 It's a pleasure to be here, it's great to see so many people out for the first drug reform conference of the new millennium, unless you're a stickler about calendars. And I want to welcome you all to Washington, even though in general I think people should stay as far away from Washington as possible. We're glad to have you here for a purpose like this. I was talking the other day to a surgeon, an engineer and a politician and the question came up late at night about what was the world's oldest profession? And the surgeon said, well when God made Eve from Adam's rib that was a surgical operation. And the engineer said, yes but before that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing and that was an engineering, out of chaos and that was an engineering operation. And the politician said yes but who created the chaos? In fact the chaos that politicians have created is all around us. We live in a pretty great society right now. The fact is that on average we're richer, healthier, living longer, working fewer hours than ever before. And yet in the areas that are dominated by the government we see chaos rather than progress. In the information age we've got post office and schools getting worse rather than better. Most Americans are enjoying, well about half of Americans are enjoying the 17th year of a stock market boom but the other half of Americans are unable to participate in this incredible market boom because they're forced to put 12% of their income every month into a bankrupt retirement program rather than into real wealth. And I hardly have to tell you about the chaos that our drug laws have created. Over a million arrests a year, an absurd number of them for simple possession of marijuana, half a million drug users in jail, broken families, corruption in law enforcement, chaos in our inner cities and 75 million Americans who are officially lawbreakers. Now there are really only two political philosophies. I'm supposed to talk about marijuana the case for freedom so I want to talk a little about freedom. There are fundamentally only two political philosophies which we can call liberty and power and that means that either people should be free to live their lives as they see fit so long as they respect the equal rights of others or some people should be able to use force to make other people act in ways that they wouldn't choose. That's the alternative we face. Well it doesn't surprise you to know that I choose the former of those two choices. I believe that each person has the right to live her own life in the way she chooses so long as she respects the equal rights of others. Or another way that I like to put it because I think responsibility is an important aspect of this is to say every adult individual has the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about his own life. And that responsibility is important too and I want to talk about that later. Now when I say this what I'm saying is that moral decisions about the way we run our lives ought to be left up to individuals, adult individuals. Some people on both the left and the right think that if you leave moral decisions to the individual you must think they're unimportant since you're not making a collective decision about them. But that's wrong. It's backwards. It's because these decisions are important that they have to be left up to the individual conscience. If what we were talking about was choosing the right fork then there'd be no reason not to have central direction. Who cares? Choosing the right fork. But we're not talking about choosing the right fork. We're talking about choosing what to believe and whom to love and how to treat our friends and our children and what to achieve and what to create and where to live and what to do for a living and how and where and with whom. And those are decisions that are important which is why they need to be made by individuals. Now I don't have to tell you too much about some of the right wing views of whether people should be able to make these choices. But I want to point to a couple of prominent people who are not right wingers. Hillary Clinton goes around saying things like there is no such thing as other people's children. Now it would be bad enough if she wanted collectively to raise all of our children. The fact is she doesn't think just children as defined as under 18 should be raised by the collective. She thinks there are a lot of rules for those of us who are over 18. Al Gore said once he was speaking at the White House Conference on Character Building and don't they need that? And he said we should never want the government to be like the parents but rather it should be like the grandparents. It's not so hands on but still would have a nurturing role. He thinks adult individuals are like the grandchildren of the federal government. Meanwhile I noticed a couple of intellectuals recently saying almost precisely the same thing from the opposite sides of the political spectrum. The left wing writer Robert Kutner wrote a book that basically complains that Americans have an excess amount of choice. While the right wing pundit William Crystal writes conservatism's fundamental mandate is to take on the sacred cow of liberalism choice. So both Kutner and Crystal think the problem in our world is that we have too much choice that adults get to make too many choices in their lives. So we're talking about making people children. We're talking about taking choices away from them. How do they make us children? What kinds of choices do they want to take? Well I could spend the whole speech on that but let me just point out there are some people who think we should be drafted into military service or drafted into non-military but compulsory service. There are people who want to censor the internet or have speech codes regulating what you can say on college campuses and eventually probably other places. There are people who don't think we should have freedom of contract. I think that's a classic example. There are some ways in which you protect children from the possibility of making contracts that they don't understand. You don't protect adults from that sort of thing. You protect children. They want to take away from us the freedom to choose our schools, the freedom to choose our medicines, the freedom to choose the size of oranges we will buy. You may not realize it but it's illegal to sell oranges of certain sizes. The freedom to choose whom to hire and whom to fire. And