Intoxication “smothers thought and dilutes discontent, the very things that real lovers of human liberty need and value.” You argue that when an individual gets intoxicated, he or she is seeking “sensual pleasure sought for its own sake, separated from any effort or responsibility.” They are voluntarily leaving behind the world of the senses – the real world, where they can affect real people – and entering a world of selfish indulgence, where only their own egos matter.
I think you make essentially five core arguments in your book: It’s outside the remit of this particular conversation, but I want to urge people to read it.) (By the way, I thought the chapter in your book warning against anti-depressants – as somebody who took them for more than a decade – was important and superb. Then, later, perhaps I can explain where I disagree. I think if we can have a discussion where, at the start, we have shown we understand where the other is coming from, it’ll make the whole conversation more worthwhile.
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Perhaps – feel free to disregard me – you might respond with a summary of mine. What I’d like to do in this first letter is give the most sympathetic possible summary of the central arguments of your book, as they seemed to me. I believe that if you had come on this journey with me – to see why drug prohibition really started, the victims it claims today, and how well the alternatives work – you may well have come to a similar conclusion to mine. I’d like to avoid that in this exchange, because I know you to be a fundamentally decent and intelligent person, and I think there is a possibility we might persuade each other a little. I’ve done plenty of this in the past: nobody is persuaded and nothing is gained. It seems to me that many online arguments seem to take the form of people shouting past each other, each playing to their respective cheering constituencies.
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As you know from the book, that ranges from a crack dealer in Brooklyn to a hit-man for the worst Mexican drug cartel – but I think it’s perhaps most important to extend empathy to the people who have reached the opposite possible conclusions to me on this question and support the drug war. I am increasingly interested in understanding the world by using empathy to try to comprehend, as deeply as I can, the stories of the people I meet.
As a recovering former columnist, I have been trying to get out of the habit of engaging with the world through angry polemics. Although I disagree with most of it, it struck me as the most clear and lucid argument for the prohibitionist case in decades.I was thrilled when you agreed to this exchange of letters. Late in my journey, shortly after spending some time in prisons in Arizona, I read your book ‘ The War We Never Fought’. As you know, for the past three years I’ve been travelling 30,000 miles to discover the real story of the war on drugs – why it started, why it continues, and what the alternatives really look like.
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