Restraints on Liberty

The United States has one of the highest drinking ages in the entire world. Luckily, I recently turned 21 years making me no longer subject to the overzealous age constraint. That said, I now find myself subject to laws like open container and drunk in public that are designed to constrain legal drinkers. Most of these personally confining laws are prudent and I find myself agreeing with their premises. Take the open container law for instance. Until the 1990s, many states still allowed non-driver car passengers to consume alcohol, but over the ensuing decades that freedom was restricted. I find this exercise of the state’s police power agreeable because passengers consuming alcohol represent a distraction and a temptation to the driver. It would be hard to argue that drunken passengers having a party in the car will maintain a safe driving environment, so it seems prudent to restrict that freedom.

One restriction on my liberty that I find completely unwarranted is the ban on hemp growing in the United States. While the restriction does not affect me directly, my family is in the commercial farming business, so there is an indirect personal connection. Regardless of how personally this restriction constrains me, it remains an indefensible attack on liberty. Although the hemp plant is related to the marijuana plant, it is unable to produce any high and is not smoked. On the other hand, hemp is a highly useful plant that can be turned into many products including fiber, clothes, rope, paper, medicine, food, plastic, and insulation. Until 1970 hemp production was legal and often encouraged by the Federal government through various programs, but that year President Nixon signed the overreaching Controlled Substances Act effectively banning hemp at the national level. As a result American farmers and manufactures were put at a decided completive disadvantage with the rest of the world where hemp production is legal. This constraint was obviously the product of an overzealous drug policy rather than of reasoned critical thought.