"The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt"
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Elder’s line doesn’t plead for sympathy for drug users; it prosecutes the state. The rhetorical move is blunt and strategic: he frames the war on drugs not as a policy failure but as a moral category error, the kind that reveals contempt for ordinary adults. By calling it “wrong, both tactically and morally,” he refuses the usual reformist escape hatch (better training, different budgets, smarter policing). If the premise is rotten, no amount of tweaking saves it.
The subtext is a libertarian critique dressed in plainspoken outrage. “It assumes that people are too stupid…” is less about drugs than about paternalism. Elder is arguing that prohibition requires a low opinion of citizens: that government must act as a substitute parent because individuals can’t be trusted with risk. That’s a sharp inversion of the typical moral panic, where the user is framed as reckless and the state as responsible. Here, the state becomes the reckless actor, willing to criminalize private behavior and absorb collateral damage in the name of control.
Context matters: Elder emerged as a prominent conservative media figure willing to break from bipartisan orthodoxy on drug policy, especially as mass incarceration and aggressive policing became harder to defend in the face of racial disparities and ballooning prison populations. “Morally bankrupt” is calibrated to land with audiences who speak in moral terms about law and order; he’s hijacking that vocabulary to indict prohibition itself. It’s not a nuanced policy memo. It’s a delegitimization tactic: if the war’s foundation is contempt for autonomy, then the real vice isn’t intoxication - it’s coercion.
The subtext is a libertarian critique dressed in plainspoken outrage. “It assumes that people are too stupid…” is less about drugs than about paternalism. Elder is arguing that prohibition requires a low opinion of citizens: that government must act as a substitute parent because individuals can’t be trusted with risk. That’s a sharp inversion of the typical moral panic, where the user is framed as reckless and the state as responsible. Here, the state becomes the reckless actor, willing to criminalize private behavior and absorb collateral damage in the name of control.
Context matters: Elder emerged as a prominent conservative media figure willing to break from bipartisan orthodoxy on drug policy, especially as mass incarceration and aggressive policing became harder to defend in the face of racial disparities and ballooning prison populations. “Morally bankrupt” is calibrated to land with audiences who speak in moral terms about law and order; he’s hijacking that vocabulary to indict prohibition itself. It’s not a nuanced policy memo. It’s a delegitimization tactic: if the war’s foundation is contempt for autonomy, then the real vice isn’t intoxication - it’s coercion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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