Revisiting Arguments Against Drug Prohibition

Matthew Feeney’s recent argument on why American policymakers should decriminalize drugs may or may not have ended in the correct conclusion.

Regardless, in support of this (unfair) conclusion—“it is impossible for someone to consistently claim to care about human suffering or respect of individual rights while arguing for the continued prohibition of some drugs”—Feeney invokes a few arguments that leave something to be desired.

First, Feeney argues:

Although the U.S. makes up only around 5 percent of the world’s population it houses close to 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.  The U.S. puts more of its citizens behind bars than any other country, with more than one percent of the population serving time behind bars.  In federal prisons, inmates serving time for a drug offense make up roughly 50 percent of the population.

This situation is far from ideal and clearly bespeaks an unhealthy dynamic. But I cannot discern in this paragraph any reason that one should conclude that the laws resulting in these incarcerations should be abolished.  The point Feeney is making here is that a certain complex of related policies are violated at a rate disproportionate to the US’s general population vis-à-vis the world’s. That is a factual statement from which normative conclusions concerning those laws’ fittingness within a given constitutional state’s purview of justice cannot be deduced.

Feeney approaches the same fallacy through a second argument:

U.S. drug policy has had a hugely detrimental effect on minorities. According to the Bureau of Justice, black males were six times more like to be imprisoned that white males in 2012. According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Justice, almost 40 percent of prisoners are black, despite the fact that African Americans account for less than 15 percent of the American population. The Sentencing Project estimates that one in three black males born recently can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.

This argument’s structure is as follows:

P1) Demographic X is more likely to be imprisoned for crime C than demographic Y.

P2) Demographic X comprises a much higher percentage of the total incarcerated population than X represents within the nation.

C) Therefore, whatever laws the violations of which result in Demographic X’s incarceration are unjust; C should not be a crime.

This is not an inductively responsible argument. The numbers that Feeney implicates here are non-negligible precisely because they also indicate a serious problem in the fabric of American life; they suggest a web of circumstances, structures, and actions that result in the disproportionate jailing of a given demographic, a result that is most likely unjust.  Regardless, to invoke this argument and then deduce from it the injustice of whatever law prohibits crime C is to make a logical error. One ends up sounding like a Leonard Pitts column.

Feeney goes on to cite a number of scientists in favor of his “moral” claim concerning the relationship between natural rights and the polis—an odd choice of supportive citation—noting, in order, that 1) drug use may have inspired religion; 2) drug use is not unique to human animals; and 3) some people find happiness in taking LSD and cocaine.  One might well respond by asking what religion has to do with Feeney’s argument; by pointing out that violent brutality is also common to human and non-human animals; and by observing that some people also find happiness in pleasuring themselves in public spaces (it’s their bodies, after all).

These premises occupy various positions of prominence within the structure of Feeney’s argument.  Many of them leave quite a bit to be desired by way of philosophical rigor. Sound arguments in support of drug decriminalization exist.  Feeney’s is not one of them.