FROM CRIMINALIZATION TO REHABILITATION: Abandoning “The War on Drugs” THESIS EDIT | Page 17

is the most basic, bare-bones commitment that the law owes us. There must always be a striving
present within our criminal justice system to enact laws whose intentions are pointed in the
general direction of society’s wellbeing.
However, perhaps more important than this “striving” to better our lives, and to control
human behavior for the greater good of participants in this communal construct, laws must be
effective in doing so. Laws can only be considered “good” laws when they successfully “impose
obligation.” In other words, if we are to qualify a law as a “good” law, this law must actually
achieve what it has set out to accomplish. Like most traffic laws, criminal laws must be
functional and pragmatic in their application to the real world, not idealistic or symbolic.
If “good” laws accomplish what they set out to achieve, then “bad” laws fail when they
are unable to accomplish the goals they have set out to achieve; they are ineffective. We can all
agree that this is a simple exercise in logic; there is no complexity or ambiguity presented in this
notion.
Relating to this concept of “bad” laws, in his “Eight Ways to Fail to Make Law” Lon L.
Fuller explains ways in which one can fail to make law. Considering criminalization of drug use,
#6 is especially relevant to our discussion: Fuller writes that a legal authority can fail to make
law when he tries to enact “rules that require conduct beyond the powers of the affected party.”
Fuller explains that, “there can be no rational ground for asserting that a man can have a moral
obligation to obey a legal rule... that [commands] the impossible [of him].” The law “can punish
or sanction us only if it provides us with a reasonable opportunity to comply with its demands.”
We cannot reasonably expect a person to abide by a rule that is literally impossible for him
to obey. “To order him to do an act that is impossible, is to convey... your indifference to his
powers of self-determination,” or, in the case of addiction, his powerlessness. Therefore, when