The End of Faith (34 page)

ing two years or less, and 76 percent were released after serving four years or less
(www.lp.org). At the federal level, the average sentence for a drug offense in the U.S. is
61Ú4 years (from the Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP] Drug Data Summary, www.whitehousedrug- policy.gov).

30 And yet, this mountain of imponderables reaches higher still. In many states, a person who
has been merely accused of a drug crime can have his property seized, and those who informed against him can be
rewarded with up to 25 percent of its value. The rest of these spoils go to police
departments, which now rely upon such property seizures to meet their budgets. This is
precisely the arrangement of incentives that led to this sort of corruption during the
Inquisition (if one can even speak of such a process being “corrupted”). Like the heretic,
the accused drug offender has no hope but to trade information for a reduced sentence. The
person who can't (or won't) implicate others inevitably faces punishments of fantastical
severity. Information has grown so valuable, in fact, that a black market for it has
emerged. Defendants who have no information to trade can actually buy drug leads from
professional informers (and they do not come cheap). The net result of all this is that
police departments have learned to target property rather than crime. Property can be
seized and forfeited even if a defendant is ultimately found innocent of any criminal
offense. One national survey found that 80 percent of property seizures occur without any
criminal prosecution whatsoever (www.drug warfacts.com). Under these enlightened laws,
couples in their eighties have permanently lost their homes because a grandchild was
caught with marijuana. For more facts of this sort see Schlosser, Reefer Madness.

The war on drugs has clearly done much to erode our civil liberties. In particular, the
standards for search and seizure, pretrial release, and judi-

NOTES TO PAGES 162-163 269

cial discretion in sentencing have all been revised in an attempt to make this unwinnable
war easier to prosecute. Since drug offenses are covered by local, state, and federal
jurisdictions, people can be tried multiple times for the same crimesome have been found
not guilty at one level, only to receive life sentences upon subsequent prosecution. On
more than one occasion, members of Congress have introduced legislation seeking to apply
the death penalty to anyone caught selling drugs. Unsurprisingly, our attempts to
eradicate the supply of drugs in other countries have been even more detrimental to the
liberties of others. In Latin America, we have become a tireless benefactor of human
rights violators. (See, for example, the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org.)

In environmental terms, the war on drugs has been no more auspi- cious. The aerial
spraying of herbicides has hastened the destruction of the rainforest as well as
contaminated water supplies, staple crops, and people. The U.S. government has recently
sought approval to use a genet- ically engineered “killer fungus,” designed to attack
marijuana crops domestically and coca and opium plants abroad. For the moment, some rather
obvious environmental concerns have prevented its use. (See www.lindesmith.org.)

31 From the ONDCP Drug Data Summary (March 2003). The war on drugs has also become a great engine of racial inequity, for
while blacks consti- tute only 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of U.S.
drug users, 38 percent of those arrested and 59 percent of those convicted for drug crimes
are black. Our drug laws have contributed to the epidemic of fatherlessness in the black
community, and thisalong with the profits and resultant criminality of the drug tradehas
devastated our inner cities. (See www.drugwarfacts.com.)

32 Ibid. 33 M. S. Gazzaniga, “Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes,” National Review, July

10,1995, pp. 26-37, makes a similar estimate. Needless to say, the cost has

only grown with time. 34 W. F. Buckley Jr., “The War on Drugs Is Lost,” National Review, Feb. 12,

1996. 35 www.lindesmith.org. 36 when was the last time someone was killed over an alcohol or tobacco

deal gone awry? We can be confident that the same normalcy would be achieved if drugs were
regulated by the government. At the inception of the modern “war on drugs,” the economist
Milton Friedman observed that "legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of
crime

and raise the quality of law enforcement.“ He then invited the reader to ”conceive of any
other measure that would accomplish so much to pro- mote law and order“ (Friedman,
”Prohibition and Drugs," Newsweek, May 1, 1972). What was true then remains true after three decades of pious misrule; the
criminality associated with the drug trade is the inescapable consequence of our drug laws
themselves.

