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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 2, Number 3 Memo to the Movement: Initiating Force Is Out, Even When You Think It's a Good Idea by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR January
14, 2008 In
Could We
Ever Justify Restraining Someone From Doing Drugs? (Part I), Danny
Shahar suggests that ". . . a drug user might not fully realize the nature of the choice
she is making, and so we might want to prevent her from making a poorly
informed, and regrettable, decision from which she might be unable to
recover." He adds, "But
all Im saying is that it doesnt seem disrespectful of someones
individuality to force them to be aware of the facts about their dangerous
decisions if their potential mistake could be ruinous." Note
that Shahar is talking about forcibly preventing someone from using drugs until after they have
been informed in some fashion that "we" meaning, apparently,
Congress or state lawmakers or the FDA or the DEA or someone in (trumpets, please) Authority
approve of. The
reader might suspect, given my tone, that I am uncomfortable with Danny's
suggestion. The reader would be correct. Danny's stated (and I believe
quite genuine) concern for every person's individuality is derailed by two
major and commonplace misunderstandings, which I discuss below. Sharer's
column was written in response to a column of my own, in which I listed my
two points in the subtitle: Danger
Is My Middle Name--And So Is Yours (Why Your Right to Self-Ownership
Includes the Right to Choose Your Own Dangers). That column, in turn,
was triggered by (although not as a response to) Danny's previous Paternalists
Just Don't Understand. That may seem enough on the subject already,
but given that the War on Drugs is an ongoing assault on human rights with
millions of victims and huge amounts of collateral damage both here and
around the world, continuing the discussion seems worthwhile. This is a
topic that needs wide exposure
and careful, honest thought. My
previous Danger column fully makes the point that using force to
protect others is morally wrong and, if only for practical reasons,
outright foolish. The two fundamental points I discuss here will expand on
that. My topics will be the uncertain nature of our knowledge,
and the nature of using force
in social life. -
- - - - The uncertain nature of our knowledge For
decades I have watched science and medicine change their opinions on one
thing after another which means that we have often been getting wrong
and even dangerous advice from experts, in and out of the government. This
is not surprising, because the universe is dramatically more complex than
we think it is or perhaps can even grasp. The result of all this
complexity is that one year's "fact" may be the next year's
fallacy. The week doesn't go by that I don't read about science changing
its collective mind on something,
from diet advice to hormone replacement therapy to cosmology. A few
well-known examples that are important in terms of human well-being: -- Ulcers --
Doctors
long believed (and built lucrative practices around) the theory that
ulcers were caused by too much stress and stomach acid. Then, in 1982,
Australian doctors Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that
infection with Helicobacter pylori
bacteria was the cause of most ulcers. It took many years for the medical
industry to accept that a short course of antibiotics (instead of a
lifetime regimen of antacids and doctor visits) could cure ulcers for most
patients. Marshall
and Warren won a Nobel Prize in 2005 for their discovery. -- Vitamin D: Miracle Worker or Threat to Health?
--
http://www.lef.org/newshop/items/item00713.html Experts
and the medical establishment, including the FDA and others in the federal
government, have long warned
about toxicity of vitamin D at 2,000 IU or more [PDF] a level not
much beyond the RDA, currently set at 400
IU per day for most adults and 600 to 800 IU for those over 70. But it
turns out that toxicity
is not seen below levels of 40,000 units daily for extended periods
not surprising, since a white-skinned person laying on the beach
creates about 10,000 IU of vitamin D in the first 15 minutes of sunbathing
(creation of the vitamin slows after that due to degradation by UV light
before the vitamin can be absorbed). While
everything has some danger,
decades of overblown warnings about "too much" vitamin D have
contributed, we now know, to higher rates of heart
disease, stroke,
multiple
sclerosis, diabetes, gum disease, tooth loss, cancer, infections, and
other problems. Vitamin D is necessary for brain
health as well as for health of the bones.
Those with dark
skin and those living at higher latitudes are especially at risk
because they get less of the vitamin from their sun exposure. Dr.
Donald W. Miller, Jr. points out that "If
everyone took 5,000 IU/day of vitamin D, the High-dose
vitamin D supplements are hard to find at health food stores; Dr. Miller
points readers to "two sites
that sell both 'D3-5' (5,000 IU) and 'D3-50' (50,000
IU) . . . here
and here."
