Drug WarRant

A good editorial: Drug war squabble an ongoing fraud at the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Seems no one on Capitol Hill wants to confront a reality: Drug trafficking, in Mexico and everywhere else illicit narcotics are grown, processed and moved in America’s direction, continues to thrive because this is where the stuff is consumed Ö at whatever cost a protected market will bear.
Keep drugs illegal, make them more expensive by busting the occasional shipment, and the price goes up. Those controlling the supply grow richer; all the more capable of bribing everyone outside and inside our boundaries, from street cops to prosecutors. And those who can’t be bought can be assassinated. […]
Neither Mexico’s government nor ours can buy enough cannon-fodder for this bogus war.
What Congress can do is invest in education, counseling and treatment Ö to catch up with, then head off, drug use. When those things are in place, de-criminalize drug possession; make the stuff available, free or cheap, at clinics. De-glamorize it Ö and take away the profit motive so many vested interests have in drugs.
Who in Congress dares do such a thing?

Who, indeed?

Here’s another example of lawmakers trying to add extra pile-on charges in the drug war.
Baltimore Councilman William Cole IV has introduced legislation adding a civil fine of $1,000 to anyone caught buying drugs if they live out of town.
What the people need to see is that when legislators come up with these odd little laws, it is essentially an admission that prohibition is a failure. But instead of fixing it, they just try to add some cosmetics. Their constituents need to reach the point where they say “OK, you passed all these laws — did any of them do any good?”
In the article, drug counselor Michael Hayes was quoted:

‹I appreciate that they mean well, but it‰s much ado about nothing,Š Hayes said. ‹They love to do something that looks good and sounds good, but have no substance to them.Š

Except for the part about it looking and sounding good, I agree.

Here’s an article that really helps show the poverty of the drug prohibitionists’ line.
Cartels driven by desire for big payoff
We have our drug czar with the old smoke-a-joint-assassinate-a-Mexican nonsense.

“The largest single source of their revenue is marijuana,” said John P. Walters, Office of National Drug Control Policy director. “These killers (cartel bosses) pay assassins with dollars from marijuana users in the United States and it needs to stop.
“It’s not a victimless activity. It’s blood money. And every time somebody buys a joint, they need to remember they’re contributing to the assassination and murder in Mexico.”

Now the author of the article points out that there are some of us with an actual idea.

An alternate solution proposed by some critics of the drug war is to legalize drugs — marijuana in particular. They say the demand for the illegal supply would drop dramatically. The drug could be regulated to keep it out of the hands of youth, they say, and taxed to fund prevention and treatment.

Yep. That’s right. And how do you counter such a reasoned, logical, and evidence-supported argument? With nonsensical ridicule, of course.

The country’s top counter-drug officials sneer at the idea.
“It’s a silly argument put forth by people who have a hidden agenda to legalize drugs,” said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, D.C. “It’s not a responsible health policy to make marijuana more available in society.”

Let me see if I can get this straight — People who call for legalization of drugs have a hidden agenda to… legalize drugs.

I’ve long considered the American Family Association to be one of those annoying, hateful and un-Christian organizations that we must tolerate as a free society. Now I add “clueless” to the list.
I don’t watch any prime-time TV, so I haven’t seen CBS’s Swingtown, but the American Family Association sure had some things to say about the show’s “offensive” content. That’s nothing new. But in the list of outrages, I was bemused by their helpful translation of drug slang…

‡ At a party in a neighbor’s home, one woman continues to ask the host and another guest for “coke” (heroin).

They must be on “crack” (laxatives).

Bizarre headline: Mexico accuses U.S. of meddling in drug war
Meddling? Don’t they know that the drug war is a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Government? It’s ours, baby.
Sure, we license out some franchises — some directly, some through the UNODC — but it’s our war. We’re McDonald’s and if you want your own drug war, you gotta sell our fries. That’s the way it is.
Meddling. Just who do they think they are?

Some great responses by readers in yesterday’s post about the drug czar’s flawed “argument, and I’ll just add a couple of thoughts…
What the drug czar’s office is using there (and what they do so often) is the Straw Man argument – a logical fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.
This is essentially the line of argument used:

Drug policy reformers claim that legalization and regulation will result in an end of all violent crime related to drugs, yet here are some specific examples of violent crimes related to drugs. Therefore, the drug policy reformers are wrong.

