The American right has frequently been a force for good and a force for freedom. In recent decades, conservatives have challenged the evil empire of Soviet Communism, struggled to change peoples’ minds about abortion, fought to let workers keep more money from their paychecks, encouraged courts to protect property rights, and worked to loosen the white-knuckle grip of the teacher unions on America’s education system.

But the American right has a blind side: in its support for the War on Drugs, the right has done serious harm to our society and to our constitutional order.

The American right normally has a clear understanding of the relationship between freedom, morality and legislation. Christian conservatives understand that when Christ commands us to feed and clothe the poor, he does not mean that we are to take tax money from people by force and hope it trickles down to the poor though a government bureaucracy. He means that we, as individuals, have a duty to help the poor. Virtue is the free choice of what is good, and welfare legislation cannot make us virtuous by fiat.

But the other side of the coin, less well understood by conservatives, is that vices are not crimes. A rabbi once told me that the Torah has 365 thou-shalt-nots — one for every day of the solar year. If our society attempts to use criminal law to enact every jot and tittle of the Torah, there will be no end to intrusive legislation. Instead, the criminal laws of a free society should be limited to combating theft, fraud, and violence — cases where individuals violate other individuals’ rights.

Anyone who has dealt with a friend or family member with a drug or alcohol problem knows that drug abuse is a horrible thing. And we as individuals have a moral obligation to help people wrestle with the demons of addiction and live productive lives. But why jail?

According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, drug offenders constitute more than half of federal inmates and make up 48 per cent of the growth in federal prisoners from 1995 to 2001. According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, nonviolent drug offenders make up 16 per cent of Arizona’s total inmate population.

Lest we forget, America’s prisons are dangerous places. According to Stop Prisoner Rape, as many as one in five inmates are raped during their sentences, and the HIV-infected population in our prisons is roughly five times that of the general population. That means that any prison sentence can be a death sentence. It is only a highly “decaffeinated” Christianity that allows us to sleep soundly at night knowing that we have cast people into the earthly hell of prison in a futile attempt to help drug abusers.

In conversations with policemen and prosecutors, the best argument I’ve heard in defense of the drug war is that some nonviolent drug offenders would be involved in other crimes if there were no drug war. Even if that were the case, ending the drug war would free up patrol officers, detectives, and prosecutors to catch individuals when they commit the real crimes of theft, fraud, and violence. And we could continue to punish individuals who sell drugs to children.

But the reality is that most drug-related crimes only happen because drugs are illegal. When America stopped putting people in jail for selling and drinking alcohol in 1933, homicide rates dropped almost 50 per cent during the next ten years. Because there were no longer any black-market profits to be made, alcohol went from back alleys to liquor stores, and bootleggers stopped shooting each other in turf wars.

The drug war is a hypocritical exception to the American right’s normally stalwart defense of the United States Constitution. In a more honest age, it took the Eighteenth Amendment to allow the federal government to prohibit alcohol. But the federal drug war is yet another float in the endless parade of unconstitutional federal programs that plague our country.

We must end the War on Drugs. That means the release and exoneration of all nonviolent drug offenders. It’s not only the right thing to do: it’s the “right” thing to do.

Tom Jenney, a registered Republican, works in media relations in Phoenix.