Half-Baked Hash Brownies
Does he realize that the rampant criminality and drug gang wars are driven by other drugs besides marijuana, like cocaine, meth and heroin? What about those? Legalize only pot, and all the criminal pathologies he lists will shift away from marijuana and converge upon the remaining illegal substances. The criminality and societal damage will not go away just because you reclassify illicit drug use as a "public health issue,"
So unless he proposes we stand aside and quit trying to stanch the torrent of drugs entering our country, he won't really end the "drug war" at all; he's just using leftwing rhetoric to make dope smokers happy and get their votes, if they can remember to go vote on election day.
Legalization will not eliminate criminality
Even if we decriminalized all drug use, meth heads and other shiftless dopers will still commit crimes to pay for their habits. Also, decriminalizing something doesn't magically make any trouble around it go away. People do violence over legal items all the time, from sneakers and XBoxes to carjackings. Moreso over addictive substances.
Legalization will not necessarily prevent a black market. Taxation and regulation could raise the price so high that a black market could be lucrative. Also, gangs could still war with one another over who provides raw material and finished products to legalized American manufacturers.
Can we live with the libertarian consequences?
If you want libertarian laws, you've got to be prepared to live with the with libertarian consequences. Do you really want to pay unemployable dopers to sit at home and use drugs? When a father breadwinner cracks himself out, do you want to foot the bill to save the kids from living on the street after the house is repossessed?
The only way drug legalization works is if we first eliminate the welfare state, and good luck with that...
In fact, Johnson wants us to pay for dopers' rehab as part of his treating it as a health issue. This is as wrong as wrong can be. He is incentivizing drug use. To implement this in a truly libertarian way, there would be no taxpayer money to drug users.
Hayek points out in Chapter 9 (Coercion and the State) of The Constitution of Liberty, that the state is right in restricting human activity where there is a collective responsibility. Welfare is a collective responsibility. A person blowing the top of her head off with drugs and rendering herself unemployable and an unfit mother places a burden on the rest of us. And not an elective moral burden, but an involuntary, mandatory one, as the state takes money from us to take care of this drug user and her children.
Taking libertarianism to its logical end...
If man is free to smoke dope, why isn’t he free to drop acid, smoke crack cocaine or use meth? Why isn’t man free to cook his own meth? Why can't two people engage in the free exchange of drugs for money? If Gary Johnson wants to run as a Libertarian, how can he countenance restricting this private behavior? Why does he stop at marijuana?
Why does Johnson and other libertarians suggest libertarian laws, but then backstop them with confiscatory progressive statism?
