"Most members of Congress just don’t
get it because they see themselves as nannies and overseers entrusted to
use the power of the federal government to stamp out vice and keep
Americans healthy and safe because they are too stupid to take care of
themselves."
The Other Unconstitutional
War
Written by Laurence M. Vance
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 00:00
It wasn’t long after World War II ended that U.S. troops were once again
involved in another foreign war. This time, however, there was a notable
difference. After North Korea invaded the South in 1950, President Truman
intervened with U.S. combat troops in a United Nations “police action.”
There was no congressional declaration of war. There was not even the
slightest pretense of consulting Congress.
On five different occasions, the United States had declared war on other
countries: the War of 1812, the Mexican War (1848), the Spanish-American
War (1898), World War I (1917), and World War II (1941 against Japan,
Germany, and Italy; 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary, and
Romania).
That Congress issued these declarations of war doesn’t necessarily mean
that they should have been issued. It just means that it was
recognized that a major military engagement called for a real declaration
of war by the Congress according to Article I, Section 8, of the
Constitution.
But not only did over 36,000 American soldiers needlessly die in the
Korean War when we entered that conflict under the auspices of the UN,
the results of this unconstitutional action are still with us today.
Since the armistice was signed in 1953, a day has not gone by when the
United States has not had thousands of troops stationed in South
Korea. There are at least 25,000 U.S. soldiers still in Korea, some no
doubt the grandchildren of the soldiers who fought in the Korean
War.
But this Korean intervention also set a terrible precedent, as no
declaration of war has ever been issued since World War II even though
the United States has been involved in many military conflicts since
then, with some of them being major wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan.
A War for Our Own Good
Aside from U.S. military operations in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Uganda, there is
currently raging another destructive and unconstitutional war at home.
And this one has been going on for over forty years.
It was just over 40 years ago that President Richard Nixon began the
federal war on drugs. Said Nixon: “In order to fight and defeat this
enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.” The President
declared drug abuse to be “America’s public enemy number one” and “a
national emergency.” He continued his military rhetoric in a special
message to Congress on drug abuse prevention and control, calling for a
“full-scale attack” on drug abuse “on many fronts.” To wage “an effective
war against heroin addiction,” he called for “a worldwide escalation in
our existing programs for the control of narcotics traffic.” Legislation
then recently passed in Congress provided “a sound base for the attack on
the problem of the availability of narcotics in America.”
None of this means that the federal government didn’t fight against drugs
and drug abuse before Nixon. Although all drugs in the United States were
legal up until the 20th century, the federal government began introducing
anti-narcotics laws in 1905. It was Nixon, though, that formally declared
war on drugs, appointed the first drug czar, and oversaw the
establishment of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973. The drug war
escalated again under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s with his
wife’s “Just Say No” campaign. Although 15 states and the District of
Columbia have legalized marijuana for medical use, the federal war on
drugs continues unabated and enjoys wide bipartisan support.
But what has the decades-long federal war on drugs actually accomplished?
How much has it cost? Has it curtailed drug abuse? Has it, in fact, been
any more successful at curtailing drug abuse than Prohibition was at
curtailing alcohol abuse? Why, unlike Prohibition, was it imposed without
a constitutional amendment granting the government the power to do what
it is doing? And should the power even be granted through the amendment
process, or should the federal war on drugs be ended?
Another Failure
Even though the federal war against alcohol known
as Prohibition was constitutional owing to the 18th Amendment, most
Americans would today undoubtedly agree that its repeal via the 21st
Amendment was a good thing. But all of the unconstitutional wars
the federal government is now waging -- including its war on drugs --
should be ended as well.
Like Prohibition, the war on drugs is a failure. It has failed to prevent
drug abuse or reduce the demand for drugs. It has failed to keep drugs
out of the hands of addicts and away from teenagers. It has failed to
stop the flow of drugs into the United States. According to the latest
National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted by the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration: “Drug use in the United States
increased in 2009, reversing downward trends since 2002.” There was even
a spike in the number of Americans admitting to using ecstasy and
methamphetamine. The government’s own Government Accountability Office
has even said that the anti-drug D.A.R.E. program has had “no
statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit
drug use.”
But that’s not all.
The costs of the war on drugs exceed its benefits. According to a study
released last year by the Cato Institute, spending on the drug war tops
$41 billion a year.
The war on drugs has clogged the federal court system. Chief Justice
William Rehnquist made this point as far back as 1989. And in testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia remarked that “it was a great mistake to put routine drug
offenses into the federal courts.”
