Drug WarRant

If you’re in my area (central Illinois), stop by on Friday for the 10th annual HempFest, sponsored by the Illinois State University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. I’ll be speaking at 6 pm.

Should be a great time. Details here.

Hardball with Chris Matthews. Chris did a nice job of putting President Obama on the spot regarding the drug war in questioning down in Cartagena. He shows that exchange, and then has a discussion with Ethan Nadelmann and Kevin Sabet. (I don’t really like to start my day with Kevin, so I haven’t watched that part yet.)

Al Jazeera Counts the Costs of the war on drugs. A 40- minute program from Sunday on the costs of the war on drugs, featuring interviews with the president of Guatemala, Otto Peres Molina; Kevin Sabet, formerly of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy; Armando Santacruz of the Mexican NGO Mexico United Against Crime; and Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

Unspeakable Harm Reduction – a new video by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, confronting the UNODC’s unwillingness to address even the words “harm reduction.”

Is it a sea change? Certainly we don’t expect reform to come from the top down — it’ll take an overwhelming revolt by the population to overcome the governmental self-interest. And the U.S. is firm in its resolve to keep the drug war going unchanged.

And yet, we have a huge number of leaders of Latin American countries blatantly calling for a discussion of legalization, and the two hard-line prohibitionists in the Western Hemisphere — Canada’s Stephen Harper and U.S.’s Barack Obama actually felt the need to express these thoughts this weekend:

Harper: “I think what everyone believes and agrees with, and to be frank myself, is that the current approach is not working, but it is not clear what we should do.”

Obama: “I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places.”

Apparently President Obama told the other nations of this hemisphere that legalization is not a “silver bullet.” I’m sure it made the translators wonder if the President of the United States actually understands the English language.

When something is not a “silver bullet,” that means that it isn’t a one-shot quickie solution to everything, not that it isn’t something worth doing. Nobody was talking about silver bullets except the President, and he’s now implying that we shouldn’t do something to change what’s going on unless it’s a silver bullet.

Well what does that say about American exceptionalism, anyway? When our revolutionary soldiers were told that the British were coming, did they say, “Well, shoot. We don’t have any silver bullets. Guess there’s nothing we can do about it.”? Of course not.

And it’s not like the President has been dispensing many silver projectiles himself. Take a look in Afghanistan. He’s shooting blanks.

Even worse, the silver bullet is a really bad analogy to use when talking about a situation where tens of thousands of people have died because of our bad policies. We need less bullets of all metallic varieties, and legalization actually reduces the bullets.

Put your gun away, Mr. President. What we need now is brains, not bullets.

So, Obama had to convince the other countries in the hemisphere that he knows what’s best for them when it comes to international policy related to drugs.

I’m guessing this wasn’t part of his strategy…

Secret service agents sent home after Colombia prostitution allegations
Members of president’s security detail recalled from Cartagena following claims of heavy drinking and use of prostitutes

… including George Will.

I noted in my discussion of George Will’s latest column that he seemed to be all over the place. My friend from Seattle even called me to ask “what the heck George Will was trying to say.”

It was apparently a real challenge for headline writers as well. Columnists generally don’t write their own headlines – those are chosen by the paper. Here’s a taste of the range of headlines that they came up with for the same column in papers around the country:

• Legalizing Drugs May Be Worth It
• 80/20 ratio is a significant factor in U.S.
• Drug legalization is coming, but at what cost?
• Weighing ups and downs of drug legalization
• Weighing pros and cons of drug legalization
• To legalize or not to legalize: That is the question when it comes to illicit drugs
• Should the US legalize hard drugs?
• Take the wind out of drug dealers’ sails
• U.S. weighs cost of legal pot versus enforcement
• Drug legalization makes a lot of economic sense
• Understanding the 80/20 ratio
• New strategy could hurt drug cartels
• Drug legalization has pros, cons
• We may find out whether legalization worth the cost
• The prices of making drugs illegal
• Drug policy calls for further review

PBS video: Obama Colombia Visit Renews Call to Retool U.S. Drug Policy. Ethan Nadelmann of Drug Policy Alliance and Ray Walser of the Heritage Foundation square off.

The interesting part of this is that Ray Walser starts off much as expected, but is unable to hold to a hardline approach.

Watch how the Heritage Foundation representative completely avoids off any strong defense of prohibition, agrees that a discussion of legalization is legitimate, and refers to legalization as “a long process.”

A good article by Jim Wyss of the Miami Herald: At summit, drug talk likely to be hot but hidden

The whole article is worth reading, but I want to highlight one small item:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told The Miami Herald that legalizing drugs is tantamount to legalizing murder to bring down the homicide rate.

“I do not support that,” he said.

Really? This is the Attorney General of the United States. The top law enforcement officer and lawyer for the government. And he doesn’t know the difference between murder and marijuana?

We’ve talked about this at length before — there are fundamental differences between laws dealing with consensual crimes and laws dealing with crimes of violence against others. Laws against murder don’t create a massive black market with violent trade routes and corruption. Laws against murder don’t end up incarcerating millions of non-violent citizens.

Laws against murder take violent criminals off the street. Laws against drugs fuel the development of violent criminals. When you arrest a drug dealer, you automatically create a job opening to meet the demand. There is no demand for being murdered.

If the Attorney General of the United States doesn’t understand these basics, then the rule of law is truly dead in this country.

One of the things prohibitionists often like to point to is that currently legal prescription drugs are subject to lots of abuse (they’ll usually call it an “epidemic”). In their minds this is somehow supposed to be some kind of argument against legalizing currently illegal drugs.

