On Drug-Driving and Illegality

Let’s Keep Drugs Illegal at the West Georgian, says:

In the case of drugs, we do not have an inalienable right to put whatever we want into our bodies if it violates any other person’s human rights. Let’s look at alcohol, a legal and widely used drug (though keep in mind that its legality has no significance in the point I’m trying to make). In 2005, 16,885 people died in the US from alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes. [...] [The] 1.4 million [people arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics] and their potential victims (which could have been you or me) were the lucky ones. Drugs other than alcohol were involved in 18% of traffic-related deaths that year, bringing the total to 57% of traffic-related deaths that involved drugs.

[...] Alcohol impaired the judgment and coordination of the users enough that 414 children died in 2005. Those who drove under the influence violated human rights. [...] Because most (if not all) illegal drugs impair judgment, users act with compulsion and/or faulty reasoning, and therefore do not always take into account other people’s human rights. They would not have enough sense, caution, or fear to know that getting in a car is a bad idea and that they could violate others’ rights. Since this impairment of rationality is essentially a certainty, there is always a chance that someone else’s rights will be infringed when such drugs are used. Therefore, it is not one’s inalienable right to consume illegal drugs, since it needlessly puts other people in harm’s way.

The argument the article puts across is pretty much:
1. People under the influence won’t think “no, driving this car is wrong”
2. People under the influence are more likely to crash
3. So, people shouldn’t allowed to take illegal drugs.

Yes, the concern that more drug use will cause more crashes is a valid one. However, if the logic in the quoted article were consistent, we would make alcohol illegal too, which we really and completely haven’t. We have, however, put very strict requirements on alcohol consumption and driving and we punish people severely if they break them.

Drink-driving is a case where public education has massively reduced harm. Whilst commonly-used illegal drugs remain illegal, though, telling people not to take them and driving will be less effective than if they were legal and there was a clear message not to. I would like to have a study to back this up, but I have two main reasons for believing that this is so.

First, if you’re doing something illegal already, then doing something else illegal is a small extra cost; this is the argument that the drug war destroys respect for the law in a significant portion of a society. If the police are out to get you whatever you do, does it really matter what you do?

Second, the public protection message “don’t take drugs and drive” gets drowned out by the larger personal morality message “don’t take drugs”. Given that the people taking drugs are disregarding the latter, they’re not going to pay attention to the former, since they’ll see it as along the same lines. There’s no message “take drugs sensibly and safely, and this includes not driving under the influence”, which may actually make a difference.

So, kids: don’t drug up and drive. And don’t let your friends do it, either.