To Free Your Children from the Tyranny of Social Media, Look to the Haredim

The premise of today’s liberal society is that when individuals choose for themselves the world becomes a better place. The routes by which the Western world came to this conclusion were long and tangled. For some, it was the product of an optimistic Renaissance philosophy of man, free to soar once liberated from constraints of class and custom. For others, it was the result of a pessimism borne of exhaustion after every dream of imposing a better world burned itself out in blood and despair. Economists, for their part, used mathematics and abstract models to demonstrate that allowing the individual to choose promotes the common good. As far as the political mainstream goes, though, all roads lead to the same Rome where the consumer is king and the path to the good life irreducibly individual. However polarized political debate becomes, there is one issue on which both sides sing from the same sheet: only they can be trusted to safeguard individual freedom.

While the boundaries of individual freedom have been extended across every obstacle of gender, sexuality and religion, there is one area which has proved unexpectedly resistant: narcotics. The legalization lobby is currently exulting in a string of victories decriminalizing marijuana and, in some cases, small-scale possession of harder drugs. It is easy to find voices extolling the public-health model of Portugal and predicting the imminent end of the war on drugs. Beneath the surface, however, the drug-legalization movement has lost momentum. Whatever the balance of compassion vs. convictions used to combat drug use may turn out to be, and whatever successes the legalization lobby might have in peeling off cannabis, the dream of treating drugs as just another consumer product is dead.

The dream died because, starting in 1996, America carried out an accidental experiment in drug legalization when Purdue Pharma first released Oxycontin for sale. Marketed as an all-purpose solution to chronic pain, Oxycontin effectively repackaged opiates as medication acceptable to the FDA. The dark and depressing story of how clinics across the United States became distribution centers for a highly addictive drug has, by now, been retold many times. Drug overdoses rose steadily to become the leading cause of death for people under fifty-five, resulting in the first sustained decrease in life expectancy since World War II. The increasing regulation of Oxycontin (and its many sister drugs) has not fixed the issue, since the addicted have switched to easily available and even more toxic street opiates. And so, silently and without fanfare, drug legalization has receded back into the bunker of libertarian student clubs. The war on drugs may be fought with better, gentler tools, but surrender isn’t an option.