Someone, somewhere wrote:

I believe that informed adults should be allowed to inflict whatever suffering they wish on themselves.  But we are not entitled to harm other people.  I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties.  They are revolting hypocrites.  Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes.

I’d like to address the “revolting hypocrites” charge. Lemme ask you, if I drink fair-trade tea, but not coffee, am I a hypocrite? What about tea, coffee, but not chocolate? Where’s the line between “doing nothing” and “completely acting out your ideal in every aspect of your behavior” where I stop being a hypocrite? You can’t charge someone with being a hypocrite because they do some things, but not enough to suit you.

I see this a lot when people want to cut down someone else who’s trying to achieve some ideal. Somebody starts eating vegetarian most of the time, but every once in a while they eat meat. “Hypocrite. You say you care about the animals, but look at you.” Somebody buys a fuel efficient car because they want to reduce petroleum consumption, and the nay-sayers respond, “Big deal. You’re still killing the environment with all the other industrial processes that support your life.”

Tell you what: why don’t I just kill myself, and then I won’t do any harm to anybody anywhere. At least you won’t be able to accuse me of being a hypocrite anymore. The fact is that doing something is usually better than doing nothing, or at least not worse. Just because I don’t act out a given ideal 100% of the time doesn’t make me a hypocrite. It makes me a human, operating in complex and interconnected web of causalities.

Okay, you might say, the hypocrisy is because of the severe consequences of “cocaine”. If you claim to care enough to buy fair-trade coffee, shouldn’t you care about Colombian kids getting their arms cut off? But pointing that question at the drug consumer carries with it a moral judgment that consuming cocaine is wrong. Why aren’t we asking the prohibitionists, “If you care so much about life, why don’t you end prohibition?” The fact is that the prohibitionists can end almost all of the criminal enterprise around drug production and trafficking by ending prohibition. You don’t see kids getting their arms chopped off over tobacco or Prozac, do you?

Assume, if you will, that the choice to legally consume cocaine and the choice to prohibit it are morally balanced and you have to choose one of them based on the outcome. Assuming that you believe that taking cocaine is inherently harmful, the choice to take cocaine in the absence of a prohibition-induced criminal context harms only the consumer. The choice to prohibit cocaine induces the creation of a criminal market that harms, among others, innocent Colombians. Which choice is morally superior? Harming yourself or harming others?