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June 15, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
14:16
Revisiting Ron Paul's 1988 Case for Drug Legalization - RPI Houston Conference

RPI Senior Fellow Adam Dick takes another look at Ron Paul's groundbreaking 1988 treatise on why all drugs should be legalized. Speech is from RPI's May 2019 conference "Winning the War on the War on Drugs." For information on RPI's next conference in August, click here: RonPaulInstitute.org/conference

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Ron Paul's Libertarian Legacy 00:07:53
Good morning.
Ron Paul helped many people discover libertarian ideas in his various presidential campaigns.
For me, during Dr. Paul's 1988 presidential campaign, things worked the other way around.
I was already familiar with libertarianism, and that familiarity led me to want to find out more about Ron Paul.
When Dr. Paul came to San Antonio, Texas, where I lived in that campaign, I went to find out more about this man who was seeking the presidency under the Libertarian Party banner.
Dr. Paul that evening presented an informative and interesting extemporaneous exploration of current events and his approach to them based on libertarian ideas.
One of the things I valued most from that evening was a pamphlet written by Dr. Paul that I brought home with me.
That pamphlet, titled, The Case for Drug Legalization, presented a strong, multifaceted argument for legalization that has held up well over the ensuing decades.
It was an argument that Dr. Paul was bold to make in 1988 in that presidential campaign.
1988 was eight years before California voters approved Proposition 215 regarding medical marijuana that gave a big boost to rolling back marijuana prohibition across the country, a process that continues today, but still has a long way to go.
1988 was also the end of two terms of President Ronald Reagan, an adamant drug warrior who helped expand the drug war in America with bipartisan support in Congress.
Ron Paul, in arguing for drug legalization in that election, was also challenging general public opinion.
A Gallup poll places support for marijuana legalization at 66% countrywide in October of last year.
In contrast, support was under 30% in Gallup polls nearest to 1988.
Back then, Gallup didn't even poll on the issue each year.
Why bother?
Legalization was not happening anytime soon.
Of course, an even smaller minority of Americans in 1988 supported the more radical proposition of legalizing all drugs.
But there was Ron Paul in 1988 in San Antonio and campaign stops across the country saying that the entire drug war should be terminated.
To boot, one of the handouts from the campaign was that extensive pro-legalization pamphlet.
That pamphlet helped show me and other people that Dr. Paul was a real deal in his support for freedom.
Indeed, one of the most important things Dr. Paul said in that pamphlet, The Case for Drug Legalization, was that he emphasized that ending the drug prohibition is, as he put it, a policy based on the American tradition of freedom.
Sure, there are many pragmatic reasons to legalize drugs, several of which Dr. Paul discussed in his pamphlet and on the campaign trail.
But fundamentally, the case for drug legalization is a case for respecting people's freedom.
This emphasis on freedom is principled.
It also is likely critical for the ultimate success of any effort to end the war on drugs completely.
Consider marijuana legalization, which is now the law in one in five states in America.
Practical arguments have helped bring about that legalization.
But I believe the biggest driver for legalization has been that people have developed the opinion that whether they think it is the right choice or the wrong choice, the freedom of other individuals to use marijuana is something that government should respect.
Dr. Paul's freedom case for ending the drug war extends beyond emphasizing that freedom to use drugs should be respected.
Ron Paul wrote in his campaign pamphlet that what the government was really doing in the drug war was assaulting civil liberties in the name of fighting drugs.
Ron Paul was declaring in his 1988 campaign what many people have come to understand in the years since the war on drugs is a war on people.
Some of the drug war abuses Dr. Paul detailed in his pamphlet are bank surveillance that sought to make every teller a monetary cop, the construction of dossiers on innocent Americans, and seizures of property such as boats or cars because any amount of drugs is found in them.
Such rights abuses in the name of the drug war have continued and intensified in the years since.
But we also have in the recent years seen an uptick in criticism of many such drug war practices and even the implementation of restrictions on their use, especially at the state and local level.
One powerful story Dr. Paul tells in his pamphlet is of a family victimized by a SWAT team raid of their apartment.
The brutal and destructive raid was justified by a false tip from an informant that drugs were present in the apartment.
This is a story that has become more and more common in the years since.
Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter B. Kroska, testifying at a hearing of the United States Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in 2014, identified the late 1980s and early 1990s as a period in which the growth of SWAT teams took off in America.
The result, he writes, is a more than 1,300% increase in the total number of police paramilitary deployments or callouts between 1980 and the year 2000.
Much of this growth is due to the drug war.
And while SWAT team raids of the wrong home is terrible, it also is terrible when SWAT teams raid the right home.
Just because there are drugs present in the home does not mean that this tactic is justified in American policing.
You could say Dr. Paul was ahead of his time in criticizing SWAT team raids.
Dr. Paul's Drug War Critique 00:05:18
He was similarly ahead of his time in condemning in the pamphlet an elderly widow who was thrown in jail for possession of four marijuana plants, despite her doctor saying she needed to use marijuana to deal with her glaucoma.
Back in 1988, there was little common understanding of the variety of people who can obtain relief for their medical problems from using marijuana.
Stories like the one Dr. Paul told would often be responded to with answers such as, you just say that because you want to get high.
Boy, things changed.
And they have only done so because people like Ron Paul, a doctor as well as a political candidate, were willing to stand up and publicly defend the medical use of marijuana,
leading the way to the situation we now have, where the majority of states have legal marijuana, in fact, two-thirds of the states, and that issue of medical marijuana is overwhelmingly supported by the American people.
Dr. Paul also addressed head-on in his 1988 campaign pamphlet some of the ulterior motives for the drug war in America.
He sought to educate people so they would not accept the line that the negative consequences of the drug war were the necessary byproduct of a well-meaning government effort to keep Americans safe.
Ron Paul bluntly stated his general opinion for why the U.S. government was pursuing the drug war.
Dr. Paul wrote that he believed part of the reason the drug war hysteria was whipped up was to strengthen big governments' hold over us.
Measured against this goal, Dr. Paul explained that the drug war was in fact a great success, with accomplishments including a huge increase in the American prison population and a catalog of liberty abuses in the name of enforcing prohibition.
But what of the purported compassionate goal of the drug war, to prevent people from via drug use ruining their lives and the lives of others?
Rubbish, answered Dr. Paul, asserting in his pamphlet that the drug abuse rates were about the same in 1988 as in 1888, 100 years earlier, and decades before drug prohibition began.
Indeed, we have witnessed with the ending of alcohol prohibition countrywide in the last century and of marijuana prohibition in some states over the last few years that there is no big rise in the use of previously prohibited drugs materializing.
While prohibition has failed to reduce drug use, it had, Dr. Paul explained, managed to bring much greater danger to Americans through a resulting rise in the rates of poverty and violent crimes.
And the drug war was creating additional dangers for illegal drug users, supposedly the people the drug war was meant to help.
Dr. Paul notes in his pamphlet: the major cause of death is not from drugs' narcotic properties.
It is from poison drugs and adulterations.
That danger, wrote Dr. Paul, is 100% made in Washington.
Today, politicians and commentators are calling for expansion of the drug war to counter the dangers of fentanyl and other adulteration of drugs, and also another danger 100% made by government.
Legalize drugs, and the problem disappears.
Here's how I put it in an October of 2017 Ron Paul Institute article.
With legalization, people could buy their drugs from established businesses that have a strong interest in maintaining a good reputation, can be sued for fraud and other wrongful acts, receive their drugs through regular supply chains not interrupted by government interdiction efforts, and sell drugs that are of consistent quality and thus have much more predictable effects when consumed.
Dr. Paul has long known that respecting freedom is inconsistent with fighting a war on drugs, but he did not leave the matter at that.
Many Facets of Prohibition Debate 00:00:58
Dr. Paul investigated deeply and widely to develop expertise in the many facets of the prohibition debate.
Indeed, in his 1988 campaign pamphlet, he discussed in detail several additional facets of this debate that I have not mentioned here.
Further, Dr. Paul has taken the initiative over the years in campaigns in the House of Representatives and in educational efforts, including through the Ron Paul Institute, to advance the case for drug legalization.
As we look at the success that has been made in rolling back prohibition of marijuana and consider the potential of ending the entire drug war, we should be thankful for Ron Paul's effective communication over the decades of a well-reasoned case for legalization.
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