For example, Kevin Sabet tweets:

Ironic that major Rx Abuse conference in FL now as pundits debate the legalization of even more drugs.

Well no, Kevin. Rx abuse isn’t about legal drugs.

Assume that someone would like to use some Vicodin recreationally. It’s a prescription drug, but no doctor in the country can prescribe it for recreational use, or they will likely be sent to prison for a whole lot of years. And no person can possess it for recreational purposes without also being sent to prison if caught.

I hate to break it to Kevin, but that’s not an example of legalization, nor does it serve as any kind of guide to what might happen with actual legalization of drugs. It, in fact, preserves every aspect of prohibition, except for certain medical situations which, even then, might be second-guessed by non-medically-competent DEA agents. This means that all recreational use of prescription drugs must be handled through illegal diversion, with all the big money and corruption that the black market naturally entails.

Show me a drug where a doctor is legally allowed to write a prescription for recreational use, and then you’ll have a useful analogy.

In a similar vein, Zach Beauchamp, in Drug Warrior Non Sequiturs, does a nice job taking down Walter Russell Mead for making the same incorrect assumption.

Beauchamp properly points out that Portugal’s decriminalization is a better guide to understanding the effects of legalization than so-called “legal” prescription drugs.

Naturally, Keith Humphreys completely misses the point (intentionally or otherwise):

Zack Beauchamp makes an extremely common analytic error in a post on drug policy. In an effort to refute Water Russell Mead’s argument that we can learn something about drug legalization from the legal opioid pain medication industry, Beauchamp responds by citing data from Portugal.

I am not going to get into the substance of their debate here. I am writing only to point out that Portugal hasn’t legalized drugs, it has decriminalized them.

This is rich. Keith lambastes Beauchamp for a semantic perception, which Keith falsely calls an “analytic error.” And yet… note that Keith, in the same paragraph, refers to the “legal opioid pain medical industry,” ignoring the fact that such a limited form of “legal” is certainly not “legalization.”

Even better… Beauchamp never actually says that Portugal’s system is legalization.

Should be an interesting weekend, as the President goes to Cartagena for the Summit of the Americas. The administration has been working for the past few months to downplay and sidetrack the huge issue that will be in the room – why Latin American countries are forced to endure massive violence in order to support the U.S.’s futile attempt to prevent people from voluntarily buying drugs.

This press conference yesterday spells out the President’s schedule, and also points out both the fact that the administration doesn’t want to talk about the real issues drug policy and the fact that others do.

In the press conference, Dan Restrepo talked about a variety of issues that the President will discuss, including a short bit about how much the administration is spending on the drug war and treatment. But the first question from the press got right to it:

Q: My question is about drug policy. Although it’s not on the official agenda, several regional leaders, including the Colombian President himself, has said they intend to take the drug policy debate to the next level at this summit and of course it surrounds the call by many leaders to urge decriminalization of certain drugs and also to have a focus on U.S. consumption and reducing U.S. demand for drugs. I’m wondering, what will be the U.S. position and how in-depth do you plan to talk about this at the summit? Thank you.

MR. RESTREPO: Josh, as you know, this is not a new issue in the Americas, nor is this an issue where there is a consensus among the countries — the rest of the countries of the Americas. There are — and as you’ve seen it in the course of the public debate over the last several weeks in the region — real differences of opinion on the question of legalization and decriminalization.

U.S. policy on this is very clear. The President doesn’t support decriminalization. He does think this is a legitimate debate, and it’s a debate that we welcome having because it helps demystify this as an option. I think that Cartagena provides a real opportunity to build on the conversation that Vice President Biden started in Honduras for the countries of Central America last month, where how is it that we can work collectively in the Americas more effectively to address the real challenges of crime and violence that societies — that too many societies are facing right now. There is no magic bullet in that debate as the challenge of — as the consumption of drugs spreads through the Americas, the response and the responsibility to address this challenge also needs to spread. And we need to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to build the kinds of rule of law institutions necessary to defeat these transnational criminal organizations.

I think very much — you’re right that the conversation — this will be part of the conversation in Cartagena. And we welcome the opportunity to go more in depth as to how collectively the countries of the Americas can more effectively address this challenge. And as to consumption in the United States, I think I touched on that in the introductory comments in terms of the investments and the national drug control policy changes that this President has made to address and to enhance treatment prevention and education as ways of driving down drug use and demand here in the United States.

A couple of questions later:

Q: Dan, you say that President Obama welcomed to have the debate on drugs, and even the Latin American President, President Santos, he seems to be open to the idea to decriminalize the consumption of drugs. So the question is — I mean, since you say that the U.S. position is very clear in this regard, what is the — I mean, what is the purpose? What is the penalty to have this dialogue, this debate in Cartagena when already one of the main players in this issue, the United States, doesn’t seem to be able to consider any future change in the government strategy?

MR. RESTREPO: I think that the important thing to bear in mind here is this is a shared responsibility, and it is one that you have an increasing number of capable partners in the Americas who can help confront this challenge. And I think the President very much looks forward to a discussion in Cartagena about how we can do better as a group to address this challenge. […]

And this is not a debate where one country is standing in a very different place than all of the other countries. There is a variety of views on the issue of decriminalization in the Americas. The United States is among the countries who does not see this as the solution and does not see it as a viable option because of the problems that come with it, and because it won’t end transnational organized crime, but that we are — that the leaders of the region will have an opportunity to further discuss this issue and see how we can enhance our cooperation is a positive thing that should help improve the lives of people across the region.

Dancing as fast as he can.

The questions aren’t going to go away.