most specifically for this conference they want to take away our self-ownership, our right to control our bodies, to decide what we will do about drugs and sex and tobacco and seat belts and all these other personal decisions that matter to us may matter very much to us, may have bad consequences for us, but our business and only regard us. And although it rarely actually comes to this in civilized modern society we need to remember that behind every ridiculous regulation stands the willingness to enforce it with violence if necessary. And we should think about that. You should think about it every time you watch the television news. You hear politicians talk about anything. We leave policies, social regulation, revenue enhancement, pro-family legislation. What they mean is that some people are going to force other people to do something they wouldn't choose to do if they weren't being forced. And if those other people resist, and as I say, it rarely comes to this in civilized modern society because the fact is we do obey. If they pass these laws most of us go along with them. We do what we're told. But if they resist my friend Paul spent six months in jail because he refused to fell out a postcard telling the government how to draft him. A guy named David Lucas in South Carolina bought an ocean front lot after which the legislature passed a law saying he couldn't build a house on that lot. The property he had spent a million dollars for was suddenly worthless, stroke of a pin. A woman named Sharon Bottoms across the river here in Virginia had her son taken away from her because she's a lesbian. And the court ultimately said yes it could be very bad for the child. There's a lot of prejudice against lesbians as demonstrated by the fact that we're taking your child away from you. A man named Tom Speese in Indiana I think had some government, federal bureaucrats show up at his office one day and say we'd like to come in and look at all your wage and hour records. He said am I accused of anything? No, you're not accused of anything. Do you have a search warrant? No, we don't have a search warrant. He ended up going to jail briefly, only briefly, because he said you can't come in if I'm not accused of a crime. You can't look at my records unless I'm accused of something. A woman named Alexandra White in California didn't like the idea that the government was going to put a halfway house in her neighborhood. She thought it might be dangerous. They had some public discussions. The Department of Housing and Urban Development came down and demanded that she and her colleagues submit to the government every email, every flyer, every letter, records of every phone call, every public address, a chilling effect on public discussion. 15 years ago in Utah, a man named John Singer took his kids out of the public schools. The government didn't approve of that at the time, although homeschooling laws have certainly been liberalized. Agents came out to inquire why John Singer didn't have his children in school. And John Singer ended up dead with a bullet in his back. Well, I don't know what happened. I don't know what kind of confrontation there was, but the bullet was in his back. And then we all know what happened at Waco. Some people that I probably wouldn't really want to spend a lot of time with went off and didn't ask me to spend any time with them, lived in a place of their own, and ended up getting raided by the government. People shot and eventually the place burned down. And that's what power can do, not only to the victims, but to the perpetrators. I wonder how the people who do these things live with themselves. It must be difficult for them, as well as for the people they've done them to. And so we should never forget that when people talk about policy, what we're really talking about is real people being told to do things that they don't want to do. And ultimately, we're threatening to use violence against them if they don't do what we say. So I want to stop talking about power for a minute and talk about freedom. And when we talk about marijuana and freedom, it's hard to know where to start. But here's maybe one good place, and that is, where does the federal government get the power to prohibit marijuana? Well, I'm going to answer that, or not. Liberals and libertarians, ACLU people, for instance, and libertarians associated with the libertarian movement, usually discuss the Constitution in terms of rights. They say, does the government's action infringe on some enumerated or unenumerated right of individuals? But the emphasis on rights may be misplaced and sometimes even counterproductive. There's no question. The Constitution protects a lot of our rights. It's important. But at bottom, the Constitution is a document through which the founders authorized a federal government's powers. In fact, it was two years after ratification of the Constitution before we even had a bill of rights. We cannot imagine that we had no rights from 1789 to 1791. Through the Constitution, we delegated certain powers to the federal government. We, the people, delegated certain of our powers to the federal government. We enumerated those powers in the Constitution. Look in the Constitution. You'll see a list of them. It tells what powers the federal government has. And by enumerating them, we made clear that the federal government's powers are limited, because we didn't enumerate every power. And we didn't say, you have all power. We said, here are the powers you have. And after a short period, it was decided that it would make sense to add a bill of rights to that Constitution. James Madison said, for greater caution, we're going to add a bill of rights. And so they listed a lot of rights. And then, because no one could enumerate all the rights that free people have, Congress added the Ninth Amendment. The enumeration in this Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people, not granted by the Constitution, retained by the people when they created the Constitution. And then they added the 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states or to the people all the powers not explicitly granted to the federal government. The Ninth Amendment reserves rights to the people. The 10th Amendment reserves powers to the states, in both cases, limiting the power of the federal government. So the first question we should ask, when we think about the Supreme Court and the Constitution, is not what rights the court will