The Drug War Consensus

Rush Limbaugh is back on the air, and his listeners have, since Monday, been effusive in their welcoming of him, both on his show and on other local and national right wing talk radio programs.

Since I wrote a column last month describing my use of the same prescription drug that got Limbaugh into trouble, I've had occasion to be on a number of these shows in recent weeks. Without exception, the host, callers, and I wound up in more or less collegial agreement: that the War On Drugs was a failure, irrational, and has served as a pretext for a vast expansion of intrusive state powers; that if a drug user violates the rights of someone else (e.g., by mugging them for drug money), the full weight of the law should come down on them, but otherwise, it's an individual's own responsibility to decide what substances he or she puts in their bodies; and that substance users who become addicts -- of either currently legal drugs (like alcohol) or illegal ones, or a combination -- should be treated by society as having a health problem, not as being criminals.

For many of these hosts, and their listeners, this is a nearly complete reversal from two decades of throw-away-the-key rhetoric. The occasion has been the case of Limbaugh -- a man who, as is the case for any successful entertainer, has cultivated over the years an emotional connection with his fans that leaves them feeling that they have a personal relationship with him. They care about Limbaugh's welfare; they want him to get better. If he has run afoul of the law, they are willing to forgive the transgressions because of what they regard as decades of good deeds and good will.

The general response of liberals, progressives, and other long-time Rush-bashers has been to cry "Hypocrites!!" from the highest rooftops. Well, of course -- but no more so than on any other issue of late where conservatives seem to have astonishing memory lapses concerning their past claims. (Iraq, anyone?) But that's not the point. Those of us -- progressive, liberal, libertarian, or conservative -- who have castigated the War On Drugs for a generation need not to be alienating its newest critics, but welcoming them as allies and figuring out how to forge a consensus as to what type of public policies should replace the failed War.

As an exercise in behavior control, the War on Drugs is over. The drugs won. Efforts to ban ingestion of psychotropic chemicals will always be doomed; for too many people, it's either too much fun or too essential a balm. And technology is about to kick the whole effort into its well-deserved grave. So-called "designer drugs" herald an imminent era in which chemists can put powerful concoctions on the head of a pin. Try keeping that from coming into the country, or your teenager's bedroom. Today, it's difficult; tomorrow, it will be flatly impossible.

Among progressives, critics of the War have claimed for years that the War On Drugs has been ineffective, expensive, an invasion of privacy, racist, ageist, classist, and an excuse for lost civil liberties and an enormous expansion of state power. But we've often failed to acknowledge that abuse of drugs (legal or not) really does hurt both individuals and communities. And therein lies the potential for a consensus that transcends ideology.

Prohibition begets violent crime, but so, at times, do the drugs themselves. Car accidents kill users and their victims alike. Lives waste away. Those of us who want people to be free to put whatever they want into their own bodies -- and that day is coming soon, whether the official War on Drugs ends or not -- have an obligation to also propose realistic, effective ways to prevent the harm that might result.

The answer must start with personal responsibility, and expand into community support through notions like low-income health care and harm reduction models. But the personal responsibility must come first. This is not a comfortable, or popular, thing for progressives to say; it's terrain often occupied by conservatives in denial about social forces. We, instead, will cite root causes like poverty or socialization as reasons why some people do bad things. But there's truth in both. People also do such things because they choose to.