Drug WarRant

The foremost academic apologist for a kinder, gentler prohibition — Mark Kleiman — has resurfaced to address prohibition again, and as usual resorts to academic dishonesty and outright wankery.
Kleiman had pretty much stopped writing about drug policy at his blog, particularly during the election season, possibly (I thought) because he got pummeled every time he would make outrageous, unsupported statements slamming drug policy reformers.
But all the press surrounding the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition seems to have brought him back to his usual prohibition-enabling diatribe (and so, of course, I must rant in response). Kleiman starts:

As Talleyrand said about the restored Bourbons, the anti-prohibitionists have learned nothing and forgotten nothing in thirty years of making exactly the same points in exactly the same way. Ethan Nadelmann’s op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal doesn’t admit that “an end to prohibition” means increased availability, and that one of the consequences of increased availability is increased abuse.

It doesn’t seem to me that it was the point of his OpEd — the point of the OpEd was that prohibition was damaging and that drug prohibition has similar failings. But that’s not enough for Mark.

Of course that isn’t where the argument ends; maybe the increased level of abuse is a price worth paying to avoid the bad consequences of prohibition: the harms generated by the illicit markets and by enforcement, plus the loss of liberty and consumers’ surpluses for those (for almost all drugs, the majority) who would use the drugs without falling in to the trap of drug abuse. But that’s where any honest argument has to start: how much more abuse are we going to have as a result of a given change in the laws? And that’s where Nadelmann & Co. relentlessly refuse to start it. Their “vigorous and informed debate” refuses to face the basic trade-off involved.

Note how Kleiman decides that he gets to determine where the start of the argument should lie. Apparently, unless we’re willing to state exactly how many more people will abuse drugs if they’re legal (regardless of the distribution structure), then he’s going to take his ball and go home and not discuss alternatives to prohibition. In point of fact, that’s his way of avoiding the “informed debate” at all — because he loves prohibition. He just wants to tinker with it to make it better.
But the issue of how many people use drugs and how many people abuse drugs is actually secondary to the issue of prohibition. That’s the part that Mark won’t grasp. Prohibition is the disease we are trying to end. And you can’t heal it by tinkering around the edges with drug courts and mandatory drug testing.
Prohibition is people dying and being imprisoned and corrupt cops and bad foreign policy and dangerous streets and broken families and over-militarization and environmental damage and racism and fiscal irresponsibility and drug dangers. This is the start of the debate. It is what really and truly matters. Then, once we have done that (and concurrently), we can look at what kinds of legalization models will work to truly reduce the harm of drugs. But that’s useless as long as prohibition is doing more damage. And as long as the “academics” have dishonestly refused to even discuss alternatives to prohibition (even as they formidably demonstrate the failures of prohibition), it is up to the drug policy reformers to continue to force people to pay attention.
Kleiman says that it’s dishonest to talk about ending prohibition until we talk about how many more people will abuse drugs. It’s not. In our country, legal is the default, and it is incumbent upon those who would deny liberty to justify it. Let the prohibitionists tell us how much it costs (in corruption, tax dollars, violence, loss of liberty, etc., etc.) for each addict we stop.
But that aside, there’s another issue here. Why is it that Kleiman puts the value of the drug abuser’s life over all the rest of us?
If I’m a family member of Kathryn Johnston or Tarika Wilson or Rachel Hoffman or Cheye Calvo or those dead journalists in Mexico or the thousands dead in Thailand…, well, you know, I wouldn’t give a fuck how many more stupid people addicted themselves to cocaine. I’d say fine, legalize it and regulate it so they hurt as few others as possible and give me my family back.
Kleiman continues….

And, speaking of honesty, Nadelmann refers to “500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations.” Really? How many of the dealers now in prison (most of the people in prison for drug offenses are incarcerated for dealing, not simple possession) were armed? How many actually used violence in the course of their business? How many of those in prison for possession actually have long records of predatory crime? (Hint: the average drug-possession inmate has more burglaries in his criminal history than the average burglary inmate.) The fact that violence isn’t part of the definition of drug offenses doesn’t mean that drug traffickers as a class are “non-violent.” The list of crimes compiled by those spared prison terms under California’s Prop. 36 Ö including not a few homicides Ö is rather impressive.

