Jacob Sullum on His New Book 'Beyond Control'
September 3, 2025
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and one of the truly great libertarian writers and thinkers of recent years. I've been reading his work for a long time and I think this is the first time I've had him on the show (although it's possible I had one once before many years ago.)
We'll discuss Jacob's new book, "Beyond Control", about laws aimed at controlling drugs and guns and how interesting it is that people of one political persuasion tend to support one of those things while people of the opposite political persuasion tend to support the other, There's a LOT of interesting stuff in this book and I encourage you to read it if you're interested in this area of public policy. Jacob notes, for example, that both of these areas of prohibition have significantly racist components in their origins. Furthermore, there's precious little evidence that these laws provide benefit to the public though they surely -- especially with drug laws -- help make criminals rich. The question, then, is whether there are more sensible policies that might reduce harm without trampling liberty and without the massive negative unintended consequences of the current regimes.