The leadership that groups like the Canadian Alliance and the Fraser Institute are taking in the liberalization of drug law should be matters of concern to those working to reduce the harm caused to individuals and communities by poverty, homelessness, crime, and substance abuse. Those who see drug law reform as an important element for bringing about a more rational approach to the issues of addiction and marginalization, should be cautious about imitating those who are using individual rights arguments to make their case. This frame situates the drug policy not as a dilemma of social policy or the role of government to provide for social justice for the most disadvantaged, but reduces it to an argument about the intrusion of government into the lives of individuals. While that argument does not lack merit, we should be asking ourselves if it is the one that groups concerned about providing better services to those most disadvantaged by drug abuse should be using their limited communications resources to make. After all, why should the government intrude in our choices about how or whether to help the needy by imposing a “burden” of taxation any more than it should intrude in our choice to use or not use drugs? Others can and will make the individual rights arguments but who will speak for the collective obligation to provide for the disadvantaged--especially the politically unpopular addicts and offenders--if we devote scarce resources to furthering the individual rights arguments?

A discussion about individual rights focuses on the literal aspects of drugs and draws attention away from their symbolic utility in legitimizing the war on drugs and its purpose of making socially acceptable government’s abandonment of the disadvantaged. What protects social programs that help the disadvantaged are arguments that appeal to collective, not individual, notions of equality.

By bolstering the frame that puts personal autonomy paramount above other concerns, drug policy activists might find themselves in world not to their liking--where commitment to the collective goals of reducing the harm done by substance abuse to the very few is lacking among the very many. If our concern is confined to the issue of personal liberty to use drugs or if ensuring the legal right to use drugs will do away with the problems the most disadvantaged among us face, then it matters not. If our concerns are about the marginalized people affected by substance abuse, then it matters a great deal. And if we believe that drug addiction and abuse is, in its essence, a health problem then why seek its remedy in arguments that make of it a matter of law?

Liberalization of the law is no guarantee that the resources previously devoted to enforcement will flow to treatment. Nor does it guarantee that, even if liberated from a criminal justice frame, drug abuse will be embraced by the Canadian public as a health issue for which they will accept any fiscal responsibility to solve. Although Canadians, with their growing consciousness of their individual rights, might fight for the right to use drugs themselves if they choose, they will not necessarily see any need to pay taxes to house or maintain the health of those who have become addicted and marginalized by their drug use any more than they feel obliged currently to provide for those who are marginalized by an addiction to alcohol.

The issue for those who care what happens to those most marginalized in our society--by addiction, poverty, or prison--is not about whether drugs are good or bad or whether the state has the right to restrict their use. The argument is about our responsibilities to the disadvantaged and how much inequality, in the name of freedom, we are prepared to tolerate.