A Shameful Surrender

 Do you remember the War on Drugs?

 

It was Richard Nixon who thought up the idea back in 1971 and while Nixon was, contrary to the impression you might have received from the typical Hollywood portrayal of the man, one of the better American presidents, this was not one of his better ideas.   The idea was that the American federal government would commit a tremendous amount of resources and effort into stomping out the international drug trade.  They would treat the drug cartels as if they were a hostile country that had attacked the United States.   Other Western countries were expected to support the “leader of the free world” in this effort and, to varying degrees, they did.  Fifty years have gone by and the drug trade is still alive and kicking, even despite the constraints on international travel over the last year and a half.    The War on Drugs, in other words has been a total failure.

 

This ought not to surprise us.   When governments declare “war” on anything other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, terrorism, hate, or the bat flu virus, the “enemy” is never defeated and the war goes on forever.   This is because such “wars” are largely excuses by governments to expand their powers, escape constitutional limitations that irk them, and spend a lot of money and, therefore, governments have no motivation to win.   

 

The War on Drugs was a particularly inexcusable failure in that it came only a few decades after the spectacular failure of Prohibition and repeated all of its mistakes.   In both cases, by forbidding a particular trade, government merely made it more profitable because those willing to take the risk of selling were able to charge much more, and more dangerous for the general public, because those undertaking such a venture were heavily armed, organized crime syndicates for whom competition for the illegal trade and its high profit margins resembled war in the literal sense of the word.

 

There was one significant difference between the War on Drugs and Prohibition, however, one that ensured that the former, even though the commodities involved were less popular, would be an even greater failure. 

 

Prohibition was the culmination of a movement that had been building for about a century which had a clear, if misguided, vision.   The Temperance movement was one of the by-products of the nineteenth century North American revivalism that had grown out of the eighteenth century Methodist movement.   Ironically, considering that its name refers to the Christian virtue that means “moderation” or “self-control”, it took the moral stance that all consumption of alcoholic beverages is sinful, a further irony considering that this is the moral position that is traditional to Islam, not the one that is traditional to both Christianity and Judaism, which latter is much more consistent with the literal meaning of the name of the movement.   This is, perhaps, only what is to be expected from a movement led primarily by individuals who gloried in their lack of theological education. The Temperance movement had the support not only of religious zealots who took this stance, but of manufacturers who thought, not without reason although there are equally strong counterarguments, that it would make for a more industrious workforce, and of the feminist movement, then in its first wave, the women’s suffragettes.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the shorter-lived experiment in Prohibition was directly tied to giving women the vote, as Stephen Leacock amusingly discussed in essays on both of those historical blunders.   However, whatever might be said against Prohibition and the movement behind it, they were unambiguous and clear.   They were against the consumption of alcoholic beverages and so, when they got their way, a law was passed – a constitutional amendment in the case of the United States – forbidding all alcoholic beverages and only alcoholic beverages.

 

The War on Drugs was pretty much the opposite of this.   It did not begin with a grassroots movement that built up momentum over a century – it started out by executive proclamation from the highest office in the United States of America.    It was not a clear and unambiguous moral project.   Confusion and complications arise the moment one attempts to identify the enemy in this “war”.

 

What is a drug?

 

Is there a difference between the kind of drugs sold by a drugstore (pharmacy) and those sold by a drug dealer?

 

The best answer to the first question is to say that a drug is any substance that is non-essential (thus excluding food, water, and air) that is deliberately consumed in one way or another for its effect on bodily and/or mental functions.

 

Using that answer as our account of the meaning of the word drug, the answer to the second question must be no.   There can be distinctions made between the two categories of drugs but there is no essential differences.    One distinction is between medicinal and recreational use.   Those who use drugs medicinally do so for a therapeutic purpose such as the alleviation of pain, the treatment of an injury, or the curing of a disease.    Those who use drugs recreationally do so for the experience they produce, usually a kind of euphoria called a “high”.   This distinction correlates with that between pharmaceutical drugs and illegal narcotics but the correlation is not exact  nor is the distinction absolute.   Many people use prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical medicine for recreational purposes and narcotics often have medicinal functions (opioids and cocaine are pain killers, for example).   Ultimately, the distinction between pharmaceutical drugs and narcotics is that the former are legal, even if their use is sometimes limited by government (some can only be purchased with a physician’s prescription), and the latter are not.