find in the Constitution. The first question is whether the power the government claims has ever been authorized. By first asking, not whether the individual has a right, but whether the government has a power, not only do we get the order right, but more importantly, we shift the focus to the government. The burden is on the government to show where it gets the authority, if anywhere, to nationalize health care, to prohibit the use of marijuana, to whatever the government seeks to do. Ours is a limited government, and government can act only under some enumerated power. So we should insist that this authority be shown, failing which, if it can't be shown, the presumption in favor of individual liberty is not overturned. So in that light, I come back to the question, where in the Constitution does the federal government find the power to ban or regulate drugs? In 1920, at least with alcohol, people understood this. When they wanted to ban alcohol, they passed a constitutional amendment. We can make all sorts of criticisms about the prohibitionists of that era, but at least they had the honesty to say, we're gonna need a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol all over this country. They went through the actual amendment process, but we have never passed a constitutional amendment, giving the federal government any power to ban marijuana or cocaine or any other drug. The federal government's contemporary prohibition policy is an illegal and unconstitutional usurpation of a power never granted to it. One of the key insights of the founders was the need to divide power, and they did this in several ways. They divided power between two houses of Congress, between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and perhaps most importantly, they divided power between the state and federal governments. In the 20th century, power has tended to flow to the central government in defiance of the Constitution. Now, in some places, there is a resurgence of federalism, of people demanding that power be returned to the states or the local communities so that government can be closer to the people it will affect. The resurgence of federalism turned up in 1995 in the Supreme Court's Lopez decision in which Chief Justice Rehnquist began his majority decision. We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a federal government of enumerated powers, and that was very important. It had been a long time since the Supreme Court had said, there is something that exceeds the powers of the federal government. Well, right now, the drug reform movement is testing the strength of federalism. Several states, as you know, have passed medical marijuana laws, and the federal government has not responded graciously to this challenge to its dominance. Those initiatives began in 1996. The Clinton administration immediately announced without any intervening authorization from Congress, leave aside the Constitution. Without even asking Congress what it thought this should be done, the Clinton administration announced that any physician recommending or prescribing medicinal marijuana under state law could be prosecuted. In February 1997, the Office of National Drug Control Policy announced that federal policy would be won. Physicians who recommend and prescribe medicinal marijuana to patients in conformity with state law and patients who use such marijuana would be prosecuted. Physicians who recommend and prescribe medicinal marijuana in conformity with state law will be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. And physicians who recommend and prescribe medicinal marijuana to patients in conformity with state law would have their scheduled drug DEA registrations revoked. Clearly, this is a blatant effort by the federal government to impose a national policy on the people in the states in question, people who have already elected a contrary policy. Federal officials don't agree with the policy the people selected, and they mean to override it, no matter what the voters in the several states say, which is nothing new for the Clinton administration. They had tried to go into court or in other ways override other initiatives, which a lot of people here may not agree with, the California initiatives dealing with racial preferences and state benefits for immigration, for instance. But in all these cases, the Clinton administration said, we reserve to the federal government the power to decide. So let's return to first principles. Ours is a federal republic. The federal government has only the powers granted to it in the Constitution. And the United States has a tradition of individual liberty, vigorous civil society, and limited government. That means that just because a problem is identified does not mean that the government ought to undertake to solve it. And just because a problem occurs in more than one state does not mean that it is a proper subject for federal policy. Perhaps no area more clearly demonstrates the bad consequences of not following such rules than drug prohibition. The long federal experiment in prohibition of marijuana and other drugs has given us unprecedented crime and corruption combined with a manifest failure to stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability to children. What are the consequences of our unlibertarian marijuana laws? Well, the drug laws break up families. That's supposed to be an important concern of ours these days. Too many parents have been separated from their children because they were convicted of marijuana possession, small-scale sale of drugs, or some other non-violent offense. I talked earlier about some people who are victims of unjust power. Talk about Will Foster. He used marijuana to control the pain and swelling associated with his rheumatoid arthritis. He was arrested, convicted of marijuana cultivation, and sentenced to 93 years in prison, later very generously reduced to 20 years in prison. He's got three children. Are those children better off with a father who uses marijuana medicinally, or a father they're not gonna see for 20 years because he's in prison? And going to jail for drug offenses isn't just for men anymore. In 1996, almost 200,000 women were arrested for violating drug laws. Now, most of them didn't go to jail, of course, but in 96, there were 150,000 women behind bars and more than two-thirds of them have children. One of them is Brenda Pearson. She was a heroin addict who had managed to maintain a job at a securities