The war on drugs makes criminals out of too many otherwise law-abiding
Americans. The DEA made almost 31,000 arrests last year. According to the
FBI’s latest report on “Crime in the United States,” over 1.6 million
Americans were arrested on drug charges in 2010, with almost half of
those arrests just for marijuana possession. There is one drug arrest in
the United States every 19 seconds.
The war on drugs unnecessarily swells prison populations. Over half of
the federal prison population and about 20 percent of the state prison
population are imprisoned due to the drug war.
The war on drugs hinders legitimate pain management. Physicians that
specialize in pain treatment face the increasing danger of arrest by the
DEA for prescribing their patients a dose of painkillers higher than some
government-set maximum.
The war on drugs has resulted in gross absurdities. Due to the Combat
Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which is title VII of the USA PATRIOT
Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005, over-the-counter
allergy-relief products like Sudafed have been rationed and their use
criminalized because they contain pseudoephedrine, which might be
used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine.
The war on drugs has destroyed financial privacy. Deposit more than
$10,000 in a bank account and you are a suspected drug trafficker.
Travelers carrying what the government thinks is too large an amount of
cash are subject to harassment and having their property
confiscated.
The war on drugs has provided the rationale for militarizing local police
forces. The Pentagon has transferred millions of pieces of surplus
military gear to local police departments. The majority of the 130-150
raids per day conducted by SWAT teams are to serve search warrants on
people suspected of drug crimes.
The war on drugs has resulted in outrageous behavior by police in their
quest to arrest drug dealers. The city of Daytona Beach Shores was
recently ordered to pay four dancers and two bartenders (and their
attorneys) a total of $195,000 to settle a federal lawsuit after they
were illegally strip-searched during a raid on their club. The women were
strip-searched in front of a group of male officers after police were
told that some employees were selling prescription pills and other
illegal narcotics to patrons. A federal judge found that “the search
warrant did not authorize a strip search of anyone in the club.”
Picking Up New Powers
The war on drugs has eviscerated the Fourth
Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. In
the recent Supreme Court case of Kentucky v. King, police were
exonerated for kicking in the door of the wrong apartment while they were
making a “controlled buy” of crack cocaine after they supposedly “smelled
marijuana,” “could hear people inside moving,” and believed that “drug
related evidence was about to be destroyed.”
The war on drugs has increased the size and scope of government. The DEA
has 10,000 employees in 226 offices organized in 21 divisions throughout
the United States and 83 foreign offices in 63 countries around the
world. There are even 300 chemists employed by the DEA. The DEA’s Office
of Aviation Operations has 100 airplanes and 124 pilots.
The war on drugs has served as a pretext for a war on individual liberty
and private property. According to Austrian economist Ludwig von
Mises:
Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once
the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect
the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be
advanced against further encroachments.
As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere
in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by
regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest
detail.
Mises did not believe that government at any level should interject
itself into “the individual’s mode of life.” America’s Founding Fathers
did allow for some government involvement concerning the lives of the
people in the federal system they created but not at the national
level. In The Federalist, No. 45, Madison summarized the division
of powers between states and the federal government this way:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal
government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State
governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised
principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign
commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part,
be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to
all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the
lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order,
improvement, and prosperity of the State.
Under the federal system devised by the Founding Fathers, the national
government is quite libertarian, while state governments are less so. But
the existence of multiple state governments, each operating under their
own state constitution, provides an important check against enactment of
“numerous and indefinite laws” including drug laws to the point where
the “individual’s mode of life” is restricted “down to the smallest
detail.” This is true not only because the actions of a single state
could not destroy the liberties of the entire nation, but also because of
the ability of individuals and businesses to move from one state to
another if a state were to become too repressive, thereby encouraging
states not to go too far in their taxation or regulation
policies.
Of course, this system is not working as intended because the federal
government has unconstitutionally usurped powers never intended for the
federal level, and the states are acting as if they are mere regional
subdivisions of the national government. The usurped powers include those
being used to wage the war on drugs, which entails Soviet-style central
planning by the federal government. Just as the government has a
calculation problem when it comes to central planning of the economy, so
also with drug regulation. The government can only arbitrarily decide
which drugs should be legal and which drugs shouldn’t be, which drugs
should be available to minors and which drugs shouldn’t be, which drugs
should be regulated and which drugs shouldn’t be, which drugs should be
sold by prescription and which drugs should be available over the
counter, which drugs should be classified as Schedule I and which drugs
should be classified as Schedule II, etc. The drug war fosters too much
trust in government planners, regulators, and bureaucrats.
