Leave the concertgoers alone

In your online article “Buzz-Killer?” [Web news, March 23], you reported that City Council member Dr. Carl Mumpower obtained privileged entry to the recent Bob Weir concert in Asheville and subsequently observed concertgoers exchanging and using illicit drugs.

Apparently, it is Dr. Mumpower’s wish that law enforcement should pay particular attention to this breach of the law and spend its limited energies continuing to chase the immoral, unconstitutional and failed “war on drugs.”

It is my opinion that the police present at this event should have only concerned themselves with actual rights-violating crime—that is, the crime of one individual violating the rights of another. That is their proper role, the Harrison Act notwithstanding.

It is the typical, paternalistic overreach of the government to arrogantly presume to protect me from myself—an odd scenario that happens to contain no victim. A victim only exists in cases where a perpetrator forcibly deprives an otherwise free individual of choice. The victimless, peaceable and voluntary commercial exchange and consumption of legally prohibited, recreational chemical substances is a government-created crime, and one that should not receive the moral sanction of a free people. (Unless, of course, American citizens are subservient to the state, and their right to pursue their own happiness as they see fit is subject to prior government approval.)

Voluntary associations and consequent personal behaviors, whether socially unfashionable or simply unpreferred by a self-anointed moral minority, should not be the object of law enforcement’s attentions.