Imagine a ‘public health’ crisis, in which:
- The media, and both major political parties, cooperate to weave an ‘official narrative’ about how the crisis was caused and what needs to be done about it.
- People who wish to share facts, or express opinions, that are not aligned with this narrative are defunded, defamed, and deplatformed.
- ‘Science’ mutates from a methodology for challenging what we think we know, to a tool for advocating what we wish to believe. That advocacy includes — indeed requires — doing things like: miscategorizing causes of death; grossly overstating risks; drawing conclusions that are not justified, and may be contradicted, by the data; and generally saying whatever seems most likely to scare the bejeezus out of the general public with very little concern for whether it’s true.
- The (always) unprecedented level of danger is used to justify unprecedented erosions of, and outright assaults on, fundamental rights and civil liberties — and unprecedented levels of spending — all in the name of safety.
- ‘Protecting lives’ at any cost replaces ‘protecting rights’ as the primary purpose of government. And as an entirely predictable result, more lives are shattered than saved.
It sounds like I’m talking about the ‘War on COVID’ (WoC), right? But I’m not.
I’m talking about the War on Drugs (WoD), which served as a combination warm-up and test-bed for the WoC.
As you read through Professor Carl Hart’s book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups — which you definitely should — you can’t help seeing parallel after parallel between these two efforts.
In terms of public policy, there are really just two significant differences between the WoD and the WoC.
First, the decimation of fundamental and civil rights during the WoD was used to destroy the lives of one subset of the population. In the WoC, everyone is getting screwed.
Second, law enforcement during the WoD had to be increasingly militarized, because people who have very little except drugs to make their lives bearable are understandably reluctant to give them up. In the WoC, further militarization has been unnecessary, because when Americans are scared enough, they’ll give up just about anything, including any rights they think could be sacrificed to keep them safe.
Otherwise, the methods (‘We can’t protect you if you insist on having rights!’), and the outcomes (increased government over-reach in every area of life), are very much the same.
All of which is to say: If you’ve supported the War on Drugs, then you are directly responsible for the War on COVID. As Malcolm X might have said, what we’re seeing now is just the chickens coming home to roost.
