the progressives’ greatest domestic triumph in the early 20th century, drug prohibition has achieved even more as a usurpation of traditional morality and the social order. Constitutionalism, states’ rights, subsidiarity, community norms, traditional medicine, family authority, and the role of the church have all been violently pushed aside to wage an impossibly ambitious national project to control people in the most intimate of ways. For years, the federal DARE program encouraged children to rat out their parents for minor drug offenses, an intrusion into family life all too reminiscent of Soviet Russia.

They go on in a similar vein for ten more substantial paragraphs.

Evidently the piece was more about the hope than the reality. So I guess I’m going to have to keep on the subject a while longer until these numbers turn around:

From an October 2013 Gallup post entitled: For The First Time, Americans Favor Legalizing Marijuana – Support is at 58%