Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market

By Thomas Szasz

Book Overview

.In Our Right to Drugs, Thomas Szasz shows that our present drug war started at the beginning of this century, when the American government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent medicines. By the end of World War I, however, the free market in drugs was but a dim memory, if that. Instead of dwelling on the familiar impracticality or unfairness of our drug laws, Szasz demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws which place people under lifelong medical tutelage. The result is that most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug economy to a free market in drugs.

Throughout the book, Szasz stresses the consequences of the fateful transformation of the central aim of American drug prohibitions from protecting us from being fooled by misbranded drugs to protecting us from harming ourselves by self-medication--defined as drug abuse. And he reminds us that the choice between self-control and state coercion applies to all areas of our lives, drugs being but one of the theaters in which this perennial play may be staged. A free society, Szasz emphasizes, cannot endure if its citizens reject the values of self-discipline and personal responsibility and if the state treats adults as if they were naughty children. In a no-holds-barred examination of the implementation of the War on Drugs, Szasz shows that under the guise of protecting the vulnerable members of our society--especially children, blacks, and the sick--our government has persecuted and injured them. Leading politicians persuade parents to denounce their children, and encourage children to betray their parents and friends--behavior that subverts family loyalties and destroys basic human decency. And instead of protecting blacks and Hispanics from dangerous drugs, this holy war has allowed us to persecute them, not as racists but as therapists--working selflessly to bring about a drug-free America. Last but not least, to millions of sick Americans, the War on Drugs has meant being deprived of the medicines they want-- because the drugs are illegal, unapproved here though approved abroad, or require a prescription a physician may be afraid to provide. The bizarre upshot of our drug policy is that many Americans now believe they have a right to die, which they will do anyway, while few believe they have a right to drugs, even though that does not mean they have to take any. Often jolting, always stimulating, Our Right to Drugs is likely to have the same explosive effect on our ideas about drugs and drug laws as, more than thirty years ago, The Myth of Mental Illness had on our ideas about insanity and psychiatry.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0275942163
• ISBN13: 9780275942168
• Release Date: April 1992
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

A Supremely Courageous, Truthful, and Useful Book

This book is a supremely courageous and truthful book written by one of the great luminaries of the age(s). This book "cuts to the chase" as regards fundamental constitutional issues raised by laws regulatingthe procurement, possession, sale, and use of drugs. The book's most striking charge (a correct one, at that!) is that a fundamental tyranny overtook this nation about90 years ago when "Americans" lost their property rights over their own bodies--all in the name of governmentally-controlled "truth in advertising" for drug sales. However, this "seemingly benign" governmental goal created untold danger for the very people it was meant toprotect. Szasz rightfully puts America's so-called "drug problem" in proper perspective by suggesting that theadmonition "buyer beware" should have sufficed--for drugs, as for almost everything else. In the most general terms, this book demonstrates that there are no shortcuts to a thorough-going approach to American Liberty and Freedom. Dr. Szasz very clearly, and effectively, corrects those who claim that drug laws be summarily repealed for any reasons other than their moral unacceptability in a free state. Making proper analogy to the wrongful justification of the slavery of blacks in America (owing to their mischaracterization as property), Szasz makes it clear that the infringement of property rights (both of your body, and substances you might possess) lies at the heart of America's despotic and tyrannical so-called "War on Drugs." Although he does not (if memory serves me correctly) directly cite the 9th Amendment in defense of all those who would fight this indigenous, governmentally-sponsored terrorism, he could have:"THE ENUMERATION OF CERTAIN RIGHTS, IN THE CONSTITUTION, SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED TO DENY OR DISPARAGE OTHERS RETAINED BY THE PEOPLE." "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms, remedy is set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is nature's manure." Thomas Jefferson--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Having the Freedom to Change Your Mind

When I got a copy of this book - having forgotten about Dr. Szasz's breadth of outlook and singular erudition - I thought I was going to read a nice little political tract condemning the current American Drug Prohibition. "Our Right to Drugs" is that, of course, but it is so much more - it is a call to intellectual and political arms. The War on Drugs, as Dr. Szasz so carefully shows, is nothing less than a Jihad, a Holy War waged by the forces of reaction and restriction in our society against all those who think that there should be peaceful choice, or self-ownership, or genuine free thought. And like all Holy Wars, this one permits the worst atrocities to be visited on the unbelieving because they are not just wrong - they are evil. Like many libertarians, Dr. Szasz has little use for compromise; in this case, by those who favor "decriminalization" or "medicalization" of psychoactive drugs. Such people, the author shows, will only end up replacing the current Ayatollahs (cops and ex-generals) with a new Inquisition lead by doctors and psychologists. In the world of physician-monitored drug usage, instead of being evil, anyone who wants to alter his or her own mood will be labeled as "sick" - and instead of being sent to jail, they will be forced into "treatment". In trying to think of some literary comparison to "Our Right to Drugs", I can only think of Plato's records of certain iconoclastic dialogues about ancient Athenian closemindedness. Truely, Dr. Szasz is our Socrates.

Good philosophical arguments, but politically naive

Good arguments for drug legalization (and deregulation of prescription drugs), but a little outdated as far as some of his allusions and political terminology go, and not precise enough in his use of the term "legalizers".He ignores the distinctions between "decriminalization" and "legalization", and lumps all "legalizers" into a single category, as not being "good enough". He does not seem to realize that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs on drugs, ranging from his position, to the position that all drugs should be banned everywhere.He is uncompromising, and this is politically defeating. Nonetheless, his position is admirable, and his idea of drugs as a "right" similiar to all other "rights" bandied about in political discourse today, is a good one.Nice philosophy, and one I wish more accepted it, but he's too radical for today's politicians, who are still in the dark ages of social medicine.Fear of people committing suicide easily, is Szasz's main hypothesis for why we regulate prescription and illicit drugs the way we do in America today.This book is good for convincing one that drugs should be legalized, but it is no help for accomplishing that feat politically.

Truly Excellent

This is a fine and brilliant book. Szasz manhandles any pretext for government intervention in medicine and the market for drugs. This is by far the best book on the subject.