Epilogue: What good are drugs anyway?

I have learned a great deal from this lively exchange of views. One thing I found oddly instructive was the extent to which the general outlines of the discussion conformed to my already existing expectations. Despite the fact that the exchange showed substantial originality on the part of our four discussants, and a number of surprising turns of thought, the broad features of the arguments on both sides were in several respects what I thought they would be. For instance, both the contributors who spoke against decriminalization---George Sher and Peter de Marneffe--presented the issue as a question of the consequences of drug use. (1) The issue, for both of them, is to a great extent a matter of weighing goods and bads. This is not very surprising. The case for making (or keeping) drugs illegal seems, at least on a first glance, to be best supported by weighing the well-publicized harm that they do. Further, neither Sher nor de Marneffe relied on deontic concepts, such as individual rights, as ideas that support their side of the issue. Although de Marneffe did discuss rights at some length, his point was to defend against rights-based objections to drug laws. This, too, is not at all surprising. Since drug laws are instances of state coercion against individuals, we would naturally expect the notion of individual rights to be most useful to those who oppose such laws. Further, both Sher and de Marneffe offer little or no support for the idea that drug use might yield significant benefits that should be weighed in the balance against the bad that drugs sometimes do. De Marneffe characterizes drug use simply as an "enjoyable recreational activity." Sher describes drugs as producing "pleasant sensations," and in the question and answer period when these papers were first presented in Philadelphia, he acknowledged that their use could be "fun," but he made no other mention of beneficial results that they might produce. Again, this is not terribly surprising. If the case against drugs is to be based on the evils they bring with them, then the case against them is the strongest if whatever good they might do is, as these comments suggest, a mere matter of fun and recreation. After all, if there is something in the world that ruins human lives and promotes violence and has nothing to be said in its favor other than that it has value as a source of entertainment, then why should we miss it if it is banned? Given this, it might seem surprising at first that Douglas Husak's case for decriminalizing use, as he has presented it here, does not involve resisting this way of characterizing the possible benefits of using psychotropic drugs (2). Rather, his approach is based on minimizing the bad they do. There are billions of uses of illicit drugs in this country every year. The number of harms they do--and consequently the probability that any one use will be harmful--is in comparison very small. In taking this approach, I think he leaves himself open to an objection that Sher raises: even if the billions of occasions on which drugs are used result in harm only ten thousand times, why should we not think of ten thousand in this context as a very large number--indeed, as too large? Clearly, there are some missing premises here, ones that Sher probably omits because he thinks they are obvious: he is supposing that there is no need to weigh the ten thousand against the billions to see which is more important. And the reason for this is, no doubt, that he supposes the good that characterizes the billions of uses is a very petty thing compared to the evil of the ten thousand harms. Once the missing premises are supplied, I think that this objection is potentially a powerful one. After all, who would say that thousands should die so that millions can have some fun? Clearly, the question of the value (or lack of value) that drugs might have is an essential component in the debate about drug legalization. …