Ah, Nadelmann is dishonest for referring to “500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations” even though that is true. Kleiman wants Nadelmann to interview each of the 500,000 people incarcerated for nonviolent drug-law violations and find out if they were, at any time, violent. And then reduce the number of nonviolent drug-law violations event though they would still be “nonviolent drug-law violations.” Apparently, we should arrest people not for the crimes they commit, but for the crimes we didn’t catch them for. In other words, instead of arresting burglars, we should arrest drug offenders because they’re probably burglars. Unbelievable.

As to substituting taxation and regulation for prohibition, those “strict controls” are themselves prohibitions: it is prohibited to sell untaxed cigarettes, or to sell alcohol to those under 21.

Really? You’re going to go there? Really?
Talk about intellectually dishonest — this one really takes the cake. Gee, if we’re going to define prohibition that way then drinking alcohol wasn’t prohibited during prohibition. So what do we call it?
How far down must he go to attempt such stupid semantic tricks?
OK, for the really dense out there, here’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about eliminating criminal prohibition such that a responsible adult would be able to, in some transparent way, legally obtain and consume drugs, although there may be regulations in terms of time, place, and manner, and taxes may be charged, and these regulations may be different for different drugs.
But Kleiman continues…

And those prohibitions, just like categorical prohibitions on selling or possessing a particular drug, invite evasion and require enforcement. Tobacco smuggling is reported to be a major source of terrorist finance in Europe.

Again, intellectually dishonest. Badly so. To equate the policing of grey market sales tax evasion on legal products with the violent worldwide black market on illicit drugs is not just dishonest, it is insulting.
And so, we see what Kleiman wants:

That’s the honest debate we ought to be having: just what should we permit and what should we prohibit, and how should we go about enforcing those prohibitions, to steer between the Scylla of drug abuse and the Charybdis of prohibition side-effects?

It’s not an honest debate he wants. He wants a debate with legalization off the table. He wants a debate between prohibition and prohibition.
And that’s not honest. It’s insulting and contemptuous. And the world isn’t putting up with this crap much longer. If Kleiman and RAND and the others aren’t willing to be honest with themselves, nobody else is going to listen to them.
Update: He just gets weirder.
Now, in his blistering critique of Walters (made confusing by Mark’s insistance on promoting his own pet causes in the middle of it), Kleiman finds more unsupported ways to attack Nadelmann (and all drug policy reformers)

Walters and Nadelmann are like a pair of aging vaudeville comedians, still whacking away at each other with their slapsticks long after everyone in the audience has gotten bored with them. […]
The arguments for the drug war and for “an end to prohibition” are symmetrically nonsensical, only with opposite signs: rather like a particle and its anti-particle. Sadly, there’s a difference; I see no hope that the “drug war” and “drug policy reform” might someday meet and disappear in a flash of photons.

Cute. Geeky. Meaningless. It’s the only way he ever addresses alternatives to prohibition – by ridiculing and dismissing without reason, and without actually ever addressing them. More intellectual dishonesty.

We keep hearing from the drug warriors that the war is going great, with disasters like Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan held up as examples of success. Isn’t there some kind of psychiatric term for a complete disconnect from reality?
Danny K has an excellent post over at Transform: Afghan Opium and the Emperor‰s New Clothes about a presentation he attended featuring Antonio Maria Costa Executive Director UNODC and Bill Rammell, Minister of State Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK).

Their headline was the 20% reduction in opium cultivation which they welcomed (albeit cautiously) as evidence of new found success of their respective interventions in the region. Opium production, by the way is only down 6% (as yields per acre cultivated have risen).
The statistical annex on world drug prices and purity from the World Drug Report 2008, shows precisely how badly they are really doing – even by their own standards. It is now eight years after the Allied troops overthrew the Taleban and effectively took control of the country with one of the key aims being the eradication of the opium crop, and things really aren’t going well given the billions thrown at the sprawling military-led anti-opium enterprise since 2001.