5,000 IU capsules of vitamin D
are also available from the Life
Extension Foundation; the price is currently under $10 per 60 capsule
bottle, and $6.68 in quantity of four or more for members an
incredibly inexpensive way to support your health.* In summer, simply
spending more time outdoors (without sunscreen, at least some of the time)
may supply you with all the vitamin D you need how's that
for cheap? In comparison, the authors of a recent study report that
pharmaceutical firms in the United States spent over $57
billion promoting their drugs in 2004 "almost twice as much
on promotion as they [spend] on R&D." That sound you hear is the
government-created medical-pharmaceutical-regulatory complex gnashing
its teeth. -- Global Cooling. Uh, Global Warming. No, Global
Cooling. -- In
the 1970s and 1980s, global cooling became a major concern. (In a previous
column I linked to a Time Magazine
article from the era to illustrate this point; here's
one from Newsweek, In
recent years, global warming
has replaced concern for global cooling, with so much cheerleading for
this view that no reference is necessary. Now despite the huge
entrenched special interest that has grown up around global warming, global
cooling is again what science is seeing in the data or at least
what some scientists are seeing, and they make a good case. Either way,
one obvious point to draw from all this is that committing huge, long-term
government resources and programs to one view or the other is, at best, a
form of high-stakes gambling. The scientific community is apparently far
more clear on this than are the political elite and the general public:
~
Read
the Sunspots by R. Timothy Patterson, Financial
Post, Patterson
goes on to tell us that "Solar
scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its
weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to
unusually cool conditions on Earth." See
also Changes in the
Sun's Surface to Bring Next Climate Change and Global
Cooling Everywhere. -
- - - - Conclusion
for Point One:
Using government force to "protect" people is foolish, in part
because uncertainty is a built-in
part of life. Even if people did not have the inherent right to live
their own lives and choose their own dangers, this uncertainty factor
would undermine attempts at protection and often cause
harm by the very efforts aimed at reducing harm. Even forcing people to
listen to "approved" information about drugs or other possible
dangers is subject to this basic truth about human knowledge: It changes and, thus, is often wrong. Adding Force to Stupidity and Venality: The
Pro-Coercion Approach Initiating
force against peaceful human beings is morally wrong, and is not magically
improved by a desire to "protect" others from something they are
willingly choosing. As an individual, one might decide to forcibly
restrain a neighbor or friend or family member from something (jumping off
a bridge, for instance), but even then one incurs liability. Still,
natural concern for a fellow human being might lead one to temporarily
restrain another in an exceptional circumstance. Whatever harm might come
from such an attempt is limited in scope, and the liability of the
would-be protector is clear and can be addressed, if necessary, in a court
or through arbitration. When
trying to protect others from their own
chosen dangers, things change for the worse as always when we
shift to using government force and violence in the service of our goals.
Danny's column was on drugs specifically, and I will simply recap some of
the results of government "protection" in this area, including
the futility of trying to protect others by forcing information down their
throats: -- Drug dangers --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ReeferMadnessPoster.jpg Whenever
I think of efforts to "educate" people about the alleged dangers
of drugs, I think of the 1936 propaganda film Reefer
Madness. Ever since that film, marijuana users have been squarely in
the crosshairs of those who feel the need to protect others from
themselves. Pot users (and those who used cocaine and other street drugs)
were the perfect patsies for the police-prison-legislative-DrugLord
complex pot users were minorities,
for the most part, so who cared
what happened to them? Prohibition
of alcohol had been dismantled a few years earlier because too many
upstanding white folk were getting caught up in the machinery (also,
naturally, it was a dismal failure at the stated goal, but later events
suggest that was not a real
issue); the power elite itself
was not about to give up booze, so, despite the lovely police-state powers
created by prohibition, the war on alcohol had to go. But addiction to
Power is stronger than addiction to crack cocaine, and predictably, the
one lesson learned by the power elite from prohibition was not
that prohibition was an unworkable, violent, corrupt, and immoral sham,
but instead to be more careful about what
substances were prohibited. Simply letting free human beings decide on their own what to put into their own bodies would have missed the
point which was that staggering
levels of money and power were at stake. In
addition to billions of dollars in direct fiscal costs to taxpayers, the
