Customer Reviews

Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market

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When I got a copy of this book - having forgotten about Dr. Szasz's breadth of outlook and singular erudition - I thought I was going to read a nice little political tract condemning the current American Drug Prohibition. "Our Right to Drugs" is that, of course, but it is so much more - it is a call to intellectual and political arms.

The War on Drugs, as Dr. Szasz so carefully shows, is nothing less than a Jihad, a Holy War waged by the forces of reaction and restriction in our society against all those who think that there should be peaceful choice, or self-ownership, or genuine free thought. And like all Holy Wars, this one permits the worst atrocities to be visited on the unbelieving because they are not just wrong - they are evil.

Like many libertarians, Dr. Szasz has little use for compromise; in this case, by those who favor "decriminalization" or "medicalization" of psychoactive drugs. Such people, the author shows, will only end up replacing the current Ayatollahs (cops and ex-generals) with a new Inquisition lead by doctors and psychologists. In the world of physician-monitored drug usage, instead of being evil, anyone who wants to alter his or her own mood will be labeled as "sick" - and instead of being sent to jail, they will be forced into "treatment".

In trying to think of some literary comparison to "Our Right to Drugs", I can only think of Plato's records of certain iconoclastic dialogues about ancient Athenian closemindedness. Truely, Dr. Szasz is our Socrates.

This book is a supremely courageous and truthful book written by one of the great luminaries of the age(s).
This book "cuts to the chase" as regards fundamental constitutional issues raised by laws regulating
the procurement, possession, sale, and use of drugs.

The book's most striking charge (a correct one, at that!) is that a fundamental tyranny overtook this nation about
90 years ago when "Americans" lost their property rights over their own bodies--all in the name of governmentally-controlled "truth in advertising" for drug sales.

However, this "seemingly benign" governmental goal created untold danger for the very people it was meant to
protect. Szasz rightfully puts America's so-called "drug problem" in proper perspective by suggesting that the
admonition "buyer beware" should have sufficed--for drugs, as for almost everything else.

In the most general terms, this book demonstrates that there are no shortcuts to a thorough-going approach to American Liberty and Freedom. Dr. Szasz very clearly, and effectively, corrects those who claim that drug laws be summarily repealed for any reasons other than their moral unacceptability in a free state.

Making proper analogy to the wrongful justification of the slavery of blacks in America (owing to their mischaracterization as property), Szasz makes it clear that the infringement of property rights (both of your body, and substances you might possess) lies at the heart of America's despotic and tyrannical so-called "War on Drugs."

Although he does not (if memory serves me correctly) directly cite the 9th Amendment in defense of all those who would fight this indigenous, governmentally-sponsored terrorism, he could have:

"THE ENUMERATION OF CERTAIN RIGHTS, IN THE CONSTITUTION, SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED TO DENY OR DISPARAGE OTHERS RETAINED BY THE PEOPLE."

"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms, remedy is set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is nature's manure." Thomas Jefferson

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This is a fine and brilliant book. Szasz manhandles any pretext for government intervention in medicine and the market for drugs. This is by far the best book on the subject.

Good arguments for drug legalization (and deregulation of prescription drugs), but a little outdated as far as some of his allusions and political terminology go, and not precise enough in his use of the term "legalizers".

He ignores the distinctions between "decriminalization" and "legalization", and lumps all "legalizers" into a single category, as not being "good enough". He does not seem to realize that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs on drugs, ranging from his position, to the position that all drugs should be banned everywhere.

He is uncompromising, and this is politically defeating. Nonetheless, his position is admirable, and his idea of drugs as a "right" similiar to all other "rights" bandied about in political discourse today, is a good one.

Nice philosophy, and one I wish more accepted it, but he's too radical for today's politicians, who are still in the dark ages of social medicine.

Fear of people committing suicide easily, is Szasz's main hypothesis for why we regulate prescription and illicit drugs the way we do in America today.

This book is good for convincing one that drugs should be legalized, but it is no help for accomplishing that feat politically.

Thomas Szasz (born 1920) is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center. He is a well-known critic of psychiatry, of the social role of medicine in modern society, and is a social libertarian.

Szasz states in the Preface to this 1992 book, "everything that I say in this book is premised on my contention that in today's American society there are two kinds of diseases and two kinds of treatments. The first kind of disease, exemplified by AIDS, is discovered by doctors; the second kind, exemplified by drug abuse, is mandated by legislators and decreed by judges."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Courts now routinely order persons who use illegal drugs to attend drug treatment programs, from which mental health experts conclude that there is a huge demand for drug treatment services in our country."
"(N)o one is, or can be, killed by an illegal drug. If a person dies as a result of using a drug, it is because he CHOSE to do something risky."
"(T)here was no question, during Prohibition, of randomly testing people to determine if there was any ethanol in their system, or of searching their homes for alcohol, or of imprisoning them for possessing alcohol, or of involuntarily treating them for the disease of unsanctioned alcohol use."
"My point is simply that neither participating in the drug trade nor using drugs (legal or illegal) need be interpreted as constituting vice, crime, or disease."
"(W)e supinely accept agents of the therapeutic state monitoring our drug-using behavior, refusing to recognize that it is simply a pretext for the government's meddling in our lives."
"The gun lobby has long warned, 'When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' We have outlawed narcotics, and now only outlaws have narcotics."
"The effect of a drug on behavior, like the effect of religion on it, may be for good or ill. Some of the greatest works of art in the world were created by men intoxicated with drugs, religion, or both."

The author quotes Milton Friedman as an almost exclusive source and uses fifty-cent words where penny words will do, all in an attempt to make his unresearched statements sound intelligent and academic.

He constantly claims that specious conclusions are "obvious" and assumes things to be true which are not true (or at least have not been argued persuasively as truth).

It is written with all the authority and lack of concrete support of a religious treatise; Szasz assures us that he is right because he says he is right, and, SURELY, no one can argue with that.