Drug WarRant

Based on the excellent, though occasionally derailed, discussion we were having at Opposing prohibition is not designed to be a simple solution to the drug problem, it appears that it would be good to talk definitions again.

The definitions of “legalization” and “prohibition” are sometimes used as ways to create straw men arguments, by essentially claiming that your opponents are for something else entirely.

“Legalization” has been used that way a lot. Prohibitionists will use the L word as though it necessarily means that we would need to allow major corporations to place Superbowl ads touting the self-esteem benefits for pre-teens shooting up heroin, and that pre-filled needles would be sold in shrink-wrap containers in the impulse display by the cash register at 7-11.

And then, when we say that legalization can include regulation, we get comments like:

Every regulation is a prohibition of something. … Meaningful regulation is a prohibition of some kind.

If we want to get into parsing dictionary entries, fine, but it’s pretty disingenuous to claim that regulation is equal to prohibition in a discussion about drugs being legal or not (thereby if you’re opposed to prohibition, you’re also opposed to regulation). Conflating regulation and prohibition in a discussion of legalization is nothing more than a dishonest attempt to re-define the position of those opposed to prohibition.

Consider alcohol. Would you say that prohibition never ended? After all, alcohol has been heavily regulated for every moment of time since the years of what the history books call “prohibition.” Did the 21st Amendment end prohibition or not?

Tobacco is heavily regulated. Is it prohibited? No. Driving is heavily regulated. Is it prohibited? No.

Here are the definitions I often use:

Legalization: A status where responsible adults may legally acquire, possess, and use a particular drug, although there may be restrictions on time, place and manner. Legal does not mean unregulated. In fact, when it comes to drugs, most supporters of legalization call for some regulation and control.

Consider gasoline. It is an extremely dangerous substance — it can cause severe health problems or death if inhaled, can be fashioned into an explosive and can cause damaging fires. It is a legal substance (responsible adults may acquire, possess, and use it), but it is subject to control and regulation. It can only be sold by licensed dealers, and there are regulations as to how it may be used, in what kind of containers it may be stored, and so forth.

Legalization of drugs is fully compatible with regulatory efforts restricting access to children, forbidding use while driving or while working in safety-sensitive jobs, banning use in certain locations or situations, controlling the means for manufacture and distribution (including taxation and labeling), and creating standards for purity and potency.

Criminalization: A status where the manufacture, distribution, and/or possession of a particular drug is likely to result in criminal penalties if caught (ie, felony or misdemeanor charges, jail, fines, probation, criminal record), regardless of time, place, or manner.

Prohibition: Criminalization as public policy.

Decriminalization: American Heritage dictionary defines it as “to reduce or abolish criminal penalties for.” Theoretically, decriminalization could mean legalization (and is preferred by some drug policy reformers), except for the “reduce” option. Decriminalization is sometimes used to describe contradictory legal situations where marijuana, for example, is legal to possess and use, but not to acquire — this is a partial legalization that leaves intact certain aspects of prohibition’s dangerous side-effects.

The default status of any substance is legal.

Now it’s true that regulation, if used to improper extremes, can be indistinguishable from criminalization. For example, if the law said marijuana sales and possession were legal, but only on February 29, and not within a mile of any trees, sand, airplanes, or bodies of water, then it’s not regulation, it’s prohibition disguised as regulation.

When we have legalization, I believe that we’ll have to be vigilant to watch for the correct balance of regulation (tailored to individual drugs), evaluating potential harms, and the significant reduction (although probably not complete elimination) of the black market.

I am so damned tired of hearing prohibitionists say that nobody goes to jail for marijuana. We all know that’s a lie.

I want to mention one particular area where this particular lie is especially egregious.

Unfortunately, I get letters like this all the time…

The VA Hosp has had me on 60 mg of Morphine plus 1650mg of Hydrocodone for pain from spinal damage while I was in the Navy back in 83. I was sick every morning barely able to hold up my own head. In Jan. 2007 I had a third massive heart attack I knew my body wasn’t going to take much more opiate based pain killers. So I started growing my own Meds. after many years of killing plants I started growing some true pain relief. It was helping me to get back on my feet lose the extra weight no more morning throwing up last night’s dinner. My wife and I was able to get out enjoy movies and dinning out because I wasn’t sick all the time.

You know what happens next.

