The Drug War and the Constitution

I think I may have found the best argument on the web with regards the drug war and how it violates the very principles of our Constitution and The Bill of Rights. The Aurthur Paul Hager is the 2000 Libertarian Senate nominee of the Indiana Libertarian Party. Hager received 33,992 votes for 1.6% of the total vote.

I'd like to draw your attention to companion notes that I put together for this talk. They're located on the tables out back there, and I think that those of you who are doing CLE have them in your manuals.

Well, I'm going to attempt to descend into the murky depths of political philosophy and Constitutional analysis. At the outset, I do have a caveat: the arguments I am going to be presenting have never been endorsed by Congress or the courts and I hope that during the question and answer session we can get into this in a little bit more detail.

The thesis that I want to advance today is that the drug war and the laws that prohibit the private consumption of certain drugs are un-Constitutional. Prohibition laws, themselves, violate every tenet of limited government that is embodied in our Constitution.

To begin, let me pose a question: why was it necessary to amend the Constitution in order to prohibit the drug alcohol? And, while you are cogitating on that: how is it possible to prohibit other drugs without going through the formal amendment process? Well, I think, in order to answer these questions, it's necessary to take a look at what the Constitution is supposed to be.

At the recent confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas (uh, Clarence Thomas, by the way, -- he and I have at least two things in common: we're both ex marijuana users [chuckles from the audience], and we're both married to attorneys) -- in any case, there was a lot of discussion at the hearings about natural law and natural rights. Just about all of the participants seemed to agree that our system recognizes the existence of "inalienable" natural rights and that government exists to "secure" those rights for its citizens. It's just as well that they agreed on that -- the architects of our system of government, in fact, had that principle in mind, and they viewed the Constitution as being a blueprint for a limited government in which those powers that were to be made available to the federal government would be listed. If a power is not listed in the Constitution, it is not supposed to be available to the Federal government. Two hundred odd years ago, when the Bill of Rights -- which we're here to celebrate -- was being debated, there were those who opposed the Bill of Rights on the grounds that, uh, they're completely unnecessary. It's redundant -- the rights already exist and therefore they don't have a place in the Constitution. In fact, they made the argument that a Bill of Rights is dangerous because at some future point in time, people would get the idea that if a right wasn't to be found in the Constitution -- like privacy -- it did not exist. Perhaps the best articulation I've ever seen of this principle is to be found in The Federalist Papers...

The rest of this excellent article can be found at the Drug War Library