human costs of sending tens of millions of Americans to the "filthy
cages and rape rooms" of the prison system over the years is
well, impossible to really grasp. Try to imagine the pain, trauma, terror,
and disruption for even one
victim as he or she is dragged into the court system (assuming they
survive the arrest) and then convicted, labeled for life as a criminal,
ripped from their family and friends and incarcerated for months or years
in a cage with genuine and often violent criminals, and finally let out to
face a new life as an ex-con (imagine your first job interview after
leaving the Big House). How can we do
this to people? Is
marijuana dangerous? Sure; what isn't? On the other hand, is marijuana as
dangerous as being arrested and imprisoned? No;
of course not the number of people who die
from pot each year is often given as "zero,"
although some sources put the number slightly
higher [PDF] but still extremely low. Would a free market in marijuana
be as dangerous as the cops-and-DrugLords action game (with live ammo) we
have created with our drug laws? One second of honest reflection will
answer that for you. Finally,
do anti-drug information campaigns work? If they did, the "drug
problem" would have vanished long ago. DARE
and the many other (often multi-million dollar) anti-drug
campaigns have, despite whatever minor or localized success they may
have had, clearly not succeeded
at keeping Americans from using drugs. Note that this is separate from the
question of whether it is even desirable
to encourage people to not use recreational drugs. People have used drugs
to alter their state of being since before written history began,
including in religious ceremonies. Deciding for
people that drug use is necessarily wrong is just another form of
paternalism. Given the changing state of knowledge as well as the changing
state of what we find desirable, even forcing others to listen
to what we think they should know about drugs is foolish and worse in
part because it encourages the eventual use of force to actively prevent drug use, as history has shown repeatedly. -
- - - - Conclusion
for Point Two:
Using force to "protect" others is immoral, dangerous, and no
better than using force against people for anything else. If you wish to
help someone, please keep force out of it. The
guiding principle for the freedom movement is, with good reason, the non-initiation
of force (AKA voluntaryism).
If you believe there are good reasons to use force against your fellow
human beings other than in actual defense, please give the topic more
thought. If
there is one thing history shows clearly, it is that use of force against
others, even with the best intentions, soon grows into an ever-larger use
of force that eventually becomes a nightmare. See today's ------------------ *
The "To be taken under a physician's supervision.
Monthly blood tests are suggested when taking this 5000 IU vitamin D
supplement to guard against a very low risk of kidney toxicity or
hypercalcemia (excess calcium in the blood). "Do not use if taking digoxin
or any cardiac
glycoside. Use of thiazides
and high dose vitamin D may cause hypercalcemia. Hypercalcemia can result
in calcification of soft tissues such as kidney, blood vessels, heart, and
lungs." As yet another reminder that knowledge is seldom
as incontrovertible as we would like it to be, here
is a long, detailed article by Amy Proal at Bacteriality.com asserting
that almost everything positive
ever reported about vitamin D is wrong an overstatement, perhaps,
but well, read the article and decide for yourself. Proal believes
that long-term use of vitamin D will eventually be shown to have dire
effects. Personally, I think it very unlikely that we would have evolved
to create large amounts of vitamin D in our own bodies in response to sun
exposure if our bodies didn't have good use
for the vitamin D, and I am also not convinced Proal is right about the
poor quality and/or misinterpretation of the many research studies showing
benefits of vitamin D. Last year a
large, randomized, four-year study found a 60% reduction in cancer
among participants taking vitamin D; on the theory that some participants
may have had undetected cancers at the start of the study, the data was
re-analyzed for only the last three years and the cancer reduction was
found to be 77%. For another example (out of many), a recent study
published in The Nutrition Journal found that adults who took a large array of
supplements (an average of 17 different supplements, which would almost
certainly include vitamin D) were significantly,
even dramatically, healthier by many measures than those who took no
supplements or only a single supplement such as a multivitamin. I continue
to take 10,000 IU per day and 50,000 IU immediately at the first (and
thus, last) sign of a cold but I will certainly keep reading up on the
topic. Proal's article and the Marshall
Protocol movement generally are perfect examples of my point about the
uncertainty of knowledge. ** By "initiated force" I mean force used other than in self-defense. Starting the fight and responding in self-defense (or defense of others) to an attack are two different things. 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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