Blog of the Moment: Drug War Rant

In political terms, the tortured analogy is often used because the ignorant (or the one preaching to the ignorant) would rather not addresss the actual facts of the issue and so tries to make the issue itself seem ridiculous to short-circuit real discussion.

We see this in drug policy a lot.

“If you want to legalize drugs, why don’t you just go ahead and legalize rape while you’re at it?”

It’s a classic tortured analogy misdirection. Of course, my favorite response to that is a rather facetious “If you don’t know the difference between drugs and rape, you’re not going to get invited to the good parties.”

All of us know why that’s a tortured analogy. It’s an attempt to avoid any real discussion of the issues. Drug transactions are consensual, rape is not. Drugs are demand commodities; rape is not. If you arrest a drug dealer, it creates an immediate job opening caused by demand, so the net effect of the arrest is an increase in drug dealers, whereas if you arrest a rapist, you get the rapist off the street, and it doesn’t result in a demand for new rapists. The illegality of drugs makes them so valuable that corruption in law enforcement and other areas inevitably ensues; the illegality of rape doesn’t make rape valuable.

These things are completely incomparable.-Tortured Analogies


Drug War Rant