 

The obviously artificial nature of this distinction is a large part of the case that many make for the legalization of narcotics.      This is not the only case that can be made from this, however.   Someone who thinks that the goal of the War on Drugs – the elimination of the drug trade, the bondage of addiction, and the ruin of lives that goes along with these – to be a good one, even if he may think the “War” itself to be ill-advised, doomed to failure, the cause of more evils than it prevents, and an excuse for government aggrandizement – could argue that efforts to keep people, especially children, from falling prey to the lure of drugs, are contradicted by the presence of the legal pharmaceutical industry, that advertises its products on billboards, radio, television, and the internet, which advertising conveys, in essence, the same message as illegal drug pushers, i.e., use our product and your suffering will cease and you will find happiness.

 

Related to the above point about the contradictory mixed-messages being sent by the legal pharmaceutical industry and those fighting the War on (illegal) Drugs, is the fact that the fifty years since Nixon declared the latter have also seen a massive rise in the number of young children being prescribed dangerous mind-altering stimulants such as methylphenidate and amphetamine.   Oddly, these have been prescribed for diagnoses of hyperactivity, which is characterized by the inability to stay still and focus due to excess energy, something one would think ought to be the last thing in the world to be treated by stimulants (amphetamine is the drug that is sold on the street as “speed”).   Some have posited a link between the rise in medicating children in this way and the new phenomenon of school shootings which popped up in the same period, just as others have noted a similar correlation between mind-altering medication and mass shootings in general.   Whatever the truth may be with regards to such allegations – Politifact maintains that the first is false, which is a strong if not infallible indicator that it is in fact mostly true - it can certainly be said that this new propensity for prescribing stimulants to children, which looks suspiciously like the result of the takeover of public education by radical feminists who bullied the medical profession into treating the condition of being a normal young boy as pathological, sends a message that contradicts that of those waging the War on Drugs.

 

Given the massive contradictions we have just seen between the legal and tolerated advertisement campaigns of the huge pharmaceutical industry and the recent fad of prescribing stimulants to children on the one hand and the War on the Drugs on the other, it can hardly be surprising that the latter turned out to be something less than a success.  

 

When the War on Drugs began, the main drugs that were regarded as problematic were substances that occur naturally in the coca plant and certain kinds of hemp and poppies.   Experimental synthetic drugs were gaining popularity however – the 1960s saw the LSD craze – and this indication that the use and abuse of recreational drugs was becoming a bigger problem as were turning to newer, more dangerous substances, was likely what inspired the Nixon administration to launch the war to begin with.     Surely, however, the radical shift in the cultural climate towards the major drugs of fifty years ago has to be chalked up as a major loss in that war.

 

Today, the use of marijuana, the most widely used of the drugs obtainable from hemp, is depicted as normal, non-problematic, and even commendatory on television and the movies.      The drug itself is now generally depicted in popular culture as being harmless and benign.   The most dangerous of its known harmful effects are seldom if ever discussed.   Increasingly, popular culture has been trying to normalize cocaine use as well.

 

This shift in cultural attitude wrought by the entertainment media has begun to manifest itself politically.   Here in Canada, the Liberal government kept Captain Airhead’s election promise of 2015 and legalized marijuana.   There have been some indications, that they are considering doing the same for harder drugs such as cocaine.   There are growing movements for similar legalization south of the border. 

 

Meanwhile, the increase in the use of more dangerous synthetic drugs has had all sorts of ill social effects.   The synthetic opioid fentanyl, for example, while technically a legal painkiller if prescribed, has led, through its recreational misuse, to an alarming increase in deaths by opioid overdose.   This is due to such factors as the small amount needed to produce a lethal overdose and its being mixed with other drugs, especially heroin.   The opioid crisis in Canada began early in 2016.   This was shortly after the premiership of Captain Airhead began. Draw your own conclusions about that.  

