84
GORE VIDAL
scandal of the west. With the passage in 1914 of the Harrison Act,
addiction to narcotics was found to be not the result of illness or bad
luck, but of sin and sin must of course be punished by the state. For
half a century the Federal government has had a splendid time playing
cops and robbers. And since you cannot have cops without robbers,
they have created the robbers by maintaining that the sinful taking of
drugs must be wiped out by law. As a result, the government's severity
boosts the price of drugs, makes the game more desperate for addicts
as well as pushers, encourages crime which in turn increases the payroll
of the Narcotics Bureau. This lunatic state of affairs could exist only
in a society still obsessed by the idea that the punishing of sin is the
responsibility of the state. Yet in those countries where dope addiction
is regarded as a matter for the doctor not the police, there can be no
criminal traffic in drugs. In England there are 550 drug addicts. In
New York City there are 23,000 addicts.
Theoretically the American separation of church and state should
have left the individual's private life to his conscience. But this was
not to be the case. The states promptly took it upon themselves to
regulate the private lives of the citizens, flouting, many lawyers be–
lieve, the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution. The result of this
experiment is all around us. One in eight Americans is mentally
disturbed, and everywhere psychiatry flourishes. Our per capita acts of
violence are beyond anything known to the other countries of the
west, making our city streets unsafe for Peggy Goldwater and Mamie
Eisenhower to walk. Clearly the unique. attempt to make private
morality answerable to law has not been a success. What
to
do?
On April 25, 1955, a committee of The American Law Institute
presented a Model Penal Code (tentative draft number 4) to the In–
stitute which was founded some 40 years ago "to promote the clarifica–
tion and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social
needs." This Code represented an attempt to make sense out of
conflicting laws, to remove "dead-letter laws" which might, under
pressure, be reactivated or used for sinister ends, and to recognize that
there is an area of private sexual morality which is no concern of the
state. In this the Code echoed the recommendation of the Wolfenden
Report which said: "Unless a deliberate attempt is to
be
made by
society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of
crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality
and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not th.e law's
business."
The drafters of the Code proposed that adultery and sodomy
be-