firm in New York. She supplied heroin to an addict friend who had moved to Michigan and couldn't find heroin there. A Michigan prosecutor had Brenda Pearson extradited, prosecuted, and sentenced to 50 to 200 years for supplying a drug to a friend. And we can only hope that her two children will remember her when she gets out. And speaking of children, I hope some of you saw this op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday about over-medicating America's children. Let's say a pediatrician in Walnut Creek, California. We've got this massive program to keep marijuana away from children. Meanwhile, according to this guy, four million children younger than 18 are being prescribed drugs. And I'm gonna read the ones he mentions in here. Children, and when I say under 18, this is down to children as young as two years old being given behavioral drugs such as Ritalin, Lithium, Zoloft, Risperdoll, Dexadrine, Adderall, Prozac, Paxil, Clonodyne, Depecote, Neurontin, and Luvox. And my apologies for mispronunciations of some of those. What are they thinking? We try to keep a pretty benign drug away from children, and then we prescribe that's 12 different kinds of mind-altering drugs to children. Two-year-olds who have depression, behavioral problems, seven-year-old boys who are hyperactive. You know, there may be something that actually is hyperactivity, but as I recall, most seven-year-old boys are pretty active. I think there's a real corruption going on in the way we think about drugs. The consequences, drug prohibition also leads to civil liberties abuses. Because this war is unwinnable, the effort to win it has led to wiretapping and trappling, property seizures, and other abuses of Americans' traditional liberties. The saddest cases result in the deaths of innocent people, people like Donald Scott, who was accused of having marijuana, whose home was raided at dawn, who was shot and killed when he rushed into the living room carrying a gun, as any American would if he heard people bursting into his home at 6 a.m., or people like the Reverend Ace Line Williams, a 75-year-old minister who died of a heart attack when police burst into his Boston apartment looking for drugs. They had the wrong apartment. Or people like Ezekiel Hernandez, who was outtending his goats near the Rio Grande just six days after his 18th birthday when he was shot by a Marine patrol looking for drug smugglers. As we deliberate the costs and benefits of drug policy, we should keep those people in mind. And speaking of consequences, how about this one? Drugs make you crazy. Now, when I say I don't mean you exactly, I mean that drugs make politicians crazy. They try to outwackle each other in the ways that they would escalate this unwinnable war. They trip all over themselves trying to explain or conceal their own drug use. They're afraid to walk down the street two days before the New Hampshire primary. And they stridently insist that it is unacceptable. It is treason to question the policy of drug prohibition. They almost act as if they don't think our current policies could stand up to debate. Equality under the law is one of the things that has been severely affected by the drug laws we have today. The racial disparities in the way the drug laws are enforced ought to worry every American. According to at least one survey, blacks and Hispanics make up about 20% of marijuana smokers in the United States, but they made up 58% of the marijuana offenders sentenced in federal court last year. I'm sure there are a variety of explanations for that, but it's got to be something that ought to concern anybody. As I said earlier, freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. Normal has put forth the principles of responsible cannabis use, and I applaud that effort. But I would take individual responsibility further. I don't think we can demand the freedom to make our own choices about drug use and then demand that the taxpayers help us out if we run into trouble, or give us drug treatment on demand. Subsidized freedom is a contradiction in terms, like corporations demanding to be free of regulation, but then going to Washington to get subsidies and protected markets. Now the fact is that people don't need to be treated for marijuana addiction. But when we talk about other drugs, we should remember that to have any credibility we have to talk about individual freedom and individual responsibility. Let me conclude with the basics. People have rights that governments may not violate. Thomas Jefferson described them as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I would say people should have the right to do anything they want to, so long as they respect the equal rights of others. And what right could be more basic, more inherent in human nature than the right to decide what to put in your own body? Whether we're talking about alcohol, tobacco, herbal cures, saturated fat, or marijuana, this is a decision that should be made by the individual, not by the government. If government can tell us what we can put into our own bodies, what is it that it can't tell us? What limits on government are there in that case? History teaches us that people will have no more freedom than they demand. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. If we want to end the nightmare of the drug war, if we wanna stop imprisoning hundreds of thousands of peaceful people, if we want to see our government once more constrained by the Constitution, if we wanna be free to make our own choices, then we will have to stand up and demand our rights. In the first place, the 10 million people who use marijuana, especially the comfortable, well-educated middle class or rich marijuana users, will have to come out of the closet and declare, I am a marijuana smoker, but I am not a criminal. And I applaud Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico for having said exactly that, or he said I am a former marijuana smoker, and when I was a marijuana smoker, I was not a criminal. And other Americans who don't smoke marijuana, but do love freedom, will have to join those people in demanding an end to prohibition. And I suggest that we start, this year, it's an election year, by making sure that every candidate for office this year, at every town meeting and every public appearance, answers one simple question, where in the Constitution do you find the power to tell adult Americans what they can smoke in their own bodies? Thank you very much.