 

Another disturbing trend has to do with methamphetamine.   Methamphetamine, like its cousin amphetamine mentioned above, is a synthetic substance derived from the naturally occurring Chinese medicine ephedrine.  Ephedrine used to be marketed as a weight-loss supplement and can still be found, in small doses, in some decongestants although a synthetic form is more commonly used.  Fifty years ago, the biggest problem with methamphetamine was its abuse in pill form, especially by long distance truck drivers who used it for its fatigue combating properties.   In recent decades, however, the crystalized version of the drug, which is used in much the same way as crack cocaine, has been increasingly replacing the latter as the hard drug of choice, especially among younger recreational drug users.    There are a number of explanations for this, among them that crystal meth produces a longer lasting high than crack – hours as opposed to minutes, and that it can be homemade from the synthetic ephedrine in over-the-counter decongestants.    The reason this switch is of concern to the general public is because of the effects crystal meth produces in its users.   It has the tendency to induce paranoia.  Consequently, as younger drug users have turned to crystal meth as their drug of preference, we have seen the rise of the brand new phenomenon of people walking down the street, minding their own business, and being verbally and physically assaulted, in some cases murdered, by complete strangers for no reason outside of the assailant’s drug-addled mind.    Isn’t progress grand?

 

When we consider how much worse the drug situation is today than at the beginning of the War on Drugs – and much more could be said about it than the highlights given above – the behaviour of our governments over the last year or so appears that much more irresponsible.    

 

For one thing, the insane, totalitarian, lockdowns they imposed, starting early last year, in order to slow the spread of the bat flu virus, have caused substance abuse, addiction and overdoses to skyrocket.    This was a completely predictable consequence of the loneliness and cabin fever generated by this prolonged, artificial, social isolation as well as the loss of jobs, businesses and savings.   The authorities acknowledge that overdoses and other drug-related problems have gotten much worse over the last year and a half, but they place the blame on the virus rather than on the wrongness of their actions in response to the virus.

 

Then there is the way in which our governments have been sending the biggest contradictory message to that of the War on Drugs to date this year.   Much effort was devoted in the War on Drugs in trying to keep children from getting involved with drugs in the first place by persuading them to resist pressure from their peers, i.e., other children trying to talk them into taking drugs (the message applied to other situations in which children pressure other children into doing something wrong as well, of course).    This year, however, we have seen a top down effort, led by governments, but also involving media companies – news, entertainment and social – aimed at pressuring all of us into taking the latest products of the pharmaceutical industry, and then pressuring everyone else (our peers) into doing so as well.    How, exactly, do we expect to have any credibility in the future, when we tell kids to resist the pressure to try marijuana, heroin, crack, ecstasy, crystal meth or the like, when we are now telling them that they, and everybody else, needs to shut up with their objections and reasonable questions and take an experimental new form of vaccine, despite the ill-effects, both those that are already known and the long-term ones that we might not know about yet, that provides an inferior immunity to that which contracting the virus provides, against a virus which the vast majority of people survive and which poses only the most minimal of risks to the young and healthy?   

 

Up until now, Western governments have been fighting Nixon’s War on Drugs with LBJ’s tactics.    Had they truly been committed to defeating this industry they would have gone after the pharmaceutical industry and all the legal dope pushers in the medical profession.    Now it would appear that they have raised the white flag and surrendered altogether.

Light 'em up, Boys!

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Twenty-seven years ago the World Health Organization declared May 31st to be “World No Tobacco Day”. What better way to celebrate the occasion, and to give the WHO and its parent organization the United Nations that ancient phallic symbol of disrespect, the digitus impudicus, that they so richly deserve than by writing a pro-smoking essay?

Just to be clear, it is not all smoking that I will be defending, merely that of the leaves of that excellent, indigenous-to-the-Americas, plant Nicotiana. This plant, long grown by decent, salt-of-the-earth farmers of the kind depicted in the novels of Wendell Berry and which has long provided comfort and temporary respite from the stress and pressure of the day to professional and working classes alike, has been the target of a decades long vilification campaign on the part of numerous organizations of bossy busy-bodies. Just under a century ago another plant, this one indigenous to Asia but which has been put to various uses in Western countries for millennia, was banned outright or at least heavily regulated in most countries of the world. The scientific name of this plant is Cannabis, its more common name is hemp, and its flowers and leaves too are often smoked as the drug marijuana. I will not be defending the smoking of this substance, just that of tobacco and I will explain my reasons for supporting the one and not the other as this essay unfolds.

