The Philosophical Primacy of the 9th Amendment in terms of Granting Function to The Constitution

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

What this means to a philosopher is that the constitution shall not be used against the aim for which it was erected.
James S saint was always hammering on the necessity of this clause, but it's actually there.

The Interwep is vague, people seem not to understand this amendment. But it is the centerpiece of the Bill of Rights, it carries the philosophy behind it.

So call me a 9th Amendmendist.

Yes, there exists a store of "natural rights". The Bill, in enumerating some of these rights, is not legitimizing those enumerated against those not so, but rather, utilizing those few specifically enumerated as a check on the scope of government power, for which task some of those not enumerated may prove themselves of utility at a later point, though which are in any case still afforded equal confidence, and in no way to be considered incidental to the basic purposes and resolution of the founders, who so hardly touched upon them in our judiciary character, but rights which may not be so dispensed with in the same. The 9th simply states this fact explicitly.

The right to jerk off is as much a right as anything else, but specifically enumerating it in the legal framework would not provide any meaningful and practicable check on the scope of federal authority, so there was no reason to bother with it. But the fact that it was not bothered with, is not an indication that it can be infringed upon, or is even any less of a right than the right to freedom of speech: this later right, contrarily, whose enumeration and precise legal definition were incredibly useful in articulating certain checks on the scope of governmental powers, was so included in the Bill for precisely this reason and this reason alone. This explication in the ninth, typifies the whole constitutional philosophy.

So people often read the whole Bill incorrectly. The Bill is not a list of rights the government is giving us, but rather, a list of checks on government power that we are giving the government, through the precise legal framework of those enumerations.

The idea of adding amendments thus boils down to the idea of enumerating, within this framework, extra rights from the common store in nature, which would be useful in further extending, or more perfectly articulating, that system of checks on the scope of powers between individuals, between individuals and government, and between the internal branches of the government itself, whose preservation it is the entire labor of the constitution to afford posterity. Only in this sense is the constitution a "living document," an idea no less generally misunderstood, as is the Bill of Rights.

Based on what I said above, one could argue that the right to consume drugs is one of the unenumerated rights. For from this right, one could articulate the right to be one's own doctor, among other things, and thus obtain valuable restrictions of governmental reach- valuable, for they would "more perfectly articulate" "the basic purposes and resolution of the founders," that is, "that system of checks on the scope of powers between individuals, between individuals and government, and between the internal branches of the government itself, whose preservation it is the entire labor of the constitution to afford posterity.".

The only way to contravene that natural right would be through an amendment to the constitution, like the one that was passed and later repealed, which prohibited alcohol.

Currently the federal law under Nixon is what criminalizes certain substances. When a mere act/federal law and the constitution are found to be at odds, the constitution wins.

How is the whole war against drugs thing constitutional?

Basically:

We have a store of natural rights.


Some of these are enumerated specifically in the Constitution and the Amendments because they allow a legal framework to be articulated that defines how the spheres of power relate to one another.


Some of them were not enumerated in the Bill at the time because the founders couldn't figure a way to use them in further articulating that system. They aren't any less "rights."


We can amend the constitution to add rights from our natural store and further articulate that system.


To contravene either an enumerated or a natural right with anything less than a constitutional amendment is impossible.


The right to consume drugs is a natural right.

I can't possibly conceive how someone could construct a rational argument stating that we do not have a natural right to consume "drugs". (And "drug" is just a label anyway, a fairly arbitrary one at that).

Of course that's not the same as saying it is always a good idea to consume drugs. Or anything else for that matter.

No one has a right to never do something stupid, harmful or which they may regret later.