“Humphreys thinks the root of “San Francisco’s drug crisis” is “a libertarian, individualistic culture” that since the 19th century has attracted people who yearn “to be free of traditional constraints back East, to reinvent themselves, to escape the small-mindedness of small towns and to find themselves.” While that culture “underlies the city’s entrepreneurialism, artistic energy and tolerance for diversity in all forms,” he says, it “has a downside when it comes to addiction, which thrives in such a cultural milieu.” San Francisco “has long been one of the booziest cities in the country,” he writes, and “heavy use of substances has always been part of how San Francisco defines freedom and the good life.”
Conflating “heavy use of substances” with libertarianism is more than a little strange. Libertarianism focuses on the proper role of government; it does not tell people how they should conduct their private lives, except insofar as their actions impinge on the rights of others.”
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“The actual cause of ever-escalating drug deaths, he avers, is “the libertarian assumption that given freedom and tolerance, everyone will rationally and productively pursue their self-interest,” which “cannot explain why a starving person would, for example, forgo food in exchange for fentanyl or cocaine.”
The assumption that Humphreys describes as “libertarian” is plainly at odds with reality. But libertarianism does not assume that people never make mistakes, never develop bad habits, or never engage in behavior they ultimately regret. It simply argues, for moral and pragmatic reasons, that the possibility of error is not enough to justify using force, which should be reserved for conduct that violates other people’s rights.
Humphreys suggests that decisions regarding psychoactive drugs are a special case because those substances negate the ability to choose. As I explain in Saying Yes, this belief is a tenet of voodoo pharmacology, which posits that drugs take control of people and compel them to act against their own interests.
Survey data, which show that people can and generally do use both legal and illegal drugs without developing life-disrupting habits, contradict that theory. Observational and laboratory research confirms that the way people react to drugs is not pharmacologically determined but highly contingent on the circumstances and incentives they face, as psychologists such as Stanton Peele, Bruce Alexander, and Carl Hart have been pointing out for many years.”
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“”Portugal is in no way a libertarian country,” Humphreys writes. “Rather, it’s a cohesive, communal society in which drug use is culturally frowned upon rather than celebrated as a sign of freedom. When drug-addicted people commit crimes in Portugal, they are sent to a ‘dissuasion committee’ that can apply penalties to those who refuse to seek and stay in addiction treatment. Informally, this is backed up by pressure from family and community for addicted individuals to enter recovery.”
Humphreys is right that Portugal’s approach is not libertarian. While “dissuading” drug users is preferable to arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating them, it shows little respect for individual autonomy. Humphreys is comfortable with that because he thinks individual autonomy is meaningless in the context of drug use. Hence he thinks San Francisco should “use court authority to mandate addiction treatment more broadly than it currently does.””