It is not primarily a question of legality. Tobacco is technically legal, at least for those of the age of majority, although it is taxed to the hilt, its advertisement is forbidden, the companies that sell it are required to put grotesque warnings on their labels, shops that sell it are required to keep it hidden, and its use is prohibited in an increasing number of places and situations. The use of cannabis as a drug is illegal, except when prescribed by a doctor for medicinal purposes. There is currently a campaign to legalize its recreational use, a campaign that has received the prominent support of Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. Although Trudeau’s support is a very good reason indeed to question the soundness of legalizing marijuana, it seems evident to me that the prohibitionist approach to marijuana and other mind-altering substances has been the wrong tactic, one that has accomplished more harm than good. It needs to be said, however, that despite the fact that the prohibition of marijuana has driven the profit margins of its production and sale through the roof, enriching drug lords, and creating needless amounts of violence as criminal organizations compete for the monopoly of the dangerous but profitable black market, the outright prohibition of the drug is far more honest than the laws regarding tobacco, which are designed to demonize tobacco producers and harass and persecute tobacco smokers while still allowing the government to make money off of the trade.

When it comes to matters such as this culture is far more important than law. Decades ago, when the anti-tobacco zealots were just getting organized , when the most prominent tobacco prohibitionist was a vegetarian dictator with a postage stamp moustache who governed Germany with an iron fist while the Tory statesman who led the free world in its fight against this dictator did so with a huge cigar firmly clamped between his teeth, cultural attitudes towards tobacco smoking ranged from tolerant to supportive and tobacco was depicted positively in much literature and art. “A woman is only a woman”, Rudyard Kipling quipped in a poem, “but a good cigar is a smoke”. G. K. Chesterton wrote “Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar.” In the context in which he wrote this he told about offering cigars to two American journalists, one of whom responded as if he “were the Old Man of the Mountain offering him hashish that would turn him into an assassin”. Hashish is an alternative form of the drug produced from the hemp plant, thus Chesterton’s remarks demonstrate more than one way in which cultural attitudes have changed. C. S. Lewis, himself a chain smoker, mocked anti-smoking fanatics in his novels while J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbits famously grew and smoked “pipe-weed” described by Tolkien as “a variety probably of Nicotiana.” Since that time, the technological media of film and television have replaced the written word as the primary vehicle of popular culture and in these media today, tobacco smoking is routinely demonized, while pot smoking is routinely glorified. That the cultural attitudes represented by Lewis and Tolkien are slipping away from us while those of the protest movements of the sixties and seventies of the last century have now become mainstream is in itself a reason to be dismayed over the turn our culture has taken.

Long before the anti-tobacco movement became the power that it is today, certain preachers would condemn smoking from the pulpit. These were virtually all Protestants of a kind that placed great emphasis upon basing its theology and ethics directly upon the Bible without putting much stock in how Christians, in the Great Tradition from the Church Fathers down to the Medieval Scholastics, interpreted the Scriptures. This, amusingly, led to dogmatic ethical positions that are not only not taught by the Bible but sometimes contradict its teachings. It was this kind of Protestant, for example, that preached against the consumption of and even started a movement to ban the sale of a form of beverage that was made by Jesus Christ Himself in His first miracle (John 2) and later commanded by Christ to be consumed in the sacrament He ordained and instituted at the Last Supper before His Crucifixion. There is, of course, no verse in the Bible, Old or New Testament, with or without the Deutero-Canonical writings, that mentions, let alone condemns, the smoking of tobacco. Preachers who condemned it from the pulpit, inevitably had to fall back on St. Paul’s comments in the third and sixth chapters of his epistle to the Corinthian Church against defiling the Temple of God. Of course the context of these remarks make it clear that the defilement St. Paul was talking about is fornication, and if one wishes to argue that the concept can be extended to include defilement by other means, it is equally valid to extrapolate what Jesus says in Matthew 15:11 “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man: but that which commeth out of the mouth, this defileth a man” to show that smoking is not included. Which is undoubtedly why the greatest Calvinist Baptist preacher of all time, C. H. Spurgeon, wrote to the Daily Telegraph saying: “I demur altogether and most positively to the statement that to smoke tobacco is in itself a sin…There is growing up in society a Pharisaic system which adds to the commands of God the precepts of men; to that system I will not yield for an hour”

