Drug WarRant

Mark Kleiman has a really outstanding piece at The American Interest Online: Dopey, Boozy, Smoky — and Stupid (although the title, which he didn’t pick, sucks).
This is Kleiman’s best piece to date, and finally does justice to his analyses of the failures of prohibition. For the most part, he avoids his usual unsupported attack on legalizers, with only the slightest obligatory mention…

…the standard political line between punitive drug policy ‹hawksŠ and service-oriented drug policy ‹doves.Š Neither side is consistently right; some potential improvements in drug policy are hawkish, some are dovish, and some are neither.

Some of his suggestions for policy reform are a little bizarre and unworkable (his drinking license, which he’s been promoting for over a decade if I recall right, is laughable).
But his discussions about the nature of drug use and prohibition are really quite good. Here are a few snippets:

Most drug use is harmless, and much of it is beneficialÖat least if harmless pleasure and relaxation count as benefits. […]
Not all drugs are equally risky or abusable. But since different drugs are abused in different ways and have different harm profiles, there is no single measure of ‹harmfulnessŠ or ‹addictivenessŠ by which drugs can be ranked. Moreover, the overall damage caused by a drug does not depend on its neurochemistry alone; the composition of the user base and the social context and customs around its use also matter. […]
Some pairs of drugs are substitutes for one another, so that making one more available will reduce consumption of the other. […]
Taxes, regulations and prohibitions can reduce drug consumption and abuse, but always at the cost of making the remaining consumption more damaging than it would otherwise be. […]
But once a drug has an established mass market, more enforcement cannot greatly shrink the problem; existing customers will seek out new suppliers, and imprisoned dealers, seized drugs and even dismantled organizations are replaced. Moreover, the effectiveness of enforcement tends to fall over time as the illicit industries learn to adapt. We have 15 times as many drug dealers in prison today as we had in 1980, yet the prices of cocaine and heroin have fallen by more than 80 percent. […]

And some of his suggestions include legalizing personal growth of marijuana, eliminating the drinking age, not relying on D.A.R.E., expanding opiate maintenance programs, and getting drug enforcement out of the way of pain relief.
I haven’t had time to analyze the full piece, but as a policy recommendation short of a full legalization regime, it’s one of the best ones out there.

Over at Human Events Online, which recently embarrassed itself by printing John Hawkins fetid In Defense of the Drug War, there is a new piece: Drug War Victories by Robert J. Caldwell.
Caldwell touts the recent extradition of Mexican drug lords with a kind of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” enthusiasm — you can almost hear the voices of munchkins in his writing.

Once among the most powerful and feared criminal syndicates in Mexico, the AFO is now a shambles. Its top leaders are dead or in custody. Most if not all of the AFO leaders now behind bars face trial in the United States, where bribery cannot buy the criminal justice system and intimidation doesn’t work. […]
A counter-narcotics war popularly disparaged as a chronic loser, yet vital to the national interests of both Mexico and the United States, is producing its biggest victories ever.

While he notes that this won’t mean an end to the “plague of smuggled narcotics,” the degree of his celebration seems to know no bounds, and really has no relevance to the real world.
By the time the trials of these drug lords are completed, the DEA will be soft-pedaling their significance, because a whole new structure of cartels will be fully in place and functioning smoothly, with ownership of much of the Mexican government. (Just like the conviction of the leaders of the Colombian Cali cartel this past September was such a non-issue, given the transition of cartel power in that country.)
The only true victory will come from ending the drug war.

A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.

“bullet” Note: In regards to the Hawkins piece, I left out one rebuttal — from Mark Draughn of Windypundit.

While working on my new Bong Hits 4 Jesus Supreme Court page I’ve found some interesting quotes in some of the briefs.
For example, check out these from Ken Starr’s brief representing Principal Morse:

… the court of appeals substituted its unforgiving libertarian worldview for the considered judgment of school officials (and school boards) in seeking, consistent with Congress’ statutory mandate, to foster and encourage a drug-free student lifestyle. […]
As to both the First Amendment and the law of qualified immunity, the court of appeals’ uncompromisingly libertarian vision is deeply unsettling to public school educators across the country. The decision below is doubly — and dangerously — wrong.

