An Ethical Analysis of Marijuana Prohibition

The widespread prohibition of most recreational narcotics fuels a difficult and long-standing debate that challenges the libertarian ideals of many Western states. The issue calls to question the extent of government involvement in the lives of its constituency, weighed against the very individual freedoms of these people. Though absolute ideals about freedom help to direct policy goals, implementation is often much too complicated to rely solely on theoretical principles. The arena of the narcotics debate admits a range of attempts to reconcile personal liberty and the interests of society. To this day, psychoactive drugs are illegal in most nations, but the degree of their regulation varies widely. In chiefly Islamic nations, such as Indonesia, penalties for drug-law infringement include death. In the United Arab Emirates, trace amounts of marijuana on an individual’s shoe are grounds for a four-year prison sentence [24]. This is contrasted to the Netherlands, where moderate quantities of drugs for recreational use are de facto legal, though they remain illegal on the books [11]. The United Nations’ Convention on Psychotropic Substances placed severe limitations on international drug trafficking since 1976 [25]; moreover, it summarizes the world’s almost unanimous belief that narcotics, including marijuana, are harmful to society. The United States, a relative champion of civil liberty, takes a firm stance on drugs, classifying marijuana among the most noxious narcotics of Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) [26]. Current federal policy forbids marijuana use in all forms, including all medical applications of the drug. Other legislation such as the Marijuana Tax Act has placed strict regulations on marijuana in the U.S. since the 1930s, well before the CSA of 1970. The recent Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Raich (2005), in accordance with an abundance of previous districtand federal-level rulings, has upheld the national marijuana ban against more lenient state laws, citing the federal government’s ability to legislate in matters that affect interstate commerce [10]. Particularly in the U.S., the debate of marijuana legalization has grown stale with political buzzwords such as the “War on Drugs.” The issue is complicated by the role of states’ rights, which does not directly involve the ethics of the policy so much as it does the country’s federalist structure. The debate has been fought all around the political arena with arguments on both sides relying on economic considerations, medical research, the Constitution, and more. However, these positive analyses will only carry us so far; the rest of the debate must be supported by a normative evaluation that incorporates the findings into an ethically sound policy. The objective here is to remove the political banter from the issue and to consider rigorously the compelling reasons for the prohibition and legalization of marijuana—among other narcotics—separating the often tempting but vacuous pretexts that obscure the discussion.