The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (31 page)

Somewhere, Trey Parker and Matt Stone just heard that and said, “Thank
you
!”

Like many episodes of
South Park
, “Medicinal Fried Chicken” drags real political scenarios into the cold, hard light of the Rocky Moun­tains. In this particular case, the issues include the ­normalization of the use of cannabis, ostensibly for combatting glaucoma, chronic pain, cancer, epilepsy, and other medical needs. At present in the US, medical marijuana has been legalized (in terms of possession, cultivation, or both) in 16 states and the District of Columbia; in 2000, Colorado legalized the possession of up to two ounces of usable cannabis and allowed dispensaries to be established.
¹
But the issue of addiction in “Medicinal Fried Chicken”—and the observation that Americans seem keen to be addicted to
something
, legal or not—also stretches to the American movement to provide environments in which healthier eating is encouraged by banning fast food chains from establishing new restaurants, particularly in low-income areas. Such laws typically provoke a firestorm of controversy regarding rights and freedoms—even a kid like Cartman is highly passionate about the fast food issue when, in Randy’s car, he says, “Uh sorry, sorry. I just, you know, when I’ve been waiting too long for the Colonel’s chicken I get easily ­agitated. You’re a fuckin’ asshole Kenny!”

In this chapter, I’d like to challenge the received interpretation of the moral message behind “Medicinal Fried Chicken” and many other
South Park
episodes, the message that legislating lifestyles is immoral at worst and ridiculous at best. This message is encapsulated by the moral perspective known of libertarianism, which takes individual rights in political and social scenarios to be not only basic, but also to trump many other moral considerations. In the discussion of the ­legalization of addictive substances—whether pot or fried chicken—Americans very quickly jump to the tension between individual rights and community standards, a conflict that may be insoluble and is certainly interminable. The US has been beset in recent years by political calls for “reform” that recommend the dismantling of rules and regulations because they unfairly bind people’s (and corporations’) freedom of action. But, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein points out: “Because they resolve cases in advance, rules are disabling, but they are enabling, too. Like the rules of grammar, they help make social life possible … Rules facilitate private and public decisions by establishing the frameworks within which they can be made, freeing up time for other matters.”
²
Not only is Sunstein correct, but rule-less Americans are becoming less and less competent to run their own lives while still maintaining a minimal common good; at least that’s the point I’ll try to make. This fact is making the US more like South Park, and this is something we all have a good reason to avoid.

The touchstone in social philosophy for discussion of the relation ­between community standards and individual rights is John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873)
On Liberty
, a long Victorian essay about the proper compass of liberty. At the center of all of Mill’s arguments is the ­
liberty principle
, that “the appropriate region of human liberty” is found in “a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest: comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself or, if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation.”
³

In trying to preserve a space for individualism, Mill claimed that the best forms of social organization make possible “liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures,
so long as what we do does not harm them
, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.”
⁴
In Mill’s native Britain, civil rights were guaranteed by a long string of legislative and judicial decisions dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215; in the United States, many such rights are codified in the Bill of Rights seconded to the American Constitution. Intriguingly, Mill didn’t defend civil liberties on the grounds that they were based in the inalienable rights of individuals—a concept that his godfather and fellow philosopher Jeremy Bentham had called “nonsense on stilts.” Rather, Mill saw the health and well-being of society as a whole as bound up with the individual freedom of its citizens.

For his time, Mill was a radical, but he was also a member of the social elite. His vision of an educated society enjoying music and poetry is an inherently sustainable one, but it’s not clear that this vision would work well in a huge, diverse nation such as the US in the twenty-first century. And, in this question, the one question that Mill never asked is an extremely important one: where do individuals’ “tastes and pursuits” come from?

South Park
is a case study in how problems emerge when Mill’s views are plunged into the libertine, consumerist culture of contemporary America. While Mill provides a passionate defense of the ­maximal liberty of the individual in a society that was increasingly reliant on collective labor and productive of mass media, his arguments are mainly about the beneficial consequences—primarily increased chances for finding truth and growth—that such liberal, open societies are likely to incur. He doesn’t deal in any detail with the question of what occurs when one person’s liberty interferes with another. In particular, Mill fails to make it clear exactly what
harm
consists in. For example, in the episode “South Park is Gay!” Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave take Kyle to New York to kill the cast of
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
. This is clearly a situation of
immediate harm
and Mill would invoke the power of the state to stop them, because no matter how annoying the cast of
Queer Eye
is, their own rights to their lives are not in dispute. However, in another Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave episode, “The Death Camp of Tolerance,” we see a case of
indirect
harm when Garrison, in an effort to get fired by the school board for being gay, subjects Mr. Slave to a course of sexual sadism in front of his kids. This is not a case of physical, but of potential psychological or moral harm. Whether harm is inflicted in this case is dependent upon each child’s experience, character, and psychological makeup. While many, if not most, parents would agree that children have a right not to be exposed to offensive behavior, Mill would say that merely being offended isn’t being harmed. So it all comes down to whether or not witnessing the sexual sadism actually harms the children.