I’m charged with cultivation and sales a class B felony looking at 5-15 years

This is someone who is only growing for their own use, and wants to avoid having to buy their medicine from criminals… but you see, growing is a whole different category than possessing. It’s oddly called “manufacturing” in many places, and it also assumes “trafficking,” even though no marijuana is sold or given away.

And now you’ve got a disabled vet with a family facing serious jail time, unable to use a medical defense, and being charged as a major drug dealer.

It’s a sick system.

Remember during the Prop 19 debate how everyone (ie, RAND) suddenly got bent out of shape when legalizers said that a large percent of Mexican drug criminals’ income came from Marijuana? (even though that number originally came from the government)

They “proved” that the number was some unknown lesser number instead, thereby bizarrely supposedly negating the value of marijuana legalization to the reduction of criminal profits.

Must be a little embarrassing to them to see all the huge seizures of marijuana from Mexico these days.

These are just the latest

Federal officers are still investigating two warehouses that were impounded in the Otay Mesa area; it started on Thursday after a sophisticated drug tunnel was discovered linking the warehouses to a home in Tijuana.

The discoveries of the two tunnels netted nearly 50 tons of marijuana and renewed arguments for the legalization of pot by supporters of proposition 19, which was struck down by California voters three weeks ago.

OK, now. Let me get out my prohibitionist calculator… At 2,000 joints per ounce, that makes the street value… carry the seven… add a random factor of 2… ah, here we are… $14.26 trillion.

It is, however, a simple solution to the drug prohibition problem.

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post: On caffeine-alcohol mixes. Not surprisingly, he’s in favor of a federal ban on such drinks. Also, not surprisingly, I don’t support such a ban. I’m in favor of considering studies, regulating, providing warnings, and providing appropriate limitations to use, but, while I don’t particularly care much about alcohol-caffeine mixes, bans don’t provide an increased societal “good” over regulation, and public policy generated as the result of public hysteria is the worst kind of public policy.

Mark used this particular ban to make a broader point about prohibition in general.

He made some good and appropriate points about the nature of drug use and prohibition…

4. Fighting drug abuse by reducing availability always has costs: loss of liberty, loss of the benefits of non-abusive drug-taking, and sometimes illicit markets and the need for enforcement. Good policy balances those control costs against the costs of abuse, looking for a system that minimizes total harm.

… but then concluded erroneously:

Consequently, anyone offering a simple “solution” to the drug abuse problem, in the form of maximum controls to produce a “drug-free society” or eliminating prohibitions in favor of “taxation and reguation” or “prevention and treatment” is peddling snake-oil. The costs of drug abuse, and the costs of drug abuse control measures, are both real and inevitable, and the grown-up approach requires facing the tradeoffs squarely rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Ah, yes, the both-sides-are-wrong meme shows up again. In Mark’s mind, people who are in favor of “eliminating prohibitions in favor of ‘taxation and regulation’ or ‘prevention and treatment'” are claiming to give a simple solution to the drug abuse problem, and therefore have not considered facing the tradeoffs. Mark is ignoring the entire basis of the legalization argument in order to pull this sleight of hand.

I like to turn to the quote from LEAP’s Peter Christ

Drug legalization is not to be construed as an approach to our drug problem. Drug legalization is about our crime and violence problem. Once we legalize drugs, we gotta then buckle down and start dealing with our drug problem.

Of course I’d add a list of about 20 more things after “crime and violence,” including corruption, over-incarceration, lost rights, destruction of families, bad foreign policy, etc., etc.

In comments over at The Reality-Based Community, Daksya does a good job of pointing out the problem with Kleiman’s argument, but it appears to go completely over the heads of the folks there, as nobody addresses it:

Consequently, anyone offering a simple “solution” to the drug abuse problem, … or eliminating prohibitions in favor of “taxation and reguation” … the grown-up approach requires facing the tradeoffs squarely rather than pretending they don’t exist.

At the base of drug policy, there is a binary choice to be made, either prohibition or accommodation. The prohibition can be tempered with some judicious leeway and accommodation can be constrained by some prudent barriers, but essentially, there are only two modes and one must be adopted. One of the fundamental deficits of prohibition is that, being an absolutist policy, it allows no room for engaging and developing a considered attitude towards its object, thus locking the policy ‘in’. Any attenuation of its instruments have to be defended in roundabout ways, and can’t be set appropriately given the rhetorical and/or ideological surface commitments.

