The Right to get High

Every year or two some public figure gets in trouble and I feel compelled to write yet another version of my drug-prohibition injustice column. Last year it was Lance Armstrong. This time it’s Ron Washington.

For those of you who don’t know, Ron Washington is the manager—for the moment—of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He tested positive for cocaine last year; he said he used it once.

I hope that’s a lie, because he’s had to abase himself enough to cover an eight-ball. That one high got him three weeks in rehab, and now he can’t take a leak without some putz holding a cup under his putz. All because he wanted to have a little fun, off the field, on his own time, with demon coke.

So here we go again. Another victim of our crazy buzz-phobia. Ron Washington isn’t going to jail for his sin, but he could have.

Railing about our inhumane, ineffective, counterproductive and just plain evil drug policies is an exercise in futility, the Super Bowl of frustration.

Sisyphus had it easy. He only had to roll a rock up a mountain. Trying to change our drug laws is like rolling a mountain up a rock. Sisyphus was a sissy.

Well, I’m done with half measures. If you are trying to do the impossible, you might as well ask for the impossible. Once and for all. No more compromises, no more nibbling around the edges, no more happy talk and BS excuses. The whole drug law edifice is rotten, rotten to the core. It must go.

The most damaging thing about drugs isn’t drugs. It’s jail. Drug prohibition is a murder machine powering failed states. The most poisonous drug is lead.

Drug laws aren’t about social control, they’re not about crime, they make crimes, they’re about sin, they’re the product of theocracy.

A free, secular, society is one where nobody has to power to dictate what you can put into your body. In a free society, you own that body. You can put whatever you want into it and you can put it into what and whoever consents.

It’s taken a couple of hundred years but we’ve finally allowed the latter. The sodomy laws were religious laws as well. Homosexuality was banned because it was considered a sin; there is no other reason, or rather excuse, to justify criminalizing that ineradicable human behavior. So now it’s legal to commit sodomy, a mere three thousand years since they invented it in Sodom.

There is no difference with drugs. Pills, powders or penises, it’s all the same. It’s your body. It’s your choice. You are free to do as you wish.

Otherwise freedom is a lie. What good is freedom if you are only free to do what the government deems “good?” You have the right to get high.

The Founding Fathers left that out of the Constitution. They left out the right to bear arms, too, but they quickly jammed it into the bill of rights. We’ve been paying for that freedom ever since. Supposedly it’s helped keep tyranny at bay. But there’s still plenty of tyranny around when it comes to what we’re allowed to do with our bodies.

It is time to rectify that mistake. I hereby propose this 28^th amendment to the Constitution.

“A well-regulated mood being necessary to the pursuit of happiness, Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to get high.”

Just that simple. No, I’m not advocating intoxication in critical places or times, so I don’t want to hear any silliness about loaded drivers, pilots, cops and surgeons. It should be illegal to get high anywhere and everywhere it is to drink. And nowhere else.

There is no difference between drinking and getting high. Everybody knows this, it’s a truism, a cliché, but society acts surprised every time anyone says it. Oh no, they say, surely you can’t mean cocaine, you can’t mean marijuana, you can’t mean heroin, for god sakes!

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t care if the drug kills you dead on the toilet. Or rather, I do care, because if there was a right to get high, intoxicants would be included under the pure food and drug laws and it would be a felony to sell unlabeled poisons.

Here’s how it would work. You go to your friendly neighborhood liquor store. You say, I’d like a gram of cocaine please. The clerk would say, domestic or Peruvian, then he’d ask for your ID and say, that’ll be a hundred dollars.

Then you’d get your drugs and drive home. If the cops found you with “open bindle” on the way you’d get the DUI you deserve. If you took it out and started snorting off a park bench you’d get busted for public intoxication. But if you did what you’re supposed to do, the same thing you do with that Remy VSOP you bought at the same time, take it home and use it alone, or offer it to your adult guests at a dinner party, there would be no legal consequences.

Addiction is no excuse for drug prohibition. We have come to see that there are countless types of addiction, drugs, sex, gambling, video games, internet porn, even work. You don’t go to prison if you can’t pull yourself away from the blackjack table, your kids don’t lose their father, and your employer doesn’t get to test your fingers for casino residue.

You can damage yourself, your relationships, your loved ones, you can even lose your life if you overdo any of those freedoms. That’s the price we pay for freedom.

But a mere taste, a little buzz, a one-time indulgence at a party can ruin your life, if you get caught. Not because of what you did to yourself, or what the drugs did to you, but because of what people did to you, when you violated their arbitrary, theocratic, tyrannical laws.

I’m done compromising on this issue. Either we are free or we’re not. We have to have the courage to speak the truth about a practice that millions upon millions of Americans indulge in, always have and always will.

Let it start with one courageous congressperson, let the 28^th amendment be offered upon the floor of the House. “Congress shall make no law abridging the people’s right to get high.”

Who knows, maybe in three thousand years it will pass.