37 According to the U.S. government, twelve of the twenty-eight groups that have been
officially classed as terrorist organizations finance their activities, in whole or in
part, by the drug trade. (See www.theantidrug. com/drugs_terror/terrorgroups.html.)

38 S. Weinberg, “What Price Glory,” New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 55-60.

39 All of this folly persists, even though the legalized and regulated sale of drugs would
most effectively keep them out of the hands of minors (when was the last time someone was
caught selling vodka in a school- yard?), eradicate organized crime, reduce the annual
cost of law enforce- ment by tens of billions of dollars, raise billions more in new sales
taxes, and free hundreds of thousands of police officers for the job of fighting violent
crime and terrorism. Against these remarkable benefits stands the fear that the
legalization of drugs would lead to an epidemic of drug abuse and addiction. Common sense,
as well as comparisons between the United States and places like Holland, reveals this
fear to be unfounded. As more than 100 million of the estimated 108 million Americans who
have used illegal drugs can attest, addiction is a phenomenon distinct from mere use, and
users merely require good information to keep from becoming addicts. Addicts require
treatment, of coursefor which there are at present insufficient funds.

This is not to deny that a small percentage of people who use drugs (both legal and
illegal) have their lives powerfully disrupted by them. We generally think of this problem
as having two stages of severity: “abuse” and “addiction.” It remains true, however, that
most people who use drugs do not abuse them, and many illegal drugs do not readily become
sources of addiction even in the hands of abusers (marijuana, LSD, psilo- cybin,
mescaline, etc.). To say that a drug is addictive is to say that peo- ple develop both
tolerance to it (and therefore require progressively higher doses to achieve the same
effect) and withdrawal symptoms upon stoppage. It is not hard to see why well-intentioned
people would worry that others might become inadvertent slaves of such biochemistry. While
opium and its derivatives (like heroin and morphine) are the classic

NOTES TO PAGES 165-168 271

examples of drugs of this sort, nicotine and alcohol can fall into this cat- egory as well
(depending on usage). Given our laws, however, all users of illicit drugswhether
dysfunctional or not, addicted or notare consid- ered criminals and subject to arrest,
imprisonment, property seizure, and other punishments by the state.

Our drug policy has created arbitrary and illusory distinctions between biologically
active substances, while obscuring valid ones. No one doubts that the use of certain drugs
can destroy the lives of certain people. But the same can be said of almost any commodity.
People destroy their lives and the lives of their dependents by simply overeat- ing. In
2003 the Centers for Disease Control declared obesity to be the greatest public health
problem in the United States, and yet few of us imagine that new criminal laws should be
written to control the use of cheeseburgers. Where drugs are a problem, they are a problem
whose remedy is better education and better health care, not incarceration. Sim- ply
observe the people in public life who are incapable of having a ratio- nal discussion on
these matters (start with John Ashcroft and work your way down), and you will find that
religious faith does much to inform their view of the world.

40 See, e.g., D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, “On the Reality of Cognitive Illu- sions,” Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91.

41 “Misguided Faith on AIDS” (editorial), New York Times, Oct. 15, 2003. 42 N. Kristof, “When Prudery Kills,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003. 43 Ibid. 44 Kristof also misinterprets Einstein's famous statement "Science without

religion is lame; religion without science is blind,“ suggesting that Ein- stein was
voicing respect for religious credulity. Science without religion is lame, merely because
”science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward
truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of
religion.“ Whereas religion without science is blind because religion has no access to the truthit was, to Einstein's mind, nothing other than this ”source of feeling," this striving for
something greater that cannot itself be scien- tifically justified. Faith, therefore, is
hunger only; while reason is its food.

Einstein seemed to consider faith nothing more than a eunuch left to guard the harem while
the intellect was away solving the problems of the world. By pretending that it could
proceed without any epistemic aspira- tions whatsoever, Einstein robbed religion of the truth of its doctrine. In so doing, he also relieved it of its capacity to err. This is not the
faith that

evangelicals, or any other religious believers, have ever practiced. See

Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), 41-49.