That’s right, in our success, we’ve managed to increase opium production to more than twice the pre-2001 levels. We’ve done so well that the opium supply in Afghanistan is now significantly higher than world-wide demand, and large quantities are being stockpiled to keep the price from dropping.
Danny and Steve at Transform tried to pin Rammell and Costa down in the questioning, but the drug war cheerleaders failed to actually answer the questions (of course).
The whole post is really worth reading, but I want to highlight another passage from Danny that resonates (It continually bothers me how little attention is paid to basic economic laws).

Prohibition is what makes an intrinsically low value commodity like opium more profitable than any other agricultural option for Afghanistan’s mostly impoverished farmers. It is economic alchemy, whereby plants are transmuted into commodities worth literally more than their weight in gold. Even if supply side interdiction was more effective (and you try and eradicate 1500+ square kilometers of poppy fields scattered over an area the size of Western Europe, every year, forever) the effect would be be to push up the price, that in turn inevitably incentivises new entrants to the market, and new cultivation. It is an economist’s dream; the completely unregulated interplay of supply and demand, and whilst the demand driven economic imperative exists (and there’s no sign of significant change on that front) the best that can be achieved is temporary, marginal and localised supply side ‘success’. The problem may move around a bit – but it doesn’t go away.

Even though drug policy reform is a logical position for liberals in many ways, it has been very hard to get any traction publicly in liberal strongholds, as they have tended to vacillate between trying to be as ‘tough’ (stupid) as Republicans and avoiding ‘distractions’ from accomplishing things that would help people(!) In the process, they have taken a pass on addressing racism, helping the environment, and stopping the disenfranchisement of their own voters, among other travesties.
So it’s nice to see a front page article at Daily Kos by Jed L on the 75 year anniversary of alcohol prohibition and its connection to drug prohibition (referring to Nadelmann’s OpEd).
And the extensive comments so far are coming in very strongly for ending prohibition, more so, in my opinion, than they would have a couple of years ago. The few that are naturally uncertain, are being rather intelligently schooled by other commenters.

Drug policy reform’s bad boy, Barry Cooper, is apparently running stings on police now.
It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Mark Draughn’s take at Windypundit:

You know what would be interesting? If someone—perhaps in response to accusations that a group of cops was framing innocent people—spent months setting up a fake drug house to attract police suspicion. Then, after the police raided the place and found no drugs of any kind, asked to see the sworn search affidavit, so they could check it for accuracy against their own heavily documented activities.
You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to want to get in cops’ faces and not be afraid of what they’d do to you. You’d have to have a hatred for the drug war verging on madness.
You’d have to be Barry Cooper.
Yes, the madman behind the Never Get Busted Again videos has set up a sting operation to snare a bunch of cops …

“bullet” Some assorted coverage of the 75th anniversary of repeal

• We can do it again – celebrating the end of alcohol prohibition – Transform
• John Walters’ Well-Kept Secret: ‘Our Drug Policy Is a Success’ – Jacob Sullum at Reason
• DPA: We’re in the Wall Street Journal today – Stop the Drug War
• 75 Years Ago Today, Prohibition Was Repealed* – Bruce Mirken, MPP
• Prohibition Ended 75 Year Ago, but what have we learned – Rob Kampia, Alternet
• Change- or More of the Same? – LEAP blogs
• Ending Prohibition: Modern parallel? – Sean Kirst/The Post Standard (Syracuse)
• Repeal Day: The Daily Journal Op-Ed – Alex at Drug Law Blog. Also see On the 75th Anniversary of Repeal Day…
• Victory in Common Sense, 75th Anniversary – D’Alliance
• Happy Repeal Day! – The Agitator
• Waging War Against Drug Laws – Froma Harrop, Spokesman-Review (Spokane)
• A Day to Remember: Prohibition Isn’t Forever – Richard M. Evans, Metrowest Daily News (MA)

“bullet” MPP video: 75 years later prohibition still doesn’t work (alcohol then, marijuana now)

“bullet” DrugSense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

Patt Morrison, in the Los Angeles Times attempts a cute piece on the notion of taxing marijuana: Should We Tax Pot?

