In the waning decades of the 19th century, Western societies experienced a wave of panic over the idea that various intoxicating substances offered pleasures so exquisite and seductive as to overcome the will and corrupt and enslave their users. One intoxicant after another became the target for prohibition efforts by ameliorist do-gooders.

All forms of prohibition make whatever is banned more desirable, and result in black markets. Black markets provide an opportunity for large profits by criminals, and typically lead to violence as rival gangsters fight over territories. The association of large profits with victimless forms of crime commonly results in the corruption of law enforcement.

Theodore Dalrymple draws on his medical experience as usual, in today’s Wall Street Journal, to debunk opiate addiction.

In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published a short book, “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” The nature of addiction to opiates has been misunderstood ever since.

De Quincey took opiates in the form of laudanum, which was tincture of opium in alcohol. He claimed that special philosophical insights and emotional states were available to opium-eaters, as they were then called, that were not available to abstainers; but he also claimed that the effort to stop taking opium involved a titanic struggle of almost superhuman misery. Thus, those who wanted to know the heights had also to plumb the depths.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted…

Why has the orthodox view swept all before it? First, the literary tradition sustains it: Works that deal with the subject continue to disregard pharmacological reality, from De Quincey and Coleridge through Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley, Bulgakov, Cocteau, Nelson Algren, Burroughs and others. Second, addicts and therapists have a vested interest in the orthodox view. Addicts want to place the responsibility for their plight elsewhere, and the orthodox view is the very raison d’être of the therapists. Finally, as a society, we are always on the lookout for a category of victims upon whom to expend our virtuous, which is to say conspicuous, compassion.

The myth of addiction has a powerful appeal to the human imagination, and is enormously useful in exculpating personal misbehavior. But a society which holds more than a million people in prison for victimless crimes is paying a terrible price in order to cling to its illusions.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Skousen notes that even Galbraith confessed recognizing the greater efficacy of freedom:

Mr. Henderson refers to one example where Galbraith changed his mind (about big business facing risk and competition). I can think of another: Which has helped the average person more — economic growth under free-market capitalism or redistribution of income via progressive taxation and the welfare state? In “The Affluent Society” (pp. 96-97), Galbraith wrote:

“Over the centuries those who have been blessed with wealth have developed many remarkably ingenious and persuasive justifications of their good fortune. The instinct of the liberal is to look at these explanations with a rather unyielding eye. Yet in this case the facts are inescapable. It is the increase in output in recent years, not the redistribution of income, which has brought the greatest material increase, the well-being of the average man. And, however suspiciously, the liberal has come to accept the fact.”

A Yale Senior Society Building

The Wall Street Journal today published a story (based on an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine) featuring just the kinds of themes illustrative of the arrogance and oppression of the ancien regime beloved by the hearts of liberal journalists.

Skull and Bones, the most prestigious of Yale’s senior societies, derives its public name from its use of that emblem, typical of the Freemasonry-inspired imagery adopted unversally by student fraternities founded in the 19th century Romantic era. Memento mori were characteristically exhibited to remind fraternity members that life is fleeting.

Skull and Bones, from the time of its foundation in 1832, has had a policy of deliberately encouraging wild rumors of its own dark secrets, influence, and power in order to enhance its prestige. One of the most popular legends, right up there with tales of guaranteed lifetime incomes, and Skull and Bones’ alleged control of governments and national economies, is the legend of the Bones collection of the skulls of famous individuals, including that of the famous Apache warrior, Geronimo.

The association of skulls with the society’s emblem supposedly makes their aquisition highly desirable to the society, so generations of enterprising and influential Yale men have spent their spare time bribing officials and excavating graveyards by moonlight in order to carry back prizes to be housed in the recesses of its High Street headquarters. The reality seems to be that the senior society does possess a human skull and pair of femurs, purchased as anatomical specimens back in the 19th century, which have been used emblematically since in annual photographs of class delegations.

A skull is a skull is a skull, and nothing has ever prevented dark hints that this particular skull is Geronimo’s, or Pancho Villa’s, or President van Buren’s. And like the legends of subsidized incomes, or the immense swimming pool supposedly in the club’s basement, the wilder the story, the more eagerly it was taken up and repeated as gossip in the college community. Bonesmen smiled behind the closed doors of their impressive clubhouse, as the hints they dropped, and the rumors they spread themselves, blossomed into wide acceptance, inspiring outsiders with awe.

The Geronimo skull legend made the news wires back about a generation ago, and in 1986 the Yale Society offered to return the supposed Geronimo relic to Indian possession, but Indian representatives were not satisfied with the skull they were offered and were unwilling to sign a receipt for its delivery.

