Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the nineteenth century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm?
Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. He goes on to ask why, on the same principle, government should not forbid skydiving or skiing as too dangerous, and where the line would be drawn.
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Cite this passage
Milton Friedman, “America’s Drug Forum interview” (1991), With Randy Paige, taped at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Washington, November 1991; reprinted as Ch. 8 “On Liberty and Drugs” in Friedman & Szasz on Liberty and Drugs, ed. Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese (Drug Policy Foundation Press, 1992), p. 70. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/proper-role-government-john-stuart-mill-drugs-overeating-1991
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He also said
On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.
Context. From his Newsweek column of May 1, 1972, on President Nixon’s “war on drugs.” He quoted this passage himself in 1998, saying he had criticized that policy “on both moral and expediential grounds.”
Prohibition and DrugsColumn, 1972, Newsweek, May 1, 1972; quoted by Friedman himself in “It’s Time to End the War on Drugs,” Hoover Digest, 1998, no. 2 (first published in The New York Times, January 11, 1998).Checked against the sourceRead the sourceWhat kind of society isn’t structured on greed? … So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.
Interview with Milton FriedmanInterview, 1973, Playboy, February 1973; reprinted in There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (Open Court, 1975), p. 31Checked against the sourceFind the bookThe heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same. This implies a belief in the equality of men in one sense; in their inequality in another. Each man has an equal right to freedom. This is an important and fundamental right precisely because men are different, because one man will want to do different things with his freedom than another, and in the process can contribute more than another to the general culture of the society in which many men live. The liberal will therefore distinguish sharply between equality of rights and equality of opportunity, on the one hand, and material equality or equality of outcome on the other.
Capitalism and FreedomBook, 1962, Ch. 12 “The Alleviation of Poverty”, p. 195Checked against the sourceFind the book
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