Do we think we can stick our bicuspids under the pillow and the national tooth fairy will leave $800 billion? No? Then what about legalizing and taxing one of our biggest, oldest vices?
That notion arose because Friday is the 75th anniversary of the end of a nationwide ban on a substance that millions of Americans broke the law and bought anyway: liquor.æ Criminalizing it turned out to have complications so enormous and expensive that in 1933 a new president, faced with a profound economic crisis, wanted it legalized and taxed again.æ
Now, as we’re desperately trying to reinvent the economy, should we consider marijuana? […]
Sacramento would be doing the backstroke in black ink.æ With all the new parks and health clinics, we’d have more ribbon-cuttings than a baby shower.æ Is this just a pipe dream?

So, to find out, she turns to Rosalie Pacula, Co-director, RAND Drug Policy Research Center; Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research. Now, you might think that someone like that might know what they’re talking about on this subject.
But apparently you would be wrong.

Is this just a pipe dream?
Rosalie Pacula says that in all likelihood, yes.æ She’s a senior economist at the Rand Corp.æ and co-director of its drug policy research center.æ Here’s how she burst my bubble:
First, you have to consider that legalizing it would have its own costs.æ Recent research, Pacula says, shows marijuana to be more addictive than was thought.

Really? What recent research? Care to mention some? It turns out that NIDA is currently funding a study which has been billed as the “first comprehensive study of marijuana addiction.” That won’t be done for four years. The only other new study on the subject I know of is the laughable one that studied a whopping “12 heavy users of both marijuana and cigarettes.” Otherwise, we’re looking at the same information we’ve always had — a small percent of marijuana users do have problems with dependency, and their marijuana-related dependency tends to be mild compared to other drugs.

Because marijuana is illegal, and because its users often smoke tobacco or use other drugs, teasing out marijuana’s health effects and associated costs is almost impossible.

Actually, no. There have been so many studies trying to find marijuana’s negative effects, that we have a pretty good idea by now (after all, that’s all that NIDA will fund). No lung cancer, some other lung-related problems in long-term heavy smokers of marijuana, and… that’s about it. What we have yet to find more of is some of the potential positive effects, such as the impact on reducing Alzheimer’s disease, or stopping cancerous growths. Plus the potential for dramatically lowering prescription drug costs as marijuana substitutes for more dangerous and expensive prescription drugs.

And more people would smoke it regularly if it were legal — Pacula estimates 60% to 70% of the population as opposed to 20% to 30% now – — and the social costs would rise.

Really? And from just what orifice did you pull that figure? Do you have some historical evidence? Perhaps you took a look at the states that previously decriminalized marijuana to get some guidance. Did they shoot up to 60%? No, they actually declined. How about the Netherlands? It’s legal there to consume. Usage must be up around 70%. Right? No, it’s dramatically lower than in the United States. So tell me, Rosalie, where do you get your numbers?

She takes issue with figures from Harvard’s Jeffrey Miron, among others, who says that billions spent on enforcing marijuana laws could all be saved by legalization.

So Ms. Pacula takes issue wIth Jeffrey Miron’s research. Why is Rand’s research better? Have they done better digging into the nuts and bolts of legalization? Let’s take a look at their major report on drug policy – How Goes the “War on Drugs”? An Assessment of U.S. Drug Problems and Policy by Rosalie’s colleagues Jonathan P. Caulkins, Peter H. Reuter, Martin Y. Iguchi and James Chiesa, where they state:

Nor do we explore the merits and demerits of legalizing drugs, even though legalization is perhaps the most prominent and hotly debated topic in drug policy. Our analysis takes current policy as its starting point, and the idea of repealing the nation’s drug laws has no serious support within either the Democratic or Republican party.

So, Rand, in a major drug policy study, cannot be bothered to even “explore” legalization, while Jeffrey Miron of Harvard has actually spent lots of time, you know, studying it. So why should we listen to Ms. Pacula?

