Drug War

I submit the following, seemingly reasonable principle:

If you engage in some costly action, Y, because you believe some other thing, X, is true and then you later find out that X is false, then on pain of irrationality you should cease Y.

Now, it’s possible that in the intervening period you get really lucky and discover another reason to do Y. In general, that seems rather unlikely. More probably, if someone persists in that costly activity, it’s a result of a habit and/or status-quo bias.

How rational does the drug war seem in light of this principle and the following historical quotes promoting drug prohibition?

  • …the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.
  • Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
  • Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing
  • Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are New Southern Menace:Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks
  • ..Negro cocaine fiends are now a known Southern menace.
  • According to Hill, “Gompers [Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor 1886-1924, except for one year] conjures up a terrible picture of how the Chinese entice little white boys and girls into becoming ‘opium fiends.’ Condemned to spend their days in the back of laundry rooms, these tiny lost souls would yield up their virgin bodies to their maniacal yellow captors. “What other crimes were committed in those dark fetid places,” Gompers writes, “when these little innocent victims of the Chinamen’s wiles were under the influence of the drug, are almost too horrible to imagine… There are hundreds, aye, thousands, of our American girls and boys who have acquired this deathly habit and are doomed, hopelessly doomed, beyond the shadow of redemption.”
  • The use of marihuana is not uncommon in the colonies of the lower class of Mexican immigrants. This is a native drug made from what is sometimes called the ‘crazy weed.’ The effects are high exhilaration and intoxication, followed by extreme depression and broken nerves. [Police] officers and Mexicans both ascribe many of the moral irregularities of Mexicans to the effects of marihuana.
  •  It has been stated on very high authority that the use of co- caine by the negroes of the South is one of the most elusive and troublesome questions which confront the enforcement of the law in most of the Southern states
  • cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of the South and other sections of the country.
  • The record of the ‘cocaine nigger’ near Asheville, who dropped five men dead in their tracks, using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing.

If anyone else has any more such delightful quotes, send them my way, please!


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