Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I’d have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old daughter is the apple of my eye. I want her to live in a society that is moral and free, that looks as much as possible like the old American Republic, unsubverted by the welfare-warfare state and its allied cultural and religious apostasy.

As a paleo-libertarian, I don’t see the government as useful in achieving this.

That does not mean I approve of everything I wouldn’t outlaw. I see the traditional family as the essential building block of society, so I wish Elizabeth Taylor hadn’t married nine times. But I wouldn’t put her in jail for it.

I worry about drugs and children, but I’m convinced that when kids don’t become addicts—and the vast majority outside of certain impoverished areas do not—it has everything to do with parents and religion, and little to do with the accessibility. Even in my quiet town, drugs are available to any young person who wants them, despite the police and the federal War on Drugs.

The choice is not between a society that is drug-free or drug-ridden. We have the latter already, despite billions in spending, thousands of agents, and hundreds of restrictions on our personal and financial liberties. Instead the choice is between a society where these problems are exacerbated by government, and one where they are not. (In fact, I would argue that just as Prohibition increased drunkenness, so the drug war has increased drug abuse. After nine years of a Reagan-Bush crackdown, we have more than double the amount of drugs available, by the government’s own statistics, and they are more potent. Just as Prohibition gave bootleggers the incentive to produce high-profit, high-proof alcohol rather than less profitable but safer beer or wine, the drug war has led to the U.S. producing, for example, the most potent marijuana in the world. Not Jamaica. Not West Africa. But Northern California.)

If I could wave a magic wand and make illegal drugs disappear, I would gladly do so. But I do not have that wand, and neither does the government. The government does have a gun, however. But—just as during Prohibition—it is not capable of using it to suppress the traffic in substances people want, whether for good or ill.

The government cannot suppress adultery, for example, even though breaking the marriage covenant, with its consequent divorce, damaged children, and other shattered moral values, does even more harm than drugs.

Let’s suppose that, knowing this, Jimmy Carter had launched a War on Infidelity.

The Federal Marital Enforcement Administration—in cooperation with vice squads at state and local levels—would institute national spying, and impose long prison sentences on those caught. Motels would be under surveillance, and couples would have to provide proof of marriage to check in. Mail would be opened and phones would be tapped. There would be 800-number informer lines. Even house parties would be watched. Who knows what could go on?

Next would come a massive federal education program, with grants from “the National Institute of Marriage to favored intellectuals and activists. Rosalynn Carter would ask us to “Just Say No” to illicit liaisons, and the IRS would use them as an excuse to restrict financial privacy, since cash could be used to fund adultery without leaving a paper trail.

Would any of us think that family values could be protected, let alone enhanced, by such a system? Yet many Americans support fighting drugs in this manner, with exactly the same success that a federal marital crusade would have. Or rather, with even less success, since the war on drugs also reaps a harvest of violent crime that a war on adultery would not.

With drugs, people tend to fall into four categories: 1) those who would not use drugs even if they were free as well as legal; 2) those who might experiment in some limited way, but would never become addicts; 3) those who can become abusers, but can also be helped to abstain by moral and educational counseling; and 4) “natural” addicts.

Categories one and two are not societal problems. Category three should be the target of our anti-drug efforts, and medical and moral healing. Category four probably cannot be helped by any human means. As the Reagan and Bush administrations have shown, the government cannot make these pathetic individuals abstain. All it can do is make sure that they visit their misery on the innocent.

If decriminalizing drugs meant nothing more than drastically cutting street crime—and it would—we should support it. We cannot prevent addicts from using drugs, but we can make sure that they harm only themselves. And we can free the police to concentrate on crimes against innocent persons and their property.

As it is, the innocent are victimized not only by drug criminals but by the government. The Reagan and Bush anti-drug acts attack our liberties by eliminating the remnants of domestic bank privacy, restricting the honest use of cash, allowing unreasonable (and unconstitutional) searches and seizures of private property, constructing computer dossiers on every American, and expanding the powers and numbers of the IRS.

The Constitution outlaws excessive fines. Yet the feds seize cars, cash, airplanes, and yachts without a trial or even an indictment, and the victim must prove his innocence in an expensive civil trial. And now the Bush administration is pushing a United Nations drug treaty that would move us closer to world government by establishing an international police force and tax agency.

In 1913, when all now-banned substances were legal, there was no “national drug problem,” but only individual abuse. Enforcing the moral law against these vices is the job of parents and churches, not politicians. To put them in charge is to abdicate our individual responsibilities, to fail abjectly, and to move closer to authoritarianism.