Another account.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day — except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

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Stung by the Journal’s criticism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responded in a Letter to the Editor today, denying any partisan bias, by noting that the Times even covers major scandals involving democrats “(Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan)” (!):

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

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If the Times editorial policy is so non-partisan, responsible, and generally sans reproche as all that, I’d be curious to know why Mr. Keller found it necessary to stonewall, and refuse to answer, the timid and polite inquiries by his own pet lapdog “ombudsman” Byrom Calame, who noted that remarkable silence at the beginning of this year.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Holman Jenkins, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday pointed out the differences between models and reality, facts and theory, and the sorts of things its possible to do something about and those which it is not.

As used by the media, “global warming” refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity.

How can a reasonably diligent citizen assess this claim? Measuring average global temperature is not an easy matter. It’s a big planet, with lots of ways and places to take its temperature. Scientists, naturally, have to rely on record keepers in decades past, using different instruments, to produce what has become the conventionally accepted estimate of a one-degree rise over the past century.

But even if a change is measured, how do we know it’s manmade? Giant, mile-thick sheaths of ice have come and gone from North America in recent millennia. In our unstable and evolving planet, temperature is often either rising or falling. Who knows whether a trend is the product of human activity or natural?

The answer is nobody. All we have is hypothesis. Let’s be honest: A diligent and engaged citizen judges these matters based on the perceived credibility of public figures who affiliate themselves with one view or another. Less engaged citizens, whose views are reflected in polls showing a growing public concern about global warming, are simply registering the prevalence of media mentions of global warming.

In both cases, it may be rational to assume there wouldn’t be so much noise about global warming unless responsible individuals had validated the scientific claims. This is a rational assumption, but not necessarily a reliable one. Politicians adopt views that are popular in order to be popular. Scientists subscribe to theories that later are proved to be wrong. There are “belief” processes at work even in the community of climate researchers.

So how else might an intelligent layperson judge the matter?

Well, he could begin by evaluating the claim that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 0.028% to 0.036% without necessarily taking the measurements himself. This finding is so straightforward, it’s reasonable to assume it would have been widely debunked if unreliable.

Next, the claim that this should lead to higher temperatures because of the heat-absorbing qualities of the CO2 molecule. A reasonable person might be tempted to take this finding on faith too, for a different reason: because even ardent believers in global warming accept that this fact alone wouldn’t justify belief in manmade global warming.

That’s because all things are not equal: The climate is a vast, complex and poorly understood system. Scientists must resort to elaborate computer models to address a multiplicity of variables and feedbacks before they can plausibly suggest (choice of verb is deliberate here) that the net effect of increased carbon dioxide is the observed increase in temperature.

By now, a diligent layperson is equipped to doubt any confident assertion that manmade warming is taking place. Models are not the climate, and may not accurately reflect the workings of the climate, especially when claiming to detect changes that are small and hard to differentiate from natural changes.

Note this doesn’t make our conscientious citizen a global warming “denier.” It makes him a person who recognizes that the case isn’t proved and probably can’t be proved with current knowledge.

He’s also entitled to turn his attention now to the nonscientific factors affecting public professions of certainty about manmade global warming.

Nobody doubts, for instance, that when Bill Clinton asserts global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, he’s consulting not the science but a purported “consensus” of scientists. A layman asks himself: What can “consensus” mean if it asserts a judgment nobody is equipped to confidently make?

Likewise, a study that made news worldwide last month purported to show the death of frogs from warming. It did not show the death of frogs from manmade warming — the study contributed zero evidence one way or another on a human role in climate change. You would have thought otherwise from the media reports. Ditto Al Gore, who offers a traveling slide show (now a movie) in which he catalogs possible dire consequences of global warming in non sequitur fashion to persuade audiences that climate change is caused by human activity and would yield to human action.

Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who spent several years observing and interviewing staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, shows in a new paper that even climate modelers themselves, who appreciate better than anyone the limits of their work, nonetheless slip into unwarranted certainty in public. She quotes one: “It is easy to get caught up in it; you start to believe that what happens in your model must be what happens in the real world. And often that is not true.”

All this explains why, inevitably and unfortunately, today’s debate over global warming revolves almost exclusively around the status and motives of spokesmen for opposing viewpoints, rather than the science and its limits. Yet this is a story of progress.

Tony Blair, whose government has been a steady sounder of climate warnings, now says he recognizes the improbability of nations sacrificing their economic growth based on uncertain climate science.

He and many others also recognize that the problems associated with climate change (whether manmade or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms and droughts. Money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.

