Would a Bigger Police State Win the Drug War?

by Jacob G. Hornberger
Mar. 04, 2015

Most everyone would agree that China is not a free society. It is ruled by a brutal communist regime, one that has absolutely no regard for civil liberties and such criminal-justice principles as due process of law, trial by jury, right to counsel, and habeas corpus. When the state wants to go after someone, there are no institutional barriers that stand in its way.

China has something else: the war on drugs, the same war that the U.S. government has been waging for decades.

According to an article in the New York Times, despite a fierce, unrelenting war waged against drugs, drug use in China remains as big a problem as ever.

Why is that important to Americans?

Two reasons.

One, it shows that drug laws are part and parcel of tyrannical regimes. It is only in genuinely free societies that people are free to ingest any substance they want without being punished by the state for it.

In other words, the United States has the same type of governmental program as the brutal and tyrannical communist regime in China.

Two, the China experience shows Americans that no matter how much more the federal government were to crack down in the war on drugs, it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. People would continue to ingest drugs, even while a large percentage of them were being incarcerated or otherwise punished.

In other words, if the U.S. government were to impose the same type of totalitarian police state as China as part of the war on drugs, it would destroy freedom without achieving the desired result.

According to the article,

China has some of the world's harshest drug laws: those caught trafficking large amounts of drugs can face the death penalty, and the police have the authority to send casual drug users to compulsory drug rehabilitation centers, which human rights groups say are little more than labor camps.

Nonetheless, "Liu Yuejin, director general of the government's anti-narcotics division, estimated the actual number of addicts at 13 million."

In one week alone, Chinese police arrested 60,500 people suspected of drug-law violations. By the middle of December 2014, an estimated 180,000 drug users had been punished, with almost a third of them being sent to government-run rehab centers.

As we can see with China, drug laws are part of tyrannical regimes, not free societies. Moreover, even if a total police state were imposed here in the United States as part of the war on drugs, as is the case in communist China, it wouldn't bring about the desired result anyway.

So, what's the point of the drug war here at home? Americans should be leading the world to freedom and tolerance, not following the well-trodden road toward tyranny and oppression. What better place to start than by ending the war on drugs?
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.