Rand’s research, Pacula says, finds that many marijuana arrests are collateral — say, part of DUI checks or curfew arrests — and many arrestees already have criminal records, meaning they might wind up behind bars for something else even if marijuana were legal.

OK, that’s just bizarre. We won’t save money from arresting 800,000 marijuana users a year, because we’ll probably just have to arrest them for something else? (And that collateral stuff doesn’t wash either — in many cases, the DUI checks or curfew arrests are excuses to search for pot.)

Legalization also wouldn’t do away with pot-related crime entirely.æ There would likely be a black market, just as there is in other regulated substances, such as cigarettes and liquor.æ That means police and prosecution, which cost money.æ

This is just a downright dishonest argument that we hear time and again. Start out with the implied straw man: “Legalizers claim that legalization would eliminate the black market entirely.” Then find the small exception: Sales tax differential black market. Conclude therefore, legalizer’s argument that legalization would reduce the black market is wrong.
She’s actually comparing the police activity to ferret out illegal smuggling of cigarette cartons from a low sales tax state to a high sales tax state, to the entire drug war apparatus! She studied economics? Was she awake?

As to the tax benefit, that’s partly a function of the price point for legalized pot.æ If everyone could legally grow and consume dope, then the crop probably wouldn’t be worth $35 billion and the taxes wouldn’t be anything to write home about.æ

This is also ridiculous. Certainly, some people will choose to grow their own pot if it’s legal. But most won’t. You could legally make your own beer or grow your own tobacco now, but most people don’t. You can even legally buy tobacco cheaper and roll your own cigarettes to save money, but people don’t. Sure, if you taxed marijuana at a rate of $10 a joint, you might lose your benefit, but you can still tax it pretty dramatically without having any significant loss in consumers (particularly compared to the actual cost of producing it).

“I have a hard time believing the tax revenue would offset the full cost of regulating and enforcing the legal market,” Pacula concludes

Again. Really? What are the actual costs of regulating and enforcing other legal markets compared to their tax revenue? Miniscule. We make tons of money off alcohol and tobacco taxes. Why wouldn’t we off marijuana taxes? Do you have any reason for your statement, Rosalie?
Even then, the actual question involves the elimination of all the marijuana enforcement costs (OK, except for sales tax smuggling), which is (still) in the billions of dollars and the addition of sales tax revenue (which, yes, would be in the billions of dollars). Would we bring in significant savings financially? Clearly, yes.
But Pacula seems to be willing to simply make up stuff, put it under the heading of “words from an economics and drug policy researcher” and shove it out there for public consumption.
And Patt Morrison dutifully laps it up, concluding with an even more bizarre statement:

No golden pot tax in the pot at the end of the rainbow, then? Pacula left me thinking that the unintended consequences of legalizing marijuana in 2009 might match the unintended consequences of outlawing liquor in 1919.

That has got to be an award-winning example of up-is-downism.
Note: in this analysis, I am assuming that Morrison correctly represented Ms. Pacula’s positions. And I would be happy to hear from either Patt Morrison or Rosalie Pacula regarding my critique and any defense of their positions. I’d be happy to print their replies.

“bullet” Ethan Nadelmann suggests:Let’s End Drug Prohibition in the Wall Street Journal.

An interesting decision in Canada:

A judge in St. John’s recently decided that a man found with 14 grams of cocaine, 62 ecstasy pills and $11,000 in cash had an expectation of privacy when he checked his luggage prior to a flight in 2006. […]
Crown prosecutors argued Mr. Crisby gave up all his privacy rights when he voluntarily checked his baggage, because he knew air travel is subject to strict controls, including security screening.
The problem with that, Justice Robert Hall ruled, is that airport security laws are designed to protect travellers against weapons and explosives, not to catch illegal drugs. He described the Crown’s argument as an “incremental intrusion upon privacy rights.”

Wow. That’s the way it should be. What a contrast to the United States, where a drug sniffing dog has the right to call for a search of your car with no suspicion (see Caballes v. Illinois). Here in the States, we pass laws, or create rules, supposedly for security purposes, and then, without even attempting to disguise it, blatantly use the law to search for drugs.
This is the land of the free?
It’s about time for people to wake up and realize that the answer to the final question in our national anthem is “No” and not “Play Ball” as some people assume.

