drug shills, The

Like everyone else in America, I had never really listened to the arguments of the drug legalization crowd since: It's not going to happen. These are like people whose area of expertise is an obscure bug in a Third World country. Their theories could be completely spurious, but no one cares enough to bother arguing with them.

The first argument you always hear about drug legalization is

Stupid Argument #1: Alcohol and cigarettes are no better and probably worse than marijuana.

As Gary Johnson, governor of New Mexico (and only the most recent Republican to figure out that the path to fawning media coverage is to adopt a dumb liberal idea) puts it (as summarized in a fawning article in the New York Times): "Last year 450,000 people died from smoking cigarettes. Alcohol killed 150,000, and another 100,000 died from legal prescription drugs. How many people died last year from the use of marijuana? Few, if any. From cocaine and heroin? Five thousand."

I'll accept all the drug-legalizers' lying statistics and demonstrate that their arguments are still dumb, but you have to say, someone who lies in formulating an argument is not to be trusted. And that figure on cigarette deaths is a bald-faced lie.

The 450,000 number refers to all "smoking-related" deaths. A "smoking-related" death is any death that under any circumstances could be connected to smoking, including heart attacks and a plethora of cancers. If an obese 99-year-old -guy, who happens to be a smoker, dies of a heart attack while shoveling snow-his death would be listed as a "smoking-related" death.

Indeed, the books are so cooked on the "smokingrelated deaths" alleged by the American Cancer Society, that a 1993 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology was able to show that by using the exact same methodology, smoking saves 277,621 lives each year. (The methodology also proves that 504,000 people die each year from insufficient exercise, and 649,000 die from improper diets.)

But even stipulating to the drug-legalizers' phony statistics, let's assume alcohol and cigarettes induce dependency, ruin lives, cause disease, depression, countless traffic injuries and fatalities, and increase the incidence of homicide and suicide. This is supposed to be an argument for legalizing another drug like them?

Stupid Argument #2: Prohibition failed.

No it didn't. Prohibition resulted in startling reductions in alcohol consumption (down over 50%), cirrhosis of the liver (63%), admissions to mental health institutions for alcohol psychosis (60%) and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct (50%).

That doesn't mean Prohibition was a good thing: Don't forget what Christ's first miracle was. But Prohibition is one of the strongest arguments against legalizing marijuana. The reason Prohibition failed was that alcohol had become a respectable libation, part of the social fabric in high society and low. Once the genie is out of the bottle (so to speak), it's hard to put it back.

So you might want to have a better argument than "alcohol and cigarettes are bad, too" before letting the drug genie out of the bottle.

Stupid Argument #3: One of the leading libertarian arguments made for legalization is that drug use would decrease if only drugs were legal because the government just "messes everything up."

While it's hard to argue with the latter point, one thing governments are really good at is criminalizing stuff. People like me hate the government because of the things it tends to prohibit (e.g., earning money, flushing toilets, owning and developing property, and engaging in political speech), not because the government isn't good at it.

The idea that making an activity legal would reduce its incidence is, not to put to fine a point on it, preposterous. This is exactly like the disingenuous argument about making abortion "safe, legal and rare." One really effective way to move the ball toward "rare" would be to outlaw it.

Indeed, the idea that politicians like, Gary Johnson want to legalize drugs so the government can put a tax on them ought to stop you in your tracks. As with gambling, the government just wants to horn in on drug money for itself. The government is always envious of criminal enterprises. It never occurs to politicians to make government more like Microsoft. Successful capitalist enterprises they want to destroy. It's Atlantic City or the Crips and Bloods they see as useful organizational models.

Whenever politicians say they say want to restrict something by taxing it, you know they're lying: The very fact that they are taxing it means they need people to keep doing it. Otherwise they'd run out of revenue.

So that's a dumb argument, too.

Stupid Argument #4: We've "lost" the drug war.

We've "lost" the murder war too-if winning is defined as total abolition.

We don't have laws prohibiting what no one wants to do, which is why people persist in committing crimes even though it's against the law. Laws against drugs have surely reduced drug use, just as laws against murder and robbery reduce murders and robberies.