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oage for erowid... make into a page: Social and Economic Justice David A.J. Richards [excerpt from http://www.psychedelic-library.org/dajr4.htm] Consistent with the autonomy-based interpretation of treating persons as equals, principles of distributive justice that would require a certain distribution of wealth, property, status, and opportunity would be agreed to or universalized.[244] Sometimes it is suggested that certain forms of drug use are appropriately criminalized in order to advance the more just distribution of goods, on the ground that these forms of drug use are mainly a temptation to the poor and a symptom of poverty. Accordingly, decriminalization proposals are viewed skeptically: heroin, it may be suggested, is the true opiate of the people, whereby the anxieties and privations of their disadvantaged lives are temporarily alleviated, but at the expense of incapacitating them for the kind of political analysis and action required to attack the basic injustices from which they suffer.[245] Decriminalization, accordingly, is disfavored because it legitimates, by a misplaced ideology of tolerance, the passive vulnerability of the poor to exploitation.[246] One is initially struck by the lack of historical and cross-cultural (including comparative law) perspective that this argument evinces. Countries that do not use the criminal penalty appear to have different patterns of drug use.[247] In the United States prior to the Harrison Act, opium addicts appear to have included many middle-class people, often women, for whom opium was a medicinal agent in various nostrums.[248] The composition of this drug-using population was probably decisively shaped by criminalization, resulting in a disproportionate number of addicts today among poor urban minorities.[249] That criminalization is responsible for these shifts is borne out by studies linking addiction to social and psychological factors.[250] If the condition of members of racial minorities who are heroin addicts is to be ameliorated, decriminalization, not criminalization, is the proper course. To the extent that criminalization itself bears responsibility for the shifts in composition of drug users to more disadvantaged persons, a sound theory of justice should condemn, not endorse, a policy that appears to have worsened the circumstances of the most disadvantaged classes.[251] When it is observed that criminalization has clearly fostered injuries incident to drug use, including death, that regulation and supervision can lessen these dangers,[252] and that these injuries fall principally on the most disadvantaged classes, the case against criminalization becomes very strong indeed. Of course, strong principles of justice, consistent with the autonomy-based interpretation of treating persons as equals, require that persons should have equal prospects for self-respect and well-being.[253] Certainly, more equal opportunities and conditions of life should be made available to racial minorities. Criminalization of drug use, however, does not advance these ends; indeed, it perversely aggravates injustice. Decriminalization would not, as critics of the ideology of tolerance urge, increase the vulnerability of the poor to exploitation;[254] rather, it would release them from a morally empty stigma and from the crime tariff industry which preys on them. Drugs would be cheaply and safely available, carefully regulated, and with enough information to fully inform persons of risks and benefits. The millennium of social justice would not be realized, but one form of unjust exploitation, one form (sanctified by unjust moralism) of blaming the victim, would be ended. Perhaps, in such circumstances, more poor persons would use certain drugs than more fortunate persons; perhaps not.[255] At least, however, the poor would be extended some measure of dignifying respect for their right to shape their own lives, undistorted by a false, sanctimonious, and class-biased moralism that ideologically distorts reality by underestimating the dangers in its own patterns of drug use and overestimating the dangers in the drug use of others.[256]