Of course the contemporary anti-smoker does not base his ideas upon the Bible, a collection of writings that he usually wants to ban as much as he wants to ban tobacco, but rather upon the adverse effects of tobacco smoke upon people’s health. Now it is true that tobacco smoking has been shown to increase your risk of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases as well as your risk of strokes and heart attacks. There are all sorts of other facts, however, that one needs to take into consideration to have the proper perspective on this. Virtually everything has a risk factor of some sort or another. Exposure to sunlight increases your risk of cancer, but as is also needed for your body to form Vitamin D3, it would be foolish to live like Count Dracula in an attempt to avoid the risk of getting cancer from the sun. The extent of the risk created by smoking depends upon both the amount you smoke and the manner in which you smoke. The more you smoke, the greater the risk, and cigarettes pose a far greater risk than cigars and pipes. Cigarettes are made from processed tobacco with plenty of additives whereas hand rolled cigars and pipe tobacco are generally pure tobacco leaf, furthermore cigarettes are intended to be inhaled and the latter products are not. The supposed threat of “second-hand smoke” is somewhere between a gross exaggeration and an outright lie. (1) Furthermore, tobacco smoking, like exposure to sunlight, has its health benefits as well. It has been shown to decrease the risk of Parkinson’s and Altzheimer’s diseases (2) and it seems to be an effectual form of self-medication for schizophrenics (3). I emphasize these benefits because of the contrast with cannabis smoke which is notoriously bad for your mental health, increasing your likelihood of developing schizophrenia or paranoia, but there are other health benefits to tobacco. It is, for example, an anti-inflammatory which decreases your risk of certain types of osteoarthritis (4) as well as ulcerative colitis and other digestive disorders (5).

These health benefits are not, of course, the reason people smoke tobacco. People smoke tobacco because it calms them down when they are stressed out and anxious and because it makes them alert when they need to concentrate. Other recreational drugs are used for a feeling of psychological pleasure or euphoria which, however enjoyable it may be to the user, usually impairs his reason, judgement, and general ability to function mentally. The alternative smokes produced from the hemp plant are a good example of this. Tobacco, by contrast, does not impair your mental functions but rather, if anything, enhances them, while balancing out your mental and emotional state. It is, of course, addictive, but this, like its other negative effects, varies according to how you take it. Cigarettes are more addictive than cigars and pipes.

Perhaps you feel that such benefits do not outweigh the risks of smoking tobacco, even moderately and in the far less dangerous forms or pipes or cigars. That is a valid decision, but one that you should make for yourself and not one that the control freaks at the WHO should be making for you.

Therefore, I say feel free to thumb your nose at the World Health Organization and all the other health nazis by saying yes to tobacco this “World No Tobacco Day”.

(1) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100251229/passive-smoking-another-of-the-nanny-states-big-lies/

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10942038

(3) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763405000874

(4) http://rheumatology.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/5/366.abstract; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15908236

(5) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2036.2000.00847.x/abstract

The Difference Between Being a Do-Gooder and Doing Good

One of the best known of Jesus’ parables is recounted by St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, verses twenty-five through thirty-seven. The passage begins with a lawyer asking Jesus the question “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Even though St. Luke tells us that the lawyer was not asking this in good faith but in an attempt, rather, to trip Jesus up, the Lord does not respond as you or I would probably be tempted to do to one of the barristers, solicitors, and attorneys in general of our own day by saying “Fat chance that someone in your line of work will ever make it”. No, Jesus passed on this opportunity to tell an excellent lawyer joke (1) and instead turned the question around and asked the lawyer what the Torah had to say about it. The lawyer answers this by quoting the two verses that Jesus Himself would quote when asked which is the greatest commandment, and Jesus commended this answer, but the lawyer then came back with a second question “Who is my neighbour?” It is then that Jesus relates the parable in which a man is robbed, stripped, and left to die on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and is left there by a priest and a Levite who happen to pass by but is rescued by a passing Samaritan who treats his wounds and takes him to an inn to take care of him. This parable has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

