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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 43 Danger Is My Middle Name--And So Is Yours Why
Your Right to Self-Ownership Includes the Right to Choose Your Own
Dangers by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR December 3, 2007 As soon as there is life there is danger. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1 - Danny
Shahar wrote an excellent column for STR recently (Paternalists
Just Don't Understand) about drug prohibition. Shahar's column
reminded me that I have been meaning to write a column of my own on the
topic, covering only the two most basic arguments for freedom on this
issue. So, with a nod of appreciation to Danny, here is that two-point
column: First,
other people are not your property.
If you would like to remind others of this most basic of rights – of the
utter and complete right to self-ownership enjoyed by every human being
– STR sells very nice bumper
stickers and t-shirts
with that exact message. "Other
people are not your property" is the entire freedom philosophy in a
nutshell. Nothing else need be added; if that one sentiment were widely
lived up to and enforced,* there would be no tyranny in this world, by
definition. Can
such an extreme position really be lived up to? Of course: it's called
"being civilized." And most of us do
live up to that standard in our daily lives; those who don’t are likely
to be arrested for coercion of some sort, be it rape or robbery or even
"coercion" by name (last year I was on the jury in the trial of
someone accused of exactly that). Busybodies and those who insist on often
telling others what to do are reminders that we are far from the levels of
love and freedom necessary for a healthy society, but even most such
people refrain from using force
to impose their views and desires on others – except for the political
process, the single weapon against human rights that has the full sanction
of the State. Get
a gang of armed men together to pull a no-knock raid on your neighbor
because he uses alcohol or pot and you’ll
be the one put in prison, but get laws passed that result in armed agents
of the state doing the same thing and you’re off the hook: You are an
accomplice to violence against (in this case, millions of) non-violent
men, women, and even children, yet you will never be held accountable for
your role in these violations of human rights, including for the many
deaths and ruined lives that result. The
good news is that people really can
live without any supposed "need" to control other people's
behavior. This is true both in primitive and in modern settings. For
example, consider the Yequana tribe, living without any modern technology
to speak of in the Amazon jungle: "The
notion of ownership of other persons is absent among the Yequana
. . . . Deciding what another
person should do, no matter what
his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is
great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence –
let alone coerce – anyone." --
Jean Liedloff, The
Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost Modern-day
examples – in addition to those relatively healthy individuals and
families one finds amidst the more general sea of sheep and control-freaks
– may be found at Summerhill
and Sudbury Valley schools, and other
schools like them. For those unaware of how amazingly different these
schools are from ordinary coercive schools, the 1949
British Government's Inspectors' Report on Summerhill provides an
excellent overview by a third party, and includes these comments by the
Inspectors:
The
report backs up that last point with a list of degrees held and careers
followed by former pupils. Clearly, the lack of a "normal,"
coercive education has not harmed the children of Summerhill. More
importantly, Summerhill clearly produces – and has, for over 75 years
– exactly the kind of people we would all want as neighbors. -
- - - - It
is worth pointing out that the concept of universal self-ownership is
"extreme" only in the same sense that "every person must
have air to breathe" is extreme. Both sentiments are rigid and
absolute, and for the same reason: Healthy life, and eventually life
itself, depends upon them. We need air because without it we die; we need
freedom for the same reason: Without freedom we die in small, inner ways
and too-often in the "bang,
you're dead" sort of way that governments inflict with wars and
firing squads and so on. Self-ownership,
unlike some other basic, natural needs, does not require getting something
(e.g., food or water) that others might be forced to give you. Universal
self-ownership simply means that no person owns another and thus that no
person has the right to enslave or initiate coercion against anyone else.
Coercion in self-defense (when the other person has initiated an assault
of some kind) is different--an unpleasant last resort, but not the same as
starting the fight, as your mom and dad probably taught you. - 2 - The
second basic point relevant to drug prohibition is that everything,
without exception, has its dangers, and thus using the excuse of
"danger" to force people to avoid something or (as with seatbelt
laws) to do something is not merely a "slippery slope"--it
immediately says that government owns your life completely, since every
minute of every day, no matter what you do or don't do, you are subjecting
yourself to danger. Eek! That
is not sophistic or based on technicalities that do not matter in the real
world: The truth is that many
of the things we do are dramatically more dangerous than using illegal
drugs. Walking down the street, driving your car, eating a high-fat diet,
smoking cigarettes, and a great many other ordinary things--not to mention
motorcycle stunt-riding or auto racing or skydiving--are far more
dangerous than smoking pot or even using "hard" drugs. For
example, here is a list of dangers expressed as the number of days each
takes off your life: Days
off your life from various activities:** ·
Eating meat regularly = 2,555 days ·
Smoking a pack of cigarettes daily (men) = 2,250 days ·
Smoking a pack a day (women) = 800 days ·
Being 30 percent overweight = 1,300 days ·
Driving a motor vehicle = 207 days ·
Alcohol = 130 days ·
Accidents in the home = 95 days ·
Breathing polluted air = 77 days ·
Walking down the street = 37 days ·
Misusing legal drugs
= 90 days ·
Using illegal drugs =
18 days ·
Coffee = 6 days Any
list of the major causes of death will show you that "using illegal
drugs" is not a serious danger in comparison to many common and legal
activities. Below is a snippet of CDC data on the major causes of death in
the United States; "using illegal drugs" is nowhere on the list,
but heart disease, cancer, strokes, and other problems strongly associated
with diet certainly are. The
15 leading causes of death in 2004:
Source:
www.cdc.gov [via usa-healthinsurance.com]
There
is a great deal of further data on the causes of death, and on other ways
to evaluate the dangers in life. Here's a Wikipedia
page on the subject; you'll find "drug use disorders" down
near the bottom of this long list, at 0.15% of all deaths (for comparison,
cardiovascular diseases are shown as 29.34% of all deaths). Wired ran a
story titled "One
Million Ways to Die" last year that includes an entertaining
Homeland Security-style danger chart. The CDC's own page on "leading
causes of death" may be found here. -
- - - - Once
again, my point is not that drugs are safe--they are
safe, compared to eating a junk-food diet, but "safe" is only a
relative term. Nothing is
completely safe, including eating and breathing. And if nothing is safe,
then throwing people in prison for doing something that endangers them is
insane, even without considering the dangers of arrest and imprisonment,
which are substantial. Using coercion to "save people" from
their own choices is a huge, horrifying mistake that can only lead to
ever-larger disaster, because the list of dangerous activities includes everything
that people might ever do. If
others have the right to forcibly prevent you from choosing your own
dangers, then they have the right to determine every moment of your life.