The irrationality of a tax-subsidy-created insurance system which typically gives you free (or at least low cost) health care when you are employed and prosperous, and which then shifts drastically-increased insurance costs to you as soon as you are out of work, is a nasty problem which perennially provides democrats with talking points and opportunities to try seducing the public into supporting its vision of a government-supplied free lunch.

Miraculously, this country actually had enough intelligence to reject HillaryCare once, but neither Hillary nor socialized medicine schemes are going away anytime soon. Today’s lead Journal editorial identifies the actual problems and points out precisely the correct solutions.

the President wants to fix defects in the market for health care. This is an area where he can do a great deal of good at little cost to the Treasury. And it’s high time. The inefficiencies of the current system are a drag on wage growth that’s being felt now even by the United Auto Workers union. And health care costs may partly explain why many Americans don’t feel as good as they might about the current economic expansion.

Longer term, it’s also increasingly obvious that the U.S. is approaching a tipping point where the reforms needed to preserve an innovative, market-based health system may become politically impossible. That’s because almost half of our health-care dollars are already spent by government. Do nothing and the inevitable growth of Medicare alone will lead us far down the path toward government-rationed health care a la Europe or Canada.

Even the half of our national health-care spending that remains a “private” responsibility bears little resemblance to an efficient market. That’s because the vast majority of Americans with private insurance get it from their employers, a relic of World War II when companies adapted to wage and price controls by offering insurance as a benefit to attract the best employees.

A tax exemption for employer health spending was later codified and will be worth about $126 billion this year. This enormous subsidy has created a system of overgenerous employer-provided plans that give individuals little incentive to pay attention to costs. It’s also unfair to people who aren’t lucky enough to get insurance from their employers, and therefore must pay for it with after-tax dollars.

So the first principle of reform must be to equalize the tax treatment of individually purchased and employer-provided insurance. Health Savings Accounts, which were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, are already a step in the right direction, since they mate a high-deductible insurance policy with a tax-free savings account to help pay pre-deductible expenses. Mr. Bush is usefully going further by asking for the premiums on the HSA insurance policy to be tax-free as well.

Equally important is creating a national market for individual insurance. Right now employers large enough to “self insure” can do so mostly as they see fit. But individuals and small businesses who want to buy insurance are at the mercy of state regulators where they live or operate. In overregulated states like New York and New Jersey, residents can pay 10 times as much for insurance as they would in neighboring states, and might not even be able to buy the high-deductible insurance necessary for an HSA. Individually purchased insurance also isn’t portable across state lines, contributing needless anxiety to normal life decisions like moving or switching jobs.

The Founders put the Commerce Clause in the Constitution precisely so Congress could act against internal restraints on trade such as today’s 50-state insurance market. We hope Mr. Bush endorses and fights for the bill from Representative John Shadegg of Arizona that would let individuals buy insurance from vendors in any state, no matter where they live.

The overall goal here is to move from the inefficiency and insecurity of the employer-dependent system to one where all workers have portable, individually owned insurance. A good analogy is portable 401k retirement plans, which are more appropriate to the mobile nature of the modern economy than traditional pensions. They are also more secure, as the increasing number of defined-benefit pension plans in default (United Airlines) amply demonstrates.

Achieving this won’t be easy, especially given the ideological stake that so many politicians have in a government-run system. They like the leverage of determining payment rates to hospitals and doctors, not to mention being able to take credit with voters for providing more benefits. But there is no free lunch in health care, any more than there is in any other part of the U.S. economy.

Health care is either going to be allocated by prices or by government, which in the latter case means price controls and waiting lines. Though it represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is the one industry in which the purchasers actually have no idea what anything costs. An individual market for health insurance would allow more freedom of choice while making consumers more cost conscious.

Market-based health-care reform could be a big political winner for Mr. Bush and the GOP. Americans have shown themselves averse to rationing via brute force, both in their rejection of HillaryCare and in the backlash against HMOs. And while the opponents have skillfully played on fears, consumer-driven plans — which let individuals “ration” care for themselves — have proven popular when they’ve been offered. Just last week the insurance industry announced that enrollment in HSAs had tripled in 10 months to three million people.

That’s a small part of the entire market, but an important start. Policy inertia on health care will inevitably lead to more government and Canadian or British-style waiting lists. But there’s still a chance to change course. Republicans in Congress should join Mr. Bush in seizing it.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent tradition, going back to 1949, of publishing the following editorial in the issue nearest preceding Christmas:

(excerpt)

In Hoc Anno Domini
December 24, 2005

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression — for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s….

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.