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Drug War and Family Breakdown

Conor Friedersdorf believes that ending the drug war would do a lot to stop family breakdown. Excerpt: It is therefore striking that libertarians, who are in fact uninclined to talk about family breakdown, seek to overturn a policy that does more damage to American families than any other. Santorum laments the staggering number of incarcerated Americans without […]

Conor Friedersdorf believes that ending the drug war would do a lot to stop family breakdown. Excerpt:

It is therefore striking that libertarians, who are in fact uninclined to talk about family breakdown, seek to overturn a policy that does more damage to American families than any other.

Santorum laments the staggering number of incarcerated Americans without noting that government is a major cause of their being locked up. Neither absent fathers nor declining traditional values caused legislators to impose mandatory minimum laws on nonviolent drug crimes. But increasingly harsh penalties passed in a failed effort to win the War on Drugs has led to hundreds of thousands of men being imprisoned, left countless kids with absent fathers, and depleted the supply of marriageable men in neighborhoods where family breakdown is most dire.

I don’t get this reasoning. Let me grant that as someone who has never smoked pot, I would in principle favor lessening the penalties for marijuana possession. I suppose I’m even open to the argument for legalization, though I have my doubts. That said, it strikes me as a libertarian fantasy, this idea that ending the drug war will strengthen families. Is it really the case that all these fathers who sit in prisons on drug charges were otherwise exemplary patriarchs who could be counted on to support their children and the children’s mother, financially and emotionally, and to be what a father is supposed to be? Really? Do we have any evidence that we’ve incarcerated a large population of Ward Cleavers and Cliff Huxtables on drug offenses?

There may be good reasons for ending, or drawing down, the drug war, but the idea that it will strengthen America’s families strikes me as an extraordinarily poor one. My guess, and it’s only that, is that the drug crime that earned Daddy a trip to the slammer in the first place is, in most cases, part of a tangle of pathology that one does not associate with the characteristics of a good husband and father. One may believe the drug laws are draconian and unjust, but if one cares about fulfilling one’s responsibilities to one’s wife and one’s children, one is disinclined to put them at risk to indulge one’s desire to get high. Rich, poor, or middle-class, a man who is so interested in getting high that he risks prison is not likely to be a candidate for Father of the Year.

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