Private property is conventionally construed as an external good: homes, cars, marshmallows. Ownership becomes a dominion over something discrete from oneself.
While private ownership of homes, cars, and marshmallows is certainly essential to a free society, it remains subsidiary to the paramount property right of self-ownership. As John Locke observed, "[E]very man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself." James Madison similarly wrote that man “has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.” Without this fountainhead, all the mansions, Masseratis, and marshmallows in the world mean nothing.
Suppose one lives on an island where he enjoys any conceivable luxury: an in-door racquetball court, Turkish bath, the entire Rifleman series shown in an IMAX theater. The only drawback to this land of splendor is that he may not leave without the permission of the island's head of state. If after reading Intruder in the Dust and Light in August he wishes to visit the land that inspired Faulkner's prose, someone else's opinion is determinative.
This ostensible paradise is thus a prison. Its plenitude does not negate the expropriation of self-ownership (aka enslavement) it perpetrates against the resident. In Andrei Sakharov's words, "A free country cannot resemble a cage, even if it is gilded and supplied with material things."
The supremacy of self-ownership having been illustrated, let us turn to the War on Drugs, which is a regime of laws and concomitant coercion deployed against the consumption of particular chemicals.
Murray Rothbard noted the separation of property rights and human rights reduces people to "ethereal abstractions," and public discourse about drug prohibition generally overlooks its palpable, oppressive effect on non-aggressive bodily – that is, proprietary – choices. We hear about efficacy strategies, reinforcement programs, etc. To discuss these matters presupposes the legitimacy of the enterprise.
The enterprise in this case is nothing short of a Marxist jihad since the War on Drugs is fundamentally a war on the paramount property right of self-ownership, prosecuted with much greater intensity than the 18th Amendment's War on Alcohol. (To examine the drug war's subversion of constitutional norms and militarization of law enforcement, see After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, ed., Timothy Lynch.)
Marxism, of course, is less than smitten with private property. The Communist Manifesto refers to making "despotic inroads on the rights of property" and "the abolition of private property"; the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" affirms, "For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation."
By criminalizing an innocuous indulgence, the drug war perpetrates abridgment of our most personal property. The expropriative underpinning of drug prohibition would apply equally to the prohibition of high-cholesterol foods or tobacco products. ("Pizza and cigarettes promote unhealthy living, so they must be stamped out.") In short, drug prohibition implies a mandate for government to prohibit anything.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." The drug war forecloses this quintessentially American vision with systematic dispossession and inflation of central power.
Today's drug way tyranny cannot comport with the Founders' design or a free society. Simply put, we own our bodies or we don't.
July 18, 2001