For tensions between an individual’s good and the common good in the drug legalization debate, let’s look at a 1989 exchange between Milton Friedman and William J. Bennett. Bennett, who was at the time director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, responded to an open letter in the
Wall Street Journal
written by Friedman, a libertarian economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1976. Bennett’s view of the
war on drugs
was uncompromising. “In my judgment,” he wrote, “and in the judgment of virtually every serious scholar in the field, the potential costs of legalizing drugs would be so large as to make it a public policy disaster.”
⁵
Friedman was also concerned about the worst effects of drug abuse, but more concerned about how the pursuit of drug dealers and users turns the “tragedy” of drug use for addicts into a “disaster” for society: “Every friend of freedom … must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”
⁶

You may agree, as I do, with Friedman’s opposition to the war on drugs. As a libertarian, though, Friedman’s argument seems to be fueled by two highly debatable presuppositions: first, that any state intervention in the lives of individuals will result in a net loss of freedom in “an armed camp,” and second, that in situations where individual rights and liberties come into conflict with claims in defense of a common good or a common security, the former must win out. Perhaps, however, you’re more likely agree with Bennett, who calls himself “an ardent defender” of American laws against drug abuse because this latter practice is morally wrong. “A true friend of freedom understands that government has a responsibility to craft and uphold laws that help educate citizens about right and wrong.”
⁷
One of the most significant differences between Bennett’s position and Friedman’s is that Bennett sees the exposure of Americans (particularly children) to the
moral
consequences of drug abuse as an
immediate
, not an indirect harm. But there are many reasons to oppose the widespread abuse of drugs other than moral ones, some of which we’ll deal with soon.

What about medicinal marijuana? This might seem to require a different approach, since the argument isn’t that everyone has a right to do what they will with their own body, but rather that, as a relatively harmless, natural, and inexpensive drug, marijuana use ought to be allowed on a limited basis. Why? For the purposes of supplying its active ingredient, THC, for: pain relief for sufferers of nerve damage; “nausea, spasticity, glaucoma, and movement disorders;” and stimulation of appetite in people who have wasting diseases, including HIV.
⁸

Interestingly enough, Mary Jane is relatively non-addictive. A much-quoted 1999 study of “Marijuana and Medicine” notes that of the 76% of the general US population who have tried tobacco, 32% had become addicted. Compare that with the 46% who tried ­cannabis versus the 9% who become addicted and the 2% who tried the ­second most addictive drug after tobacco, heroin, 23% of whom became addicted.
⁹
Heroin also topped the British medical journal
The Lancet
’s 2007 schedule of “Drug Rankings by Harm.” On a 0 to 4 point scale of possible risks, heroin scored 2.78 for physical harm, 3.0 for dependence, and 2.54 for “social harm.” On the same three criteria, tobacco scored 1.24, 2.21, and 1.42, respectively, while cannabis rated 0.99, 1.51, and 1.50.
¹⁰

Despite this, there are many who don’t support even the limited introduction of what is currently a Schedule I drug into society, citing the wider availability of pot as a clear and present danger to youth, as a smoke-and-mirror campaign to legalization of non-medicinal ­marijuana, and as carrying significant health risks. “No medicine ­prescribed today is ever smoked,” one opponent points out. “Marijuana contains over 400 chemicals, and when smoked it easily introduces cancer-causing chemicals to the body.”
¹¹
Given both the pros and cons, it’s absurd that Randy Marsh would put his long-term health at risk simply to get weed legally at the former KFC, but his choice illustrates the lengths to which the denizens of South Park (and many real-life Americans) are willing to go to in order to satisfy their hedonistic urges. And, of course, there’s the fact that women like really big balls.

A perfect libertarian state would legalize drugs like marijuana, regulating them as just another commodity like prescription drugs or automobiles, and only punish its citizens for the consequences of selling or using drugs that violate basic rights to life, liberty, and property.

Property is of particular interest to libertarians, who often claim that the reason why coercion by state or society is wrong is because individuals, first and foremost, “own their own bodies” and can do with them as they please. It’s odd to say that our bodies are our property, since it takes a body to claim and protect actual property; also, we quite ­reasonably don’t let people do just anything they please with their property. It also remains to be seen what relationship owning property has to the moral status of people: after all, “owning their own body” is cold comfort to the homeless and penniless who are interested in also having their interests represented in a liberal democracy.

Centering itself on individuals and their property, a libertarian society would model itself upon the capitalist ideal of the perfectly free market, in which the value of every social good and commodity is determined by the law of supply and demand. Such a “minimal state” has only two areas of concern: stopping the use of force or fraud between citizens, and confronting external threats from other nations. No “big government,” no welfare, little regulation. And at first glance, the plot of “Medicinal Fried Chicken” provides support for this rosy picture. When the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in South Park and Salina are closed down because of the Colorado law banning unhealthy, fast-food restaurants in low-income areas, Cartman soon falls to buying buckets of Extra Crispy in dark alleys and eventually goes into business with Billy to bring black-market chicken from Corbin, Kentucky. Cartman at first gets into the illegal “original recipe” trade because he’s addicted to KFC; only later does he see the profit in it after visiting the Colonel himself in Corbin.

Likewise, perhaps the most important factor in the debate over the legalization of marijuana is the question of the drug’s addictive properties. If a substance is addictive—not just narcotics and other outlawed drugs, but also tobacco, alcohol, and perhaps even caffeine and sugar—then it has the possibility of producing either physical dependency through changes in the addict’s biochemical states, or the drastic modification of psychological habits, or both. In either case, addiction causes changes to the human brain that start at the reward-processing centers and expand to “complex cognitive functions, such as learning (memory, conditioning, habits); executive function (impulse inhibition, decision making, delayed gratification); cognitive awareness (interoception); and emotional functions (mood, stress reactivity).”
¹²
It’s been widely recognized that the moral agency of addicts is diminished as their autonomous decision-making capacities are whittled down by avoidance or withdrawal symptoms, the belief that they can only be happy when they’re high, or their sense of right and wrong is altered by the intense need to procure money or favors to secure their supply. More importantly, the addictive properties of drugs are the basis for a serious challenge to libertarians about the sources of “taste and desire,” as Mill put it. Just so long as ­corporations and special interest groups have an adequate understanding of human psychology, they can manipulate the way in which people utilize their freedom without the issue of coercion as the violation of human rights ever being raised. In this way, the freedom of the libertarian state could be merely “formal,” with no one actually being free.