I would like to tell a different parable that begins in the same way Jesus’ did, but takes a rather different turn towards the end, hoping, that in doing so, I am not committing a terrible act of blasphemy. Here it goes.

A man is on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem when he is beset by thieves, robbers, and cutthroats, relieved of his possessions, and left bloody, wounded, and mangled on the side of the road. Shortly thereafter a priest comes along, followed a little later by a Levite, and both avert their eyes and walk on the other side of the road, rather than trying to help the poor soul. Then the Samaritan comes along. He is outraged at the plight of his fellow man and the callousness shown by the priest and Levite. In Jerusalem, Jericho, and all the surrounding communities he circulates a petition demanding that highways be made safer for travelers and that legislation be passed forcing people to stop and help the victims of highway robberies or face a heavy fine or possibly a lashing and prison time. He calls for the establishment of a public fund to take care of those victimized by highway crime and for taxes to be imposed on the priests and Levites to pay for this fund. He makes a nuisance of himself lobbying for these reforms before the Sanhedrin and in the courts of Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate and King Herod. Eventually, word of his crusade reaches Rome, and a committee of Senators invites him to come and present his case for highway security and social programs for robbery victims before Caesar himself. Meanwhile, the man who was robbed remains on the side of the road and dies.

This, of course, is the Parable of the Do-Gooder Samaritan.

It is one of the curiosities of the English language that the expression “do-gooder” does not refer to people who actually “do good”. Indeed, the expression is one of ironic contempt that suggests that there is a disconnect between the good the person to which it is applied thinks he is doing and the actual outcome of his actions. Sometimes it is just a matter of ineffectiveness in which the do-gooder has good intentions and a noble goal but fails to actually accomplish anything. Often, however, the do-gooder might accomplish harm either instead of the good he intends or which is greater than and outweighs the smaller good he actually achieves. A do-gooder typically displays naivety of one kind or another, ranging from a simple lack of the experience and know-how necessary to accomplish his lofty goals to a kind of tunnel vision in which he is so focused upon achieving one particular ideal that he is blinded to the negative consequences of his attempts to achieve it.

We usually associate the idea of a do-gooder with that of a social and moral crusader. A crusader of this type is someone who attempts to bring about a particular end either by persuading the government to pass legislation or by organizing private citizens to take action. The interesting thing about this methodology is that it distributes the cost of accomplishing a desired goal among many people, either the organized private citizens or the taxpayers as a whole, and can sometimes lead to the blame being distributed if something goes wrong as well. Meanwhile, the crusader or do-gooder gets the full credit if something good is actually accomplished. This may or may not justify an attitude of cynicism towards the motives of the reformer but it is worth taking note of and contrasting with the example of the Good Samaritan of Jesus’ parable, who when leaving the robbed man with the innkeeper told the latter to add the cost of any additional assistance that might be required to his bill.

Another contrast between do-gooders and people like the Good Samaritan who actually do good is that the latter are concerned with personally doing the right thing whereas the former are obsessed with improving everybody else. This leaves other people with the impression that the do-gooder is a self-satisfied, self-righteous, better-than-thou type of person, an impression that is in no way lessened when he enlists the help of the government in accomplishing his goals. All sorts of ridiculous legislation that is far more of an obnoxious nuisance to most people than it is a benefit can be attributed to this cause in the last century alone. Some of this legislation, like Prohibition, the biggest single effect of which was to make the mob rich and powerful, was long ago discredited and rescinded. Other such legislation, no-less discredited, for some reason remains on the books. Canadian and American federal drug laws are a prime example. Other laws that were initiated by do-gooders and which harass people more than they help them are laws which prohibit people from driving when their blood alcohol level is above an arbitrary percentage point regardless of whether they are capable of driving safely in that condition or not, laws which jack up the price of tobacco, prohibit smoking sections in restaurants and drive smokers out into the cold whenever they want a puff or two, laws that prevent an employer from offering a man a high enough wage to support his wife and children lest a single woman be discriminated against, and laws that ensure that that an employer, if he wishes to remain free of harassing lawsuits, will hire a certain percentage of ethnic and racial minorities regardless of their qualifications. Any legislation associated with the concept of human rights can be regarded as falling within the category we are discussing.

