Nice Priorities

People are writing about the dope legalization efforts in Washington and Colorado. I’ve thought about it, and although I am disgusted, I really don’t care. I used to feel differently, but it’s 2012, and our drug laws have proven to be about as effective as the Cuba embargo.

I get tired of hearing people say the government shouldn’t “legislate morality.” We have all sorts of laws intended to promote good morals, and some of those laws seem to have no other purpose. We ban incest, for example, even when it’s homosexual incest, which can’t produce deformed children. It can be very hard to separate morality from public policy, which ought to tell people something. Anyway, it doesn’t bother me that the government tries to reinforce our morals, as long as they don’t get too intrusive. But it does seem silly that a government official can punish me for putting things in my mouth. They can’t prosecute me for poking my eyes out or amputating my own feet, but if I smoke meth once at a party, they can arrest me. Seems odd.

Do people smoke meth at parties? I guess that shows how little I know about it. Meth seems more like a sleazy drug you enjoy in private, while huddled behind a dumpster in a pair of jeans caked with dried urine.

Drug abuse is a horrendous, gigantic sin. But it’s an extremely personal sin. Unlike abortion and gay marriage, drug abuse is something you can do all by yourself, and most of the harm will fall on you, not others. It’s not the same as killing a baby or forcing a society to create and enforce a new and abominable right. It’s also becoming impossible to police. To ban a drug, you have to know it exists, and you have to name it. Thanks to improvements in chemistry, we come up with new, legal drugs all the time. I don’t think we’ll ever catch up with science. It seems like the worst drugs of all are legal now. Say what you want about cocaine. It doesn’t make people eat each other’s faces.

Right now, all across the country, people of very low intelligence are making great incomes selling drugs. Without drug laws, they would be forced to go on welfare or take the menial jobs their abilities justify. If drugs were legal, selling drugs would be a real job. You would have to work 40 hours a week, the price of your product would be low due to competition, and if you were stupid or lazy (most dealers are both), you would go out of business. It would be wonderful to see hordes of trashy people deprived of an illicit livelihood. I don’t think other types of crime could absorb them. Only so many people can be pimps and burglars. I think they’d be in real trouble. They would dry up. They wouldn’t be able to subsidize gangs and illegal firearms. Our streets would be safer.

Would legalization lead to a drug craze that would destroy society? I guess it’s possible, but I don’t think so. Drugs are easy to get right now; they’re just overpriced. I think just about everyone who wants to do drugs is doing them. If I felt like debasing myself, I could have crack in half an hour, but I don’t want it, so I’m not going to get it. I doubt that a significant percentage of the population would start using drugs simply because they could.

In the past, drugs were legal in the United States. You could buy heroin if you felt like it. Back in those days, drugs were a small problem. Now they’re a big problem. You could say, “Wow, think how bad it would be if our laws weren’t suppressing drug abuse,” but the most likely thing is that our laws aren’t making a big difference, apart from financing violence and other crimes.

We complain about Democrats expecting the government to solve our problems, and we’re right, but it may be that conservatives, or at least people who favor conventional morality, are also too dependent on the government. Maybe when we look at a law, we should ask ourselves whether it makes any sense to expect the government to be able to bring about the result the law promotes. By now, it’s indisputable: laws do not prevent the widespread sale or use of mind-altering drugs.

I suppose people will say I should be in favor of gay marriage. I disagree. The regulation of drugs is a proactive step, taken by a society with a long history of avoiding the drug issue. The legalization of drugs is merely the undoing of a proactive step. The legalization of gay marriage is also proactive. We would be creating a set of rights that has never existed in any Christian nation, and like other pro-homosexuality measures, it contributes to an atmosphere in which moral people are persecuted with the government’s blessing and assistance. If we legalize drugs, we will not be forced to hire addicts or refrain from speaking ill of them, but as the homosexual agenda moves forward, we are beginning to see laws requiring us to accept homosexuality and assist in its promotion.

Laws sanctioning gay marriage are an affirmative expression of society’s approval and support. The repeal of laws banning drugs carries no such message. It simply means we’ve decided to quit knocking ourselves out trying (unsuccessfully) to protect individuals from themselves. It wouldn’t mean we could be fired or sued for criticizing addicts, or that we would be characterized as “haters” for opposing drug use.

I’m not a libertarian. I think it’s insane for intelligent people to base their votes on a juvenile desire to smoke weed, and I think weed makes people trashy and silly. I just think there are some things laws can’t fix.

The Bible mentions drugs. It is clearly against drug abuse, but there is only one drug transaction in the Bible (Rachel and Leah haggling over mandrakes), and it doesn’t mention civil penalties. And the Bible permits the use of alcohol, even when mild intoxication is the goal. My take on the Bible’s teaching on drugs is that all recreational drug use is abominable, drunkenness is sin, and we are permitted to have one or two drinks on occasion. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how it looks.

The suicidal election we just endured has served to remind me that good things don’t come from government. If enough people in a nation submit to God and have strong prayer lives, God will fix the government and bless the whole country, and he will give disproportionate power to his people. If not, all the conservative policies in the world will not save the nation.

In the last election, we had a completely godless candidate promoting himself as a socialist messiah, and that’s bad, but we also had a Republican heretic whose slogan was not, “Believe in God,” but, “Believe in America.” I was disturbed when I saw the slogan, because I knew it was offensive, but I don’t run the world, so there wasn’t anything I could do. I voted for the least-ungodly choice, and he lost.

The government can’t make everyone rich with EBT cards and free cell phones, and it can’t keep our kids off drugs. It can’t keep us out of war. It can’t give us prosperity or internal peace. All those things come from prayer and submission. I only know of one nation that can screw up its relationship with God and still come out okay, and that’s Israel (if you call losing six million people in one decade “okay”). America can be abased and subjugated permanently. We have no unconditional promises to match the ones God gave Israel.

If we want things to go well, we need to fast, and we need to pray for God to help us add to our numbers inside the US. The other things we do won’t amount to much. Conservatives are right, and we should win elections, but the voters are extremely ignorant and unprincipled, so while we’re waving our arms and yelling about the Laffer Curve and the debilitating effects of entitlements, many of the people who hear us are thinking about things like Dancing With the Stars or which candidate they’re rather sleep with. We’re drilling in the wrong places.