just say maybe to drugs

In high school, someone told me that The Doors (Jim Morrison, et al.) were named after Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception. Sometime later, I learned that Huxley's title was taken from William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

I was a drug prude throughout childhood, a completely successful product of government and (private) school propaganda. Didn't drink, didn't smoke. (And to answer Adam Ant's musical interrogative, I'll just say that sex was an entirely different issue.)

Even then, however, I was already enough of a libertarian to be entirely against all drug laws. What was already obvious to me:

A man who prevents me from taking heroin coerces me; a man who prevents me from shooting him does not."

David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

(I won't try here to go into why I failed until my late 20s to apply this same distinction -- which I understood for drugs, pornography, prostitution, hate speech, guns, etc. -- to economic freedom; I'm trying to stick to drugs.)

I never started using the illegal sort of drugs, mostly for practical reasons, but I eventually became much more open-minded to a pro-drug position. Not just pro-legalization, you understand. Pro-drug.

Some of this was the influence of Robert Anton Wilson, who introduced me to the idea that an anarchist might be rational and non-violent.

Much of the rest of it was in the spirit of Walter Block's great line about heroin:

At the present time, with the intense discussion on the evils of heroin addiction, it is well to heed the old adage -- 'listen to both sides of the story.' Among the many reasons for this, and perhaps most important, is the fact that if everyone is against something (particularly heroin addiction), one can assume that there is something which can be said in its favor. Throughout mankind's long and disputatious history, the majority opinion has, the majority of the time, been wrong."

Block has since become a social conservative (though still a plumbline libertarian). He would call my libertarianism libertine, since I'm often pro-X rather than just the plumbline pro-X-rights. I do not, however, confuse my pro-gun position, pro-porn, pro-prostitution positions, etc. with the libertarian position against coercion against those activities. I get the distinction, sometimes better than he does, at least in his writing: Block has taken to claiming (if we read him literally) that libertarians oppose such things, but think the government should stay out of it. No, that's socially conservative libertarians who actively oppose such "vices". The plumbline libertarian position itself is neither pro- nor anti-drug, neither for nor against prostitution, pornography, sexual "perversion" etc. We aren't even pro- or anti-capitalism. (And Block himself is very good on this point.) It is the laissez-faire half of laissez-faire capitalism we embrace. The capitalism half is a different issue.

Anyway, back to drugs: libertarianism is agnostic on drug usage. This does not mean that individual libertarians take no position. We just distinguish our attitude toward drugs, etc., from the non-aggression principle. Meanwhile, as an individual, I go back and forth. I never have and never will take the drug-war position. I imagine I might someday take the socially conservative anti-drug position. Right now I really am ambivalent, sometimes pro and sometimes neutral.

What I didn't know until today is what Huxley said on his death bed:

When one thinks one's got beyond oneself, one hasn't. . . . I began with this marvelous sense of this cosmic gift, and then ended up with a rueful sense that one can be deceived. . . . It was an insight, but at the same time the most dangerous of errors . . . inasmuch as one was worshipping oneself."

R.C. Zaener, Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism, p. 108.

Why do we all know that Huxley was in favor of mind-altering drugs, and not that he reconsidered this position toward the end?

Right now I'm inclined to believe that it is a question of moderation. That sounds anti-climactic, I know. My rhetoric is very anti-moderate.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

-- spoken by the Republican Barry Goldwater,
but penned by the libertarian anarchist Karl Hess.

But I don't want to make the mirror-opposite mistake of the political moderates. They think that because moderation and compromise are so often the answer for practical and strategic issues, that the same virtues of moderation apply to principles, ethics, ideology. For this simple confusion, I think many abandon their souls.

On the other hand, I know that my own anti-moderate position on questions of principle can sometimes spill over to issues that aren't principled. Compromise in ethics is evil; compromise in strategy is just smart. If someone steals $100 from me and I want all of it back, suggesting that $50 is a "fair compromise" is morally bankrupt. If I want an infinite amount of money for my labor, and you want to pay me nothing for it, the market wage we settle on is ethically valid and economically productive.

As Mark Thornton points out, the free market tends to make drugs weaker and drug use more moderate. Lite beer sells well. Decaf and half-caf are so popular that they're practically trendy. When heroin was an over-the-counter drug, it had the potency of aspirin; only under prohibition did it become so pure and so potent.

In the 1980s, the drug warriors started to claim that the marijuana that artists and students had smoked in the 1950s and 1960s was relatively weak, whereas the stuff on the streets in the 1980s (and 1990s, and now) was powerful and dangerous. This may be factually accurate, but if it's true, it's the fault of the drug warriors themselves. (And if you don't know about what Thornton calls "The Rhett Butler Effect" of prohibition, it's well worth learning.)

I know this seems like an awfully convenient conclusion, but I swear it's not how I planned on finishing this post back when I started writing it: the principle of the free market (i.e., the realization of the anti-moderate position) leads to the more moderate use of drugs, while the mixed-economy soft-police-state of the political moderates is what leads to the extreme consumption of extremely potent poisons.