indeed with most of the world. The state should have no right to
take people’s lives.
Radio listener: Does this country have a vested interest in
supporting the drug trade?
It’s complicated; I don’t want to be too brief about it. For one
thing, you can’t talk about marijuana and cocaine in the same breath.
Marijuana simply doesn’t have the lethal effects of cocaine. You can
debate about whether marijuana is good or bad, but out of about
sixty million users, I don’t think there’s a known case of overdose.
The criminalization of marijuana has motives other than concern
about drugs.
On the other hand, hard drugs, to which people have been driven
to a certain extent by the prohibitions against soft drugs, are very
harmful—although nowhere near the harm of, say, tobacco and
alcohol in terms of overall societal effects, including deaths.
There are sectors of American society that profit from the hard
drug trade, like the big international banks that do the money
laundering or the corporations that provide the chemicals for the
industrial production of hard drugs. On the other hand, people who
live in the inner cities are being devastated by them. So there are
different interests.
Gun control
Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do
you believe that it permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of
guns?
It’s pretty clear that, taken literally, the Second Amendment
doesn’t permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken
literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional
rights. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as
permitting.
But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious