Perhaps I should be more specific.

See the man in the photo at the top of this article? It isn't immoral for him to light a plant on fire, inhale the smoke, and enjoy a mild high for a short time, presuming he doesn't drive while high. But it would be immoral to react to his plant-smoking by sending men with guns to forcibly arrest him, convict him in a court, and lock him up for months or even years for a victimless crime. That's the choice, dear reader. So take a look at the guy in the photo and make your choice: Is it more moral to let him smoke, or to forcibly cage him with thieves, rapists, and murderers?

My own moral judgments don't stop there.

Denying marijuana to sick people whose suffering it would ease is immoral.

When a paramilitary police squad raids a family home, battering down doors without knocking, exploding flash grenades, shooting family pets, and handcuffing children, all to recover a small number of marijuana plants, the officers or the people who ordered them there are acting immorally.

When the United States reacts to the insatiable demand for drugs by American citizens by pursuing prohibitionist policies abroad that destabilize multiple foreign countries, it acts immorally.

When prosecutors coerce nonviolent drug offenders to risk their lives as police informants under threat of draconian prison sentences, they act immorally.

The dearth of empathy for nonviolent drug offenders serving years or even decades in prison is a moral failure.

Because we have shifted the costs of drug abuse away from the Americans who freely chose or would choose to use drugs and toward society as a whole, imposing more costs on people who never chose to use drugs but suffer from many harms of the black market, we have achieved a morally dubious redistribution.

What about character? When leaders like Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama support policies that incarcerate young people for behavior that they themselves engaged in without any apparent harm to themselves, their futures, or anyone else, it is they who exhibit character failures.

Of course, there are drug abusers who exhibit character failures too. And when those failures affect other people, when they steal or behave violently or recklessly, they ought to be punished. Law enforcement could focus on catching them, and society could do far more to rehabilitate addicts, if so much wealth wasn't squandered on an obviously hopeless War on Drugs. Like a lot of people who favor ending it, I believe a reformed policy would be a lot more moral.

