There’s nothing Michael Gerson enjoys more than berating heartless right-wingers, and his latest column is a classic of his brand of smug paternalistic authoritarianism. His target this time is Ron Paul and drug policy. At last week’s debate, one of the Fox panelists posed a question to Ron Paul about heroin and prostitution as “exercises of liberty.” Paul demurred a little, objecting that the panelist was putting words in his mouth, but then went on to object to the insulting paternalism that holds that drug prohibition is necessary to protect people from themselves. Paul was assuming that most people would be personally responsible and wouldn’t rely on government prohibition to steer them on the right path in these areas. Gerson could accuse him of having too much confidence in people, but that wouldn’t go over nearly as well as attacking him for having contempt for the poor and destitute. Most irritating of all, Gerson presents himself as a defender of the weak and downtrodden, when these are the Americans disproportionately harmed by the drug war that Gerson is quite happily defending.

Though Paul did not frame his response in quite the same way that Gary Johnson did, their answers from the last debate were complementary. Paul addressed the question as a matter of whether or not it was appropriate to criminalize individual drug use, and Johnson advocated approaching problems with drugs other than marijuana as a public health issue rather than as a problem for law enforcement and the justice system. Gerson seems to view drug prohibition as a matter of expressing disapproval of drug use. Whether drug prohibition works as a matter of public policy does not interest him, and whether it is worth the significant costs and compromises of constitutional protections never comes up in his column.

Gerson gets some of his facts wrong in his column, but perhaps the greatest failing is the spectacle of this saccharine moralist, this so-called “compassionate” conservative defending an oppressive, and unconstitutional anti-drug regime that spawns criminality, violence, family disruption, mass imprisonment, and social dysfunction on a massive scale. As Erik Kain put it well:

This is the endlessly perpetuated myth about the drug war: that somehow imprisoning hundreds of thousands of poor people and minorities, many of whom are guilty only of putting substances in their bodies, and by waging violent war against black markets here and abroad, we are somehow helping children and the poor. What a fabulous lie. We spend billions upon billions every year in enforcement and prison cells, and still drug use continues.