Nice job, Daksya. Let me try to put it another way…

The “grown-up” approach of “facing tradeoffs squarely” doesn’t in any way require keeping prohibition, particularly if prohibition doesn’t limit the total overall harm to society any more than appropriate regulation does. And by any reasonable measurement, it doesn’t.

In a post-prohibition model, it is actually quite possible to face the tradeoffs and provide the best harm reduction model for each drug (recognizing the differences between drugs). Mandatory reading in this area: Transform’s After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation

In fact, it takes some major unsupported assumptions to believe that you can be a grown-up and face tradeoffs squarely while keeping prohibition as basis for your drug policy model.

Let’s take a look at total harm.

Under prohibition, you have:

• Prohibition Harm (including crime, violence, corruption, incarceration, destruction of families, infringement on rights, harm to people who use drugs responsibly, interference with medical needs, foreign policy disasters, great expense, etc.)

— PLUS —

• Drug Abuse Harm (including overdose, health costs, harm to others by abusers, etc. – obviously this is part of the harms under prohibition since drug abuse exists under prohibition)

–EQUALS —

• Total harms under prohibition

Now, let’s take a look at total harms under regulation

• Existing Drug Abuse Harm (this, for ease of simplifying equations, is the same as the line item under prohibition)

–MINUS–

• Harm Reduction Value to Drug Abusers from Regulation (this is a real identifiable value from such things as regulated dosages reducing overdoses and drug poisonings, education reducing abuse (as with tobacco), reducing the stigma involved in getting help, etc.)

–PLUS–

• (The harms resulting from a completely uncertain change in the rate of drug abuse as a result of legalization) – as mitigated by the Harm Reduction Value above. This refers to the notion that drug abuse (and not just use) will increase significantly with legalization, regardless of the regulation approach. It is a notion that is fervently believed by people like Mark Kleiman, but not supported by existing models (ie, Portugal. Those models are necessarily flawed, since no real legalization laboratory has been allowed, but on the other hand, the belief in significantly increased abuse appears to be mostly a matter of faith. There are also those who believe that there will be no significant increase in drug abuse under regulation.

–EQUALS–

• Total harms under regulation

When you simplify the equations, it’s pretty clear:

For prohibition to be even an option in a policy that in a grown-up way compares trade-offs in harms to society and individuals, the unknown and unsupported “increase” in drug abuse harm, minus the harm reduction values of regulation to all drug abuse, must be greater than the very well known and established harms of prohibition.

With each drug out there, it is quite possible to craft a public policy of regulation that reduces the overall harm to society below what exists under prohibition. Therefore, there is no reason for us to consider prohibition as a viable tool in the crafting of drug policy.

Note, this shows that prohibition is not viable in a simple harm cost comparison. This doesn’t even include such additional factors as the basic immorality of prohibition as policy.

The argument might be made that prohibition can somehow be changed in such a way that it can exist without having great harm, but no such prohibition scheme has been demonstrated. The fact is that the most harmful aspects of prohibition have to do with its very basic nature (the creation of a black market) and are unlikely to be mitigated significantly by tinkering with sentencing reform.

It is not the legalizers who are peddling snake-oil. The prohibitionists are selling the quack medicine. In fact, what they are selling is poison — a concoction that fails to address the disease while killing the patient in other ways.

It’s good to be back, but I’ll have some catching up to do.

I didn’t get to read all the comments, but scanned a number of them on my phone. Pretty much every time I discovered an article that I thought would make for a good post when I returned… the commenters here had already found it, reported it, and commented it to death. (Makes me feel better about being away, knowing that the blog is in good hands.)

There were 700 messages waiting in the spam filter. I’m sorry if yours was in there, but I was not about to go through all of them, so they’re gone.

… because you need a new one and I’m still in wifi hell until tomorrow night.

It’s really too hard for me to do any kind of real posts on my iPhone.

There have been some great conversations in comments. Remember to keep it civil.

Give thanks for what you have, and remember those families that won’t be together today because of the war on drugs.

I’ll be without wifi for the next few days, so posting will be light.

Rio

Ten dead in police operations in Rio shantytowns

At least ten people were killed on Wednesday morning during a series of operations carried out by the Rio police in the city’s shantytowns.

