Considering that he is a criminal, Ronald Harmelin may well belong where he is, in a Michigan prison in the company of men who have committed murder, rape, assault and armed robbery, often several times.
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Harmelin, who is 45 years old and has been in prison since 1986, did none of those things. He didn`t hurt a soul. Nor had he been found to commit any crime until he got caught carrying slightly more than 1.5 grams of cocaine.
Cocaine is bad for the health and welfare of those who use it, and its widespread use is bad for society, which therefore arguably has the right to ban its sale and possession. So it is not outrageous on its face that Harmelin has to share the company of men who committed acts far worse than his.
There is, though, this other distinction between him and them. Most of them will one day get out of prison. Harmelin may not. Michigan law states that anyone convicted of possessing more than 1.5 grams of cocaine be imprisoned for life, with no possibility of parole, and last week the much-discussed ”conservative” majority of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law`s constitutionality.
Whereby are two questions raised, the lesser of which is how justices who predictably uphold the power of government and who go to some lengths to find reasons (excuses?) to overturn long-standing precedent can be called
”conservative.”
The greater question is whether the ”war on drugs” brings America closer to the status of a police state than any time since Woodrow Wilson`s attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, stopped poking under the beds of people whose opinions displeased him.
That`s a question, not a conclusion. The hypersensitivity of those who see straws in the wind as proof of hurricanes is almost as annoying as the pompous self-righteousness of the narcotics squads.
But there are reasons for concern. Harmelin is not the only person whose sentence is not ”tailored to (his) personal responsibility and moral guilt,” to quote the dissent in the Harmelin case from Justice Byron White, hardly a friend of cokeheads and criminals.
In some cities, police have taken to boarding buses to ask passengers if their baggage may be inspected, another tactic recently upheld by the Supreme Court. In and of itself, this is no tragedy; any drug courier stupid enough not to refuse that request deserves his fate. But the presence of a burly deputy blocking the narrow aisle of a bus can be, to say the least, intimidating, to the innocent and the guilty alike. Many people, not knowing that they have the right to deny these requests, will find themselves humiliated as police rifle through their dirty underwear, personal letters and private reading material.
In other cities, police have searched the homes of people who have bought plant food and paraphernalia from mail-order firms that advertise in High Times, the pro-drug magazine. Mind you, the persons whose homes have been searched did not themselves necessarily read High Times (though the fact that police know who does is outrageous; who reads what is none of any government agency`s business). They just bought legal merchandise from legal businesses that bought legal ad space in a legal, if silly, publication.
Even worse is the abuse of the law, itself perhaps reasonable, allowing the government to seize the property of drug offenders. It might be reasonable to seize the ill-gotten gains of major dealers. But when the government takes away the home of somebody who is cultivating marijauna for his own use (as was done recently in northeastern Vermont), the government is simply being an arrogant bully.
People who violate the law should be punished, but the punishment should be in proportion to the violation. Snatching a house is woefully out of proportion for the crime of using something that is, by all objective criteria, no more dangerous to the user or to society than is the perfectly legal drug many of us regularly ingest via clear or amber liquids.
This is, granted, no small danger. Those of us who drink and enjoy it have a special responsibility to acknowledge alcohol`s potential to inflict personal and social damage. And those of us for whom marijuana and cocaine hold no temptation, who find that (aside from some of its music) the drug culture is boring, and who believe that, in a democracy, law is (with extremely rare exceptions) a positive good that ought to be obeyed for its own sake have a special responsibility to warn against anti-drug hysteria.
Even if drug users deserve punishment, they do not deserve bludgeoning. And the rest of us do not deserve having our privacy invaded on the off chance that we might possess some controlled substance. If drugs are so seductive, law enforcement will not stop their use. And a society that is willing to give up its personal freedoms to save itself from drug abuse has already surrendered to the wrong enemy. This society need not do that.