I know that I’m a tad late to the party on this, but I hope that my take on this subject is in some way, unique.
Presented above is a viral photo of an Ohio couple who overdosed on heroin with their 3-year-old son in their vehicle. In short, they were arrested and in a karmic sense, justice was served, but more people like this still roam the streets and that needs to change. As an anarchist, I do not believe that I am within my rights to exterminate drug dealers or those who buy their products by means of force, but the fact still remains that they are deleterious to a functioning society, and it goes without saying that allowing them to coexist with civilized, morally upstanding, and quite frankly, clean people hurts my, or anyone else’s argument against a state that punishes these types of individuals justly.
However, before showing ire toward the couple for overdosing and endangering their son, one would have to observe the photo and interpret it from an investigative perspective—after all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Their simultaneous overdose is what raises skepticism, and from it, we can make an assortment of verdicts. Firstly, it is evident that both of them took the same dope.
Fusion reports the following, concerning the modern-day components of heroin:
While reporting on the hunt for [El Chapo] we heard about illicit drug labs in the heart of El Chapo’s territory that were making a drug so dangerous dealers were calling it el diablito -- or the little devil.
El diablito was fentanyl-laced heroin.
Three weeks before El Chapo was re-captured, we returned to Sinaloa to meet with heroin producers who were mixing the drug into their product.
There is based on possibility, rather than affirmation, that one can be led to believe that the heroin the couple used was laced with fentanyl, “black tar”, as it has been coined, in which case, one could justly shake their fist at the state that decriminalizes drugs, thus creating a black market for it, with malfeasance such as this going unnoticed to the public.
The War on Drugs is essential to state regimentation in that it not only creates more laws, and thus, a “need” for more police, but it creates a false sense of safety for its citizens by convincing them that they need the state to exist to protect us from ourselves. It establishes laws combating use and imprisons people for their perceived recalcitrance, amongst actual criminals, and amidst formidable pains of withdrawals and detoxification, and mandates rehabilitation upon release despite the fact that they have spent months, if not, years in an unhealthy environment and have become conditioned to a culture of actual crime.
As further proof that such a system is useless, in the aforementioned instance with the child and his irresponsible parents, the state did not intervene until after they had already overdosed and become too incapacitated to tend to their child. The existence of a black market created for this and many other destructive substances incentivizes people to abuse them; think of it as a forbidden fruit. Addicts use drugs regardless of their legality, and some become addicts after making the conscious decision to use drugs, to feel liberated from an invisible authority dictating to what they are allowed to own, sell, and put into their own bodies. There are more reasons to use than they are to stay away.
I’ve proposed a stateless remedy in the past. It is my opinion that the best way to discourage hard drug use and limit the market for it is to decriminalize it and replace the corporate tax with a street fee. It would be of less of an expense for owners of road networks to close off roads to places where hard drugs are sold or the sale of hard drugs is enabled, because it would keep junkies off their roads and it’s extremely difficult, theses days, for one to reach their destination anywhere without driving. They would go about this by keeping track of buildings. We get crack houses, for example, from abandoned buildings, which is either unclaimed property or property that has lost its value. If real estate companies kept track of the goings on of their buildings, they could demolish buildings used for malfeasance and build others in their place. Crack houses aren’t the products of prohibition, they’re the product of free riding; they are enabled. In a free society, if someone wants to sell crack, they would have to make it happen on their own dime.
While it isn’t my place to judge, it still goes without saying that it is imperative that one resists hard drugs to maintain a healthy lifestyle and that overdosing is not an ideal fate for anyone and enabling such behavior is inefficacious in making sense of libertarianism. In order to awaken people from the perception that libertarianism is capricious and utopian, there have to be free market solutions proposed to society’s biggest issues in ways that the state cannot.