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Social and Economic Justice
David A.J. Richards
[excerpt from http://www.psychedelic-library.org/dajr4.htm]
Consistent with the autonomy-based interpretation of
treating persons as
equals, principles of distributive justice that would
require a certain
distribution of wealth, property, status, and opportunity
would be agreed
to or universalized.[244] Sometimes it is suggested that
certain forms of
drug use are appropriately criminalized in order to advance
the more just
distribution of goods, on the ground that these forms of
drug use are
mainly a temptation to the poor and a symptom of poverty.
Accordingly,
decriminalization proposals are viewed skeptically: heroin,
it may be
suggested, is the true opiate of the people, whereby the
anxieties and
privations of their disadvantaged lives are temporarily
alleviated, but at
the expense of incapacitating them for the kind of political
analysis and
action required to attack the basic injustices from which
they suffer.[245]
Decriminalization, accordingly, is disfavored because it
legitimates, by a
misplaced ideology of tolerance, the passive vulnerability
of the poor to
exploitation.[246]
One is initially struck by the lack of historical and
cross-cultural
(including comparative law) perspective that this argument
evinces.
Countries that do not use the criminal penalty appear to
have different
patterns of drug use.[247] In the United States prior to the
Harrison Act,
opium addicts appear to have included many middle-class
people, often
women, for whom opium was a medicinal agent in various
nostrums.[248] The
composition of this drug-using population was probably
decisively shaped by
criminalization, resulting in a disproportionate number of
addicts today
among poor urban minorities.[249] That criminalization is
responsible for
these shifts is borne out by studies linking addiction to
social and
psychological factors.[250]
If the condition of members of racial minorities who are
heroin addicts is
to be ameliorated, decriminalization, not criminalization,
is the proper
course. To the extent that criminalization itself bears
responsibility for
the shifts in composition of drug users to more
disadvantaged persons, a
sound theory of justice should condemn, not endorse, a
policy that appears
to have worsened the circumstances of the most disadvantaged
classes.[251]
When it is observed that criminalization has clearly
fostered injuries
incident to drug use, including death, that regulation and
supervision can
lessen these dangers,[252] and that these injuries fall
principally on the
most disadvantaged classes, the case against criminalization
becomes very
strong indeed.
Of course, strong principles of justice, consistent with the
autonomy-based
interpretation of treating persons as equals, require that
persons should
have equal prospects for self-respect and well-being.[253]
Certainly, more
equal opportunities and conditions of life should be made
available to
racial minorities. Criminalization of drug use, however,
does not advance
these ends; indeed, it perversely aggravates injustice.
Decriminalization
would not, as critics of the ideology of tolerance urge,
increase the
vulnerability of the poor to exploitation;[254] rather, it
would release
them from a morally empty stigma and from the crime tariff
industry which
preys on them. Drugs would be cheaply and safely available,
carefully
regulated, and with enough information to fully inform
persons of risks and
benefits. The millennium of social justice would not be
realized, but one
form of unjust exploitation, one form (sanctified by unjust
moralism) of
blaming the victim, would be ended. Perhaps, in such
circumstances, more
poor persons would use certain drugs than more fortunate
persons; perhaps
not.[255] At least, however, the poor would be extended some
measure of
dignifying respect for their right to shape their own lives,
undistorted by
a false, sanctimonious, and class-biased moralism that
ideologically
distorts reality by underestimating the dangers in its own
patterns of drug
use and overestimating the dangers in the drug use of
others.[256]