None of these things matter to drug warriors, however, because taking
drugs is unhealthy and immoral. While I don’t deny the truth of those
conclusions in regard to non-medicinal drug usage, advocating a federal
war on drugs for these reasons teems with hypocrisy.
Facts Flying in the Face of Drug Laws
Figures vary, but tobacco use is supposed to cost the U.S. economy
nearly $200 billion annually in medical costs and lost productivity and
causes over 440,000 premature deaths each year from heart disease,
stroke, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases. The number of annual
deaths caused by all drugs legal and illegal pales in comparison to
deaths caused by tobacco. It seems rather senseless for the federal
government to wage war on drugs instead of on tobacco.
Every negative thing that could be said regarding drug abuse could also
be said of alcohol abuse and even more so. Alcohol abuse is one of the
leading causes of premature death in the United States. Alcohol is a
factor in many drownings, child abuse cases, sex crimes, violent crimes,
divorces, suicides, fires, and home, boating, and car accidents.
According to a study recently published in the prestigious medical
journal The Lancet, alcohol ranks as the “most harmful drug,”
beating out heroin, crack cocaine, and ecstasy. Yet, it is only the
decriminalization of drugs that conservatives like Bill Bennett call
“stupid and morally atrocious.”
And then there are the dangers of prescription drugs that is, drugs the
government says are safe and legal. According to various articles in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, over 100,000 people
die every year from drugs prescribed and administered by physicians. And
over two million Americans a year have in-hospital adverse drug
reactions. Thousands of people die every year from harmful reactions to
aspirin.
One doesn’t have to be a libertarian to recognize that the federal war on
drugs is a monstrous evil incompatible with private property,
individual liberty, personal responsibility, free markets, and limited
government and an illogical and hypocritical activity of the federal
government.
One of the most powerful arguments against the federal war on drugs, and
one that has the broadest possible appeal, is the fact that a federal
drug war is blatantly unconstitutional. The powers delegated to the
national government are, as Madison said, “few and defined.” Everything
else is reserved to the states. And just to reinforce this federal
arrangement, the 10th Amendment declares that “the powers not delegated
to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the
people.”
The Constitution nowhere authorizes the national government to prohibit,
regulate, or otherwise concern itself with the nature, quantity, or
production of any substance Americans wish to inhale, inject, or
otherwise ingest into their bodies.
When the federal government sought to limit the use of alcoholic
beverages after World War I, it realized that it could only do so by
amending the Constitution. That is why the 18th Amendment to the
Constitution was adopted in 1919. If a constitutional amendment was
needed to prohibit the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of
intoxicating liquors,” then it should also be necessary in order for the
federal government to prohibit other substances like hallucinogenic
drugs.
Strong Stances
One of the few members of Congress who actually
tries to follow the Constitution in this matter is Representative and
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Rep. Paul has cosponsored a
bill, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011 (H.R. 2306),
to end the federal ban on marijuana, not because he is a supporter of
drug use, wants more kids to try marijuana, or is indifferent to the
dangers of illicit drugs, but because he is a strict constitutionalist, a
believer in individual liberty and personal responsibility, and an
advocate of restoring the limited government established by the
Founders.
Most members of Congress just don’t get it because they see themselves as
nannies and overseers entrusted to use the power of the federal
government to stamp out vice and keep Americans healthy and safe because
they are too stupid to take care of themselves.
Typical is Lamar Smith (R-Texas), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, who
vowed to block Paul’s bill. “Instead of encouraging the use of
marijuana,” said Smith, “we should strengthen enforcement of federal drug
laws to protect Americans from the devastating effects of drug use.”
There is, unfortunately, wide bipartisan support in Congress for
continuing the federal war on drugs for another 40 years.
It is members of Congress like Smith that are more dangerous to Americans
than illegal drugs. As C. S. Lewis has written:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber
barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty
may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for
they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
If any war on drugs is to be fought, it will have to be on the state
level. Any laws or regulations relating to the production, sale,
distribution, possession, or use of drugs whether we agree with them or
not should be passed by state legislatures, not the U.S. Congress or
its agents like the FDA, DEA, or the Office of National Drug Control
Policy. No American who has any respect for the Constitution, federalism,
and the limited government established by the Founders should endorse,
support, or defend the federal war on drugs, regardless of his political
persuasion, religion, or moral code.
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/9473-the-other-unconstitutional-war
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