The operations aimed at catching the criminals involved in a crime spree which has been devastating Rio’s metro area since last weekend. Multiple incidents occurred in different parts of Rio, with criminals setting cars and buses on fire. […]

The police’s public relations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lima Castro, told a local TV station that it is possible that two rival criminal gangs have teamed up to carry out the attacks.

According to Castro, local crime lord Nem, who dominates the drug trafficking industry in the city’s largest shantytown, Rocinha, may be the mastermind behind the crime spree.

Brazil police battle Rio de Janeiro gang violence

For three days, suspected gang members have been blocking roads, burning cars and shooting at police stations.

Military police have been deployed in 17 different slum districts.

Rio’s governor says the violence is retaliation by drugs gangs who have been driven out of some areas by a police pacification programme. […]

The authorities are convinced that the attacks are being orchestrated by drugs gangs in retaliation for being forced out of their traditional strongholds in some slum districts by police pacification units.

“Without doubt these attacks are related to the reconquest of territory and the new policy of public security in Rio de Janeiro,” Mr Cabral said.

“We are not going to retreat in this policy. We are going to push forward, pacifying communities and bringing peace to the population.”

Never retreat. Never surrender. No matter how many die and how futile the effort, we will continue to fight the drug war until we achieve peace through death.

Because the alternative, regulating drugs that are already used thereby depriving criminal gangs of their livelihood and saving the lives of the innocent, is unthinkable and not part of our vocabulary.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Cannabis is here to stay. And now, the medical cannabis industry is becoming a major entity.

New York Times

DENVER — It is being called the green rush. With more states moving to legalize medical marijuana, the business of growing and dispensing it is booming, even as much of the rest of the economy struggles.

Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.

Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.

I expect to see new stress lines between an emerging medical cannabis industry and the push for legalization. In the long run, legalization will win, because every step forward that medical cannabis takes is also a step forward for legalization. There may be some short term profit-taking that could put temporary wrenches in the works for legalizers…

But in the long term, the fact is that medical cannabis users like cannabis and they would not put up with any move by the medical cannabis industry to make it non-recreational (ie, an unpleasant yet necessary medicine), which is the only way that the medical cannabis movement could end in anything other than legalization.

Today’s candidate: Lt. Andrew Hawkes, a 19-year police veteran who has worked in patrol, K9, investigations, narcotics and administration. His book, Secrets of Successful Highway Interdiction, “contains eleven chapters on Highway Drug Interdiction.”

Why does the debate continue over marijuana legalization? at PoliceOne.com (comments from registered participants only).

People see that there isn’t much upside to legalization. Crime will always be associated with drug use whether it’s legal or not. Driving under the influence, thefts, burglaries, and crimes against persons would continue to be related to people using and selling drugs.

In my opinion, if California had passed this into law it would be a matter of time before Mexican drug cartels controlled American production of the drug under legal circumstances. We can control the border violence as it is, what makes us think we could stop the Cartel’s from having a legitimized business front to control production in California.

Wow. Just wow. Forget the typos. What does it take to actually imagine this? Let’s just look at that second paragraph (have fun with the first yourself)… How would the Mexican drug cartels control American production under legal circumstances? In a legalized market, how does the drug cartel compete economically with an American grower and still pay for their army back in Mexico and the guns and the politicians…?

Perhaps we should focus on taking down the cartels — the violent organized crime units that are committing so much more crimes than just the smuggling of drugs.

Um. We have. And lots of people are dying because of it.

Bureaucrats need to stop all the bullcrap discussions in Washington about “how” to protect our border and just do it.

Just do it? What is this, a Nike commercial? Maybe if we paint a swoosh on the fence, the drugs will stay out.

Bonus stupidity: wr134 in comments:

Potheads will still be potheads and will still rob/steal/burglarize to support their habit. Why make it any easier.

Update: Shaleen with LEAP has joined in the comments there, and now so has Howard Wooldridge:

Our Thin Blue Line is getting thinner. We waste some 10 million hours nationally chasing the green plant. Aside from issues like personal liberty and limited govt intrusion in one’s house, should detectives be in chat rooms catching pedophiles or flying around in helicopters? BTW, we are currently missing tens of thousands of child cyber porn folks and 400,000 rape kits have never been opened.

In my 18 years as a street cop I went to zero calls generated by the use of pot.