Reported at Politico

A coalition of advocacy and nonprofit organizations, including the National Black Police Association, sent a letter today to President-elect Barack Obama preemptively pushing back against the nomination of Rep. James Ramstad (R-Minn.) to be head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or “Drug Czar.”
Ramstad has not been nominated for the position, but his name has been mentioned in Democratic circles and he has expressed gratification at the prospect of his consideration.
“While we applaud Representative Ramstad for his courageous and steady support for expanding drug treatment access and improving addiction awareness, and honor his own personal and very public triumph over addiction, we have strong reservations about his candidacy for the drug czar position,” reads the letter.
The coalition, which includes civic and drug-policy reform organizations, cites his past opposition to medical marijuana, needle exchange and sentencing reform as reasons for concern.

The list of signers is impressive, as is the letter:

While we applaud Representative Ramstad for his courageous and steady support for expanding drug treatment access and improving addiction awareness, and honor his own personal and very public triumph over addiction, we have strong reservations about his candidacy for the drug czar position. In his twenty-eight years in the U.S. House, Representative Ramstad has consistently opposed policies that seek to reduce drug-related harm and create common ground on polarizing issues. […]

We urge you to nominate for drug czar someone with a public health background, who is committed to reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and other infectious diseases, open to systematic drug policy reform, and able to show strong leadership on the issues you believe in.

Matthew DeLong, at the Washington Independent also picked up on it:

Admittedly, I know almost nothing about Ramstad. If the letter accurately states his positions, he‰s probably a poor choice to direct the new administration‰s drug control policy.
However, if Obama is determined to put a bipartisan face on his anti-drug efforts, reformers may have several reasons to remain optimistic. […]
Finally, and most important, there is this comment Obama made Monday at a press conference in which he named his foreign policy team:

“I will be setting policy as president. I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made. As Harry Truman said, ‹The buck will stop with me.Š

Presumably, this will apply to all aspects of the new administration‰s domestic and foreign policy, including drug control.

Related to this, the SSDP petition to President-elect Obama (making a similar request) is up to around 9,000 signatures already.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition held a press conference yesterday to tie the 75th Anniversary of the repeal of prohibition (Friday) to today’s equally damaging prohibition, and to show how legalizing drugs could boost the economy.
They’re also rolling out the website: WeCanDoItAgain.com. Check it out and get involved.
It’s early to tell if they get a lot of press from it, but they already got one outstanding OpEd from Reuters’ Bernd Debusmann: Einstein, insanity and the war on drugs

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. His definition fits America‰s war on drugs, a multi-billion dollar, four-decade exercise in futility.
The war on drugs has helped turn the United States into the country with the world‰s largest prison population. (Noteworthy statistic: The U.S. has 5 percent of the world‰s population and around 25 percent of the world‰s prisoners). Keen demand for illicit drugs in America, the world‰s biggest market, helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence in the pursuit of equally extreme profits.
Over the years, the war on drugs has spurred repeated calls from social scientists and economists (including three Nobel prize winners) to seriously rethink a strategy that ignores the laws of supply and demand.

And the connection between Capone and today’s prohibition is an obvious one:

‹In the 20s and 30s, we had Al Capone and his gangsters getting rich and shooting up our streets,Š said Nelson, who spent a 32-year government career fighting drugs in the U.S. and Latin America. ‹Today we have criminal gangs, cartels, Taliban and al-Qaeda profiting from the prohibition of drug sales and wreaking havoc all over the world. The correlation is obvious.Š
The before-and-after sequence is so obvious that the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in September noting that the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition had replaced a ‹dramatic increaseŠ in organized crime with ‹a transparent and accountable system of distribution and salesŠ that generated billions of dollars in tax revenues and boosted the sick economy.
That‰s where advocates of drug legalization want to go now, and some of them hope that the similarities between today‰s deep economic crisis and the Great Depression will result in a more receptive audience for their pro-legalization arguments among lawmakers and government leaders.

It’s a great article — go join in the comments.