Slaves and prisoners live under that level of control, but no free or
healthy society can long survive within such a framework. Every choice has
danger; therefore choosing which dangers are personally worth the risk is the essence
of living. -
- - - - Given
that the State has always been, by far, the most dangerous and deadly
human invention, it is especially strange and distasteful that the State
forces its alleged concern for our safety upon us at gunpoint. One might
gauge the sincerity of this concern for human safety and well-being by
observing the behavior of governments. For example, governments
murdered over two hundred and sixty million people in the 20th Century,
and waged dozens of wars in which millions more people died, and in which
millions beyond that were maimed or injured or traumatized or impoverished
or otherwise harmed. The United States dropped
atomic bombs on the mostly civilian residents of two large Japanese
cities and fire-bombed
other cities in both the Pacific and European theaters during World
War II, burning to death hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children
in firestorms that did little if anything to help win the war. The If
I want safety advice, I'll get it from another source than coercive
government, thank you. -
- - - - As
we all know, government doesn't stop with "advice" – it goes
the extra mile, sending a SWAT team to your home if it suspects you might
be endangering yourself with, say, pot or cocaine. Better you should risk
getting shot and killed, or at least tasered and cuffed and then thrown in
prison with violent criminals, than risk hurting yourself with an
extremely safe herb or a stimulant. Our masters are so certain of this
that over the last few decades they have protected many millions of people
by arresting, convicting, and imprisoning them on drug charges. A December
9, 2006 Reuters
story by James Vicini notes that "We
now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western
Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all
offences." There
isn't much danger to be had from using marijuana or even from most other
illegal drugs, but there is some
– and that, ultimately, is the pseudo-justification for the violence and
cruelty and corruption and astonishing monetary expense associated with
the War on Drugs. The only way to effectively end this nightmare is for
enough people to refuse to accept the lie that the State has any right to
forcibly protect us from our own choices. Once
you understand that everything
is dangerous, and that many ordinary activities are far more
dangerous than drug use, it becomes clear that State-enforced prohibitions
are not only morally bankrupt (because they violate your right to
self-ownership) but also obvious, open-ended tools for tyranny. To accept
the idea that government has the right to forcibly protect you from your
own dangerous choices is to accept that you are a slave, because every
moment of your life contains danger, no matter what you are doing. To
those strongly concerned about the dangers (physical, moral, or other) of
drugs, I say: Please express your concern in a civilized fashion.
Supporting the violence and coercion of prohibition is no more civilized
than supporting initiated violence and coercion in any other part of life.
The violence and coercion of prohibition are far more dangerous – and
not only to our health – than the drugs that prohibition is supposedly
saving us from. Violence
and coercion harm, rather than
protect, the love and freedom we are all born for. -
- - - - Notes: *
No, I am not suggesting enforcing rights by means of government. A number
of books and other resources detail how protection of rights and
enforcement of justice can be (and often have been and in many situations
still are) handled by non-government groups and methods. Good places to
start if you are new to the idea include the classic The
Market for Liberty by Morris Tannehill and Linda Tannehill and The
Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society, a collection of
essays published by The University of Michigan Press. **
Sources: National Safety Council, Found at http://www.afn.org/~savanna/risk.htm but I believe this list to be a subset of one published in Science/80 (or perhaps Science/81; the name changed every year) – a magazine no longer in business and predating the web. Regardless of the provenance and accuracy of this list of dangers (I expect adjustments would be in order, today, for many of the dangers listed – also, several of the list items are poorly defined; for instance, does "alcohol" mean one beer a week, a quart of gin per day, or what?), many sources confirm that use of illegal drugs is, in fact, far less dangerous than many other activities allowed by law and which most of us feel little concern about. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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