Last night's debate between Ethan Nadelmann and James Q. Wilson provided
a dramatic and unfortunately disheartening demonstration of the
importance of maintaining principled positions. The debate, at USF
(where were all the Libertarians?), was supposedly pro and con drug
legalization. But Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance,
began by disavowing the "libertarian position of Milton Friedman,
calling for legalization of all drugs," and closed his opening statement
by saying he "didn't know" what the proper policy should be (!)--just
something amorphous between Friedman's position and the status quo.
Wilson promptly pounced, asking for Nadelmann to define a positive
policy position, and Nadelmann never could. The specific programs
Nadelmann could confidently get behind--medical marijuana and needle
exchange--were ones that Wilson also endorsed. Nadelmann was vehement
on the point that people have a right to ingest whatever substances they
want--but Wilson rejoined that Nadelmann then had no way of
distinguishing his position from Friedman's after all: that if people
had a right to possess a substance, then they also had a right to buy
and sell it. Nadelmann didn't want to go there, with the ugly
capitalist specter of companies advertising cocaine and heroin, but he
had no effective response. He was a civil libertarian, he insisted, not
(ugh) an economic one; one couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration of
the inseparability of the two, though Nadelmann remained blind to it.
Just to put the cherry on the cake, Nadelmann was at times rude,
accusing Wilson of "willful deafness" and distorting his positions,
while Wilson was the gentleman throughout.
Nadelmann had worked on panels with Friedman, and Wilson had debated
him. If Friedman had any influence on either man, it would have to have
been greater on Wilson; one got the sense that his thinking was inching
in a more libertarian direction (a movement over which he was obviously
determined to exercise strict control). But if Friedman couldn't
persuade Nadelmann, of all people, on the legalization of drugs, that's
a good indication of how far our educational efforts still have to go.