Baby Steps

President Biden made a splash the other day when he announced he'd pardon all those who've been convicted of pot possession by the federal government.

Sounds great, if you're skeptical of the War on Drugs, or even only of the part of that war being waged against weed. Obviously, I welcome this come-to-senses moment from our leadership. My views on drug prohibition have been well documented, on this blog and elsewhere, and I've been sharing a serialized form of my book End The War On Drugs every Sunday here.

Biden's campaign-promise-fulfilling splash is really just a ripple, given that most possession convictions happen at the state level. Across the first decade of this century, there were 8.2 million marijuana arrests in the US, 88% of them for possession alone. The growing legalization of pot at the state level (37 states now allow either medicinal or recreational use) has decreased those numbers, but even so, the FBI reports over 350,000 pot-related arrests in 2020.

The pardon will apply to about 6500 people who served time in federal prison on possession alone. Almost all of these people (some sources say "all") have served their time, meaning that they're only getting their records expunged. Meaning their job and life prospects are improved. Good for them, and good on Biden for this baby step, but it really is a baby step, given how many millions aren’t pardoned by this action

Meanwhile, pot continues to be listed as a Schedule I controlled substance by the Feds, despite the aforementioned legalization in 37 states. Schedule I is the strictest level of classification. Heroin is Schedule I. Fentanyl is not. It has no business being on the Schedule I list, but in classic Kafka-esque (or Catch-22, if you prefer) fashion, its Schedule I status makes it difficult to remove it from the Schedule I list.

Still, there's progress, and one can hope that Biden, in his second half, puts some effort into actually legalizing pot federally (and that the Republicans don't stand in his way).

I bring this up today not just to highlight this wee bit of progress on the liberty front. This slow, halting, and uneven progress in the right direction by the Democrats reminds me of the earlier slow, halting, and uneven progress on gay marriage. Libertarians, myself included, were making the case for government recognition of same-sex marriage (it's an economic and equal-treatment argument) well before the Democrats came around, and well before The One himself made a campaign-trail declaration that marriage "is the union between a man and a woman."

Back before the "l" word grew to popular awareness and comprehension, libertarians would often describe themselves as "liberal on social issues, conservative on economic issues." Drug legalization and gay marriage would be classified as social issues in that summary, but the way "liberal" and "conservative" are being used nowadays weakens the utility of this eight-word distillation. As those on the left side of the spectrum continue to abandon the more traditional, sixties, counter-culture and suspicious-of-The-Man liberalism in favor of all-hail-The-State leftism, and as those on the right side embrace the nativistic populism that gave us Trump, "split-the-baby" descriptions of libertarianism don't really work any more.

Instead, it’s more and more about rejecting government excess, and advocating that government at all levels stick to a few well-defined roles and leave us alone on everything else.

Gay marriage was legal in 38 states before the Supreme Court's Obergefell ruling removed restrictions in the others. Perhaps not coincidentally, pot is legal in 37 states, and it's just now that the President has made a first little move in that direction federally. In both cases, we see a bottom-up progression in the direction of liberty, with the Federal government playing catch-up.

Rounding out the state-level liberty trifecta is the restoration of individuals' gun rights. Less than half a century ago, only one state in the US (Vermont) had so-called "Constitutional Carry" policy, where no permit was required to carry a concealed weapon (CCW), and the large majority of states could deny a request for a CCW arbitrarily. Today, 25 are Constitutional Carry states, and another 17 are shall-issue, meaning that a citizen not disqualified for such things as a felony conviction must be granted a CCW on request and under reasonable requirements. That left eight states that could say "no" arbitrarily and without cause until this past summer's Bruen ruling that told those states "you have to grant permits unless you can show just cause not to."

Of course, some state governments have made a mess of pot legalization, seeing it as a revenue source rather than a liberty matter, and as long as it's illegal at the federal level, it can't be fully legalized locally (the banking/financial world remains partially inaccessible, for one thing).

New York, the state that was slapped down by the Court in the gun rights case, didn't take that restoration of liberty well. The governor and legislature proved that government can move like a scalded cat (usually when its power is threatened), and passed a sheaf of restrictions designed to skirt Clarence Thomas's ruling. Some of those restrictions have already been challenged, and some of the challenged have been struck down pending appeals.

Progress in unraveling government's infringements is rarely smooth or easy, and as with all matters liberty-related, we should celebrate every increment. Our greatest distrust and disdain should be for those in power who kick-and-scream resist even those baby steps. The world hasn't ended due to state-level pot legalization, nor due to gay marriage recognition. The nation didn't turn into a shooting gallery with the restoration of individuals' gun rights. The politicians who resist pot legalization, or who want to ban gay marriage, or who continue to reject the plain-as-day protection of gun rights written in the Constitution, they are the enemies of liberty, they are the people libertarians most reject and abhor, and they are the Problem.

Each of us, as individuals, can choose not to smoke pot, or reject same-sex marriage, or not to own or carry a gun. We have the freedom to do so in each case. It is in letting others be to do as they wish, just as long as they don't infringe on others' rights in the process, where we respect the premise of individual liberty.

Despite what our "betters" tell us, more liberty is always a Good Thing. We've grown so used to having it infringed that we are scared of stepping too far outside the cocoon that government has created into the world of open air and sunshine. As usual, it's the people with the most power, the ones at the top of the pyramid, who are the last to get on board with liberty. In many or most of those cases, they only do so because they've been pressured from below.

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Peter.