Classic straw man. Reformers have never claimed that legalization and regulation would end all crime. Rather, our argument has been that crime — specifically prohibition-related crime — would be greatly reduced. And that’s true. As has been pointed out by the readers here, robberies of valuable goods will happen in any area, and that has nothing to do with the prohibition vs. regulation argument, (other than the fact that under the regulation system, it’s actually easier to catch the criminals since the owners can call the police.)
If you look at the whole picture, the argument is absurd. We talk about dramatically reducing gang violence and cartel violence and street shootings and armed conflicts over territory and armed conflicts with police… and the drug czar says “but someone might try to break in and steal the drugs if they’re regulated.”
Now since since prohibitionists are always in a position of arguing without actual facts or reason on his side, logical fallacies are heavily used, and it’s useful to be able to identify them.
The Nirvana Fallacy is the assumption that there must be a perfect solution to a problem. This is bizarrely used by prohibitionists even though they cannot ever show that their solution has any chance of working at all. But you see them oddly using it: “legalization won’t stop people from abusing drugs… legalization won’t end violence..”
Burden of Proof is also used by prohibitionists in… interesting ways. They ask us to show extreme levels of proof regarding the levels of drug use and abuse that would exist post-legalization — levels of proof that are impossible with no real-world laboratory to test (which they also work to prevent). This, despite the reality that they cannot prove the efficacy of their method (in fact, the proof is that their solution does not work). So what we have is a proven failure (prohibition) in place, with plenty of evidence that regulation would work much better, yet we’re told there’s not enough proof to consider turning from a failed path.
Appealing to Motive is most often used against medical marijuana support. You’ve all seen this one: “drug policy reformers don’t give a rat’s ass about sick people — they just want medical marijuana legalized in order to get marijuana legalized”
Poisoning the well used to be used more, but is getting much harder. It’s the argument that says “look at that long-haired pot head who is talking about legalization.” But when you have people like Walter Cronkite and William F. Buckley, Jr. and LEAP promoting legalization, it’s a much harder fallacious argument to get away with.
There are others used certainly — Appealing to Fear is a big one, for example. (What others can you identify?) Understanding the logical fallacies used by the drug czar is a great help in easily dismantling his groundless “arguments.”
Marijuana: harmless? [straw man]

Here’s a fun little test for you —
The drug czar is blatantly taunting us with this post.
Point out the flaws in his “argument.”

Having a great time in New York. I highly recommend both August: Osage County and Passing Strange — two very different shows with a lot to offer. August is the best combination of writing and acting I’ve seen in years. Passing Strange is not a traditional Broadway musical by any means — more like a “rock story” — Stew did a brilliant job with both the music and the journey.
So I’ve been a bit behind on blogging…
“bullet” Desperation time? Walters and friends are busy trying to convince the taxpayers that Mexico’s doing a great job in the drug war and we should support plan Colombia…. without any conditions
“bullet” All Indicators Point to a Softening of America’s Harsh Marijuana Laws by Alexander Zaitchik at Alternet
“bullet” DrugSense Weekly

The drug czar has teamed up with The Daily Mail Reuters to promote the latest in anti-marijuana junk science.
The bold headline: Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain parts: study. Ut oh. We’re in trouble now.
Except…
1. We’re talking about people who smoked 5 joints a day for 20 years, and.
2. The study did not in fact find that marijuana use shrinks brain parts.

The researchers acknowledged that the study did not prove it was the marijuana and not some other factor that triggered these brain differences.

I’d love to get paid to do studies that determine things without having to actually determine them.
But instead, I simply tried my own unscientific experiment and compared the brains of noted pot smoker Carl Sagan and noted non-pot smoker John Walters (which i was able to borrow and return without it being missed). In every test performed, Sagan’s brain won handily, despite being dead for 12 years.
More here and here
Marijuana. Harmless?
Um, no. But probably less harmful than — prohibition, alcohol, cigarettes, aspirin, global warming, working as a miner, politicians, prison, Hostess Twinkies, jogging, driving, sex, cheeseburgers, skiing…

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that money laundering requires actually, you know, laundering the money. Merely hiding cash so someone won’t find it no longer qualifies as laundering.

This was one of a pair of the decisions handed down Monday that could make it harder for prosecutors to win convictions for money laundering. This law has been one of the government’s most powerful weapons in the war on drugs.
In the second ruling, the court said the law against money laundering applies only to the profits of an illegal operation, not all of the cash it generates.

This is good news, because it cuts back on one of the abuses of the drug war — that of piling on all sorts of multiple charges for the same offense.

Defense lawyers complained the law was used to press defendants to plead guilty to other crimes, such as drug dealing. A conviction for money laundering can result in up to 20 years in prison.