6 A Science of Good and Evil

1 N. Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 543. 2 This linkage between happiness and ethics is not a mere endorsement of utilitarianism. There may be ethical questions that escape a utilitarian analysis, but they will be
questions of ethics, or so I will argue, only to the degree that anyone is in a position to suffer on account
of them. I have elected to bypass the categories of moral theory that usually frame any
discussion of ethicsutilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deon- tology being the most common. I do not believe that these categories are as conceptually
distinct, or as useful, as their omnipresence in the litera-

ture suggests. 3 One could argue that these behaviors do “victimize” others in more sub-

tle ways. If a compelling argument of this sort exists, I am not aware of it. There is
undoubtedly something to say about the relationship between such behavior and one's own
happiness, but this becomes a matter of ethics only when the happiness of others is also at stake.

4 See M. D. Hauser, “Swappable Minds,” in The Next Fifty Years, ed. J. Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2002).

5 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), vi.

6 This observation formed the central strand of Carl Jung's famous study of Job, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958).

7 The belief that human beings are endowed with freedom of will under- writes both our
religious conception of “sin” and our judicial ideal of “retributive justice.” This makes
free will a problem of more than pass- ing philosophical interest. Without freedom of
will, sinners would just be poorly calibrated clockwork, and any notion of justice that
emphasized their punishment (rather than their rehabilitation or mere containment) would seem deeply incongruous.
Happily, we will find that we need no illusions about a person's place in the causal order
to hold him account- able for his actions, or to take action ourselves. We can find secure
foun- dations for ethics and the rule of law without succumbing to any obvious cognitive
illusions.

NOTE TO PAGE 173 273

Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less) in that it cannot even be rendered
coherent conceptually, since no one has ever described a manner in which mental and physical events could arise
that would attest to its existence. Surely, most illusions are made of sterner stuff than
this. If, for instance, a man believes that his dental fillings are receiv- ing radio
broadcasts, or that his sister has been replaced by an alien who looks exactly like her,
we would have no difficulty specifying what would have to be true of the world for his
beliefs to be, likewise, true. Strangely, our notion of “free of will” achieves no such
intelligibility. As a concept, it simply has no descriptive, or even logical, moorings.
Like some per- verse, malodorous rose, however we might attempt to enjoy its beauty up
close, it offers up its own contradiction.

The idea of free will is an ancient artifact of philosophy, of course, as well as a
subject of occasional, if guilty, interest among scientistse.g., M. Planck, Where Is Science Going? trans, and ed. J. Murphy (1933; reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981); B. Libet,
“Do We Have Free Will?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9 (1999): 47-57; S. A. Spence and C. D. Frith, “Towards a Functional Anatomy of
Voli- tion,” ibid., 11-29; A. L. Roskies, “Yes, But Am I free?” Nature Neuro- science 4 (2001): 1161; and D. M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). It has long been obvious, however, that any description of
the will in terms of causes and effects sets us sliding toward a moral and logical
crevasse, for either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible
for them, or they are the product of chance, and we are not responsible for them. The
notion of free will seems particularly suspect once we begin thinking about the brain. If
a man's “choice” to shoot the president is determined by a cer- tain pattern of neural
activity, and this neural activity is in turn the prod- uct of prior causesperhaps an
unfortunate coincidence of an unhappy childhood, bad genes, and cosmic-ray bombardmentwhat
can it possi- bly mean to say that his will is “free”? Despite the clever exertions of
many philosophers who have sought to render free will “compatible” with both deterministic
and indeterministic accounts of mind and brain, the project appears to be hopeless. The
endurance of free will, as a prob- lem in need of analysis, is attributable to the fact
that most of us feel that we freely author our own actions and acts of attention (however difficult it may be
to make sense of this notion in logical or scientific terms). It is safe to say that no
one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise
as an abstract idea.