Ultimately though, the worst thing about being a do-gooder is that it is a cop out of the ethical or moral life. It is far easier, to sign up for some “save the world” cause or the other – take your pick, they are a dime a dozen – and try to fix other people, than it is to try and do the right thing yourself, to cultivate the virtues and good character, and to seek after the good, the true, and the beautiful. The latter is the hard work of a lifetime and the rewards, while enduring, take longer to appear whereas the former is easy and the rewards are instantly gratifying.

(1) Have you heard the one about the dispute between God and the devil over the fence between Heaven and Hell? The fence was run down and it was the devil's turn to have it fixed. He, being the blighter he is, did nothing about it. God pointed out his negligence and he replied "So sue me". When God said that He might do just that the devil came back with "Oh yeah. Where are you going to find a lawyer?".

Just Say No to the Nordic Model

In 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its ruling in R. v. Morgentaler, our laws against abortion were already quite light, having been liberalized by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, our worst Prime Minister ever and the father of the dingbat who is currently leader of the Liberal Party, within months of his taking over the reins of power from Lester Pearson. This did not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling against Her Majesty the Queen and in favour of a Polish born quack who had survived the Holocaust of Dachau to pursue a career of killing the unborn here in Canada. All existing laws against abortion were struck down and no government since has succeeded in introducing new ones. Nor has any government since Mulroney’s seriously tried. As a result, there continue to be no legal restrictions on the clinical killing of foeti prior to and up until the moment of birth and, thanks to Tommy Douglas’ single-payer health system, every Canadian with enough moral sanity to recognize that abortion is murder, has to contribute to it through his taxes.

Last December, the Supreme Court had another such Solomonic moment. Just before Christmas they decided to hand out tricks as well as treats and made it their ruling in Canada v. Bedford that the laws against running brothels, soliciting on the streets, and living off of prostitution were unconstitutional. Parliament was given one year to come up with better laws in the duration of which the old ones will remain in effect. If Parliament fails to do so, as of December there will be no legal restrictions on prostitution in Canada.

While the ruling in Morgentaler was stupid, unconscionable, and downright evil, the ruling in Bedford does make a certain amount of sense. Prostitution itself was not illegal in Canada. Therefore, all that these laws that were ruled unconstitutional actually did was to harass people engaged in what is technically a legal trade. This is hardly right and fair and those who fought for the elimination of such laws had a point when they argued that this kind of legislation made the trade more dangerous for those involved.

Why not make prostitution itself illegal then?

Well, the problem with that solution is that prostitution is just the sale of sexual intercourse. Like most Western countries, Canada has liberalized its laws so that sexual immorality itself, fornication, adultery, etc. is neither prohibited nor punished by law. There are good arguments that can be made for and against this liberalization. The case against it is that it weakens marriage, the family, and the social order in general. The case in favour of it is that to be enforceable, laws against sexual immorality would require that we empower the police to spy on people in the privacy of the bedroom. These arguments are both quite strong, indeed, they are ironclad. Whichever argument you or I might think to be the best, the political reality is that the only change we are likely to see any time in the near future is in the direction of further liberalization. This is my point – in the absence of laws against sexual immorality, laws prohibiting prostitution do not make sense. Such laws would in effect be saying to people “screw around all you want, just don’t let any money change hands while you are doing it.” Surely the stupidity in that is plain to be seen.

Given my druthers, I would have the government take the opportunity the Supreme Court has handed it, to decentralize and localize legislation restricting prostitution. Of all conceivable laws restricting the sale of sex, the kind that seem the most sensible and necessary to me are those that are passed locally, are locally enforced and which are designed to keep it out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and playgrounds. Have Parliament hand over the regulating and restricting of prostitution entirely to city, town, and municipal governments that make laws only for themselves and the neighborhoods they live in. Nothing further is necessary.

Now, not everybody would agree with this, naturally, and it would be a dull world if that were not the case. There are those who think of prostitution in the same way that the neo-Puritans of the early twentieth century viewed the consumption of alcohol and the neo-Puritans of the late twentieth century regarded the use of narcotics – as a great and terrible evil towards the stomping out of which all the powers of government must be marshalled. We all know how well Prohibition and the War on Drugs turned out, after all.

One person who prefers the neo-Puritan, prohibitionist approach to prostitution is Joy Smith, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Kildonan-St. Paul here in Winnipeg. Smith is a moral crusader, noted for her efforts against human trafficking. This is to her credit, of course, as no sane person could find anything defensible in human trafficking. Her response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that our prostitution laws need to be rewritten has been to campaign for what is called the “Nordic model”, i.e., the kind of laws that are in place in Sweden.

A red flag should have popped up immediately at the mention of Sweden. Sweden is a country that has much to admire including her constitutional monarchy and her national, albeit now disestablished, church that combines a Lutheran confession with the historical episcopacy. These are all centuries old, however. While Sweden may still be impressive in terms of her unusually high quality pop groups, her beautiful women and her Muppet chefs, her statesmanship has long left something to be desired. Her abandonment of her long-established traditional cultural identity for multiculturalism, extreme political correctness, and bizarre obsession with turning sex into something one chooses rather than something one is born with, all lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the members of her polite class have all gone børking mad. She is the last country whose recent political innovations we ought to consider imitating.

What the Nordic model entails is simply this – laws that target the customer rather than the provider, the john rather than the prostitute. While this approach makes a certain amount of sense from an economic point of view – cut off the demand and there will be no incentive for there to be a supply – it is highly dubious from the ethical point of view. Think of what the equivalent strategy in combatting the drug trade would look like. It would mean having law enforcement focus on arresting users for drug possession rather than going after dealers, supplies, and smugglers. Indeed, the police have often come under criticism for doing just that.

Someone might object to that comparison by saying that in drug trafficking the supplier is the victimizer, taking advantage of his client’s addiction to make a profit out of selling him the meanas of his own destruction whereas in prostitution it is the supplier, the hooker, who is the victim. The problem with that reasoning is that if prostitutes are victims as a class, their victimizers are not the people Joy Smith and company wish to punish. Individually, prostitutes may frequently suffer violence at the hands of individual clients. As a class, they can only rightly be regarded as the victims of the men who through various means force them into prostitution, i.e., their pimps. We could pass laws targeting the kind of men who kidnap girls, addict them to drugs, and force them to sell their bodies. Those laws would for the most part look identical to the laws the Supreme Court struck down.

The fact of the matter is that the clients of prostitution are a class of victims too, the victims of feminism. The true purpose of feminism, the so-called ”women’s movement”, was never to benefit women so much as to break the one woman for one man pattern of traditional, monagamous, marriage so that alpha males could horde women. It is from the deprived and desperate numbers of the beta-or-lower males that the client base for prostitution is derived. There is more than a hint of feminism in the movement to rewrite the prostitution laws to punish the clients rather than the prostitutes. This means that if the laws are changed in this way, feminism will have succeeded in victimizing this class twice over.

Rather than jump on this bandwagon of injustice, it would be far better to either return to the status quo ante, go for complete liberalization, or follow my earlier suggestion of decentralized, local regulations and restrictions.

Finally, if an attempt to starve off prostitution by cutting off the demand is still seen as desirable, then the best way to do so is not to introduce laws targetting the clients, but by cleaning up the sex-saturated culture and passing laws that strengthen rather than weaken the traditional family and marriage. Just as the trade in destructive narcotics will not go away as long as pharmacetical companies continue to promote their products as the instant cure to all your pain in their advertisements, so the demand for prostitution will not lessen as long as television, movies, magazines and books continue to preach the message "just do it" and to use sex to sell their products.