Interesting that Starr thinks…

1. that libertarian principles are wrong and dangerous
2. that the 9th Circuit is wildly libertarian, and
3. that being opposed to libertarian principles will be attractive to the Supreme Court.

Additional note in the case. If you had any doubt about the government’s intentions in this case, it was cleared up in the government’s brief, which included:

… an effective anti-drug program must not only teach the dangers of drugs; it must also protect impressionable young people from the countervailing effects of peer pressure. At a minimum, such a program entails prohibiting student advocacy of illegal drug use in school or at school events, where students are entrusted to the schools’ care. […]
If schools permitted advocacy of illegal drugs, such speech could counteract, if not drown out, the schools’ anti-drug message, especially because of peer pressure. Permitting students to make light of the school’s anti-drug message or launch a pro-drug use campaign would undermine both that message and the school’s disciplinary authority generally. [emphasis added]

It’s not just speech advocating breaking the law that the government wants to ban, but any speech that interferes with or even makes light of their propaganda.

Another old person with a gun, living in a dangerous neighborhood. 80-year-old Isaac Singletary used to bring out his gun to scare off drug dealers, so when a saw a couple of low-lifes were on his lawn, he came out with it again and told them to get off his property. Except they were undercover narcotics officers so they shot him. Isaac managed to get a shot or two off in response, but the officers were able to finish him off.
See also The Agitator and the comments from Mary, Kaptinemo and Allan in this earlier thread.

James Gierach rocks in this OpEd in the Daily Southtown (Chicago): County cuts could mean less drug-war money — and that’s not such a bad thing

… These examples tell the folly of “staying the course” and hoping to win the drug war. It’s a bad policy that endlessly costs and gets us nowhere.
“Oh, but what about our drug courts, our drug-diversion program, our drug-treatment? What about drug testing, drug drops and drug counseling? What about our undercover drug cops, our confiscation programs, our prosecutors, our public defenders, our drug education programs and our sheriff’s police? Oh, my D.A.R.E.” the addicted public officials and employees cry.
The drug war is a cash cow for drug dealers and a patronage pig for public officials. Fly over the Cook County Jail and take a bird’s eye look at the drug-war prison sprawl. New jail after new jail — a patronage dream. Eight out of every 10 inmates who enter the Cook County Jail are there for a “drug crime.” Better to build pyramids or cathedrals.

“Addicted public officials.” That sure hits true.
Really nice job, James.

Mark Kleiman has an excellent post on last year’s study that demonstrated the enormous power for psilocybin mushrooms to generate meaningful mystical experiences in churchgoers who had no previous experience with hallucinogens.

The results have potentially large importance for both law and policy.
Though psilocybe mushrooms grow wild in much of the country and are fairly easily cultivated, the psilocybin they contain is a Schedule I controlled substance, contraband except for specially-approved research purposes, and therefore so are the mushrooms themselves.
But the Supreme Court recently held (Gonzales v. O Centro) that the use of hallucinogens in religious ceremonies is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and must be permitted unless there is a particularized showing of harm. It is well-established fact that psilocybin is neither addictive nor physically toxic, though it is not without psychological and behavioral risks, especially when used haphazardly.
If taking a dose of psilocybin under controlled conditions has a better-than-even chance of occasioning a full-blown mystical experience, it seems fairly hard to argue that forbidding such use doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of religion. How the courts will deal with those who want to seek out primary religious experience on an individual rather than a congregational basis remains to be seen.

“bullet” In other news, Kleiman manages to bring his usual strong analysis of the failings of government prohibition, without his all-too-common unsupported put-down of reformers, in this LA Times article about the situation in Mexico.

Despite the praise, the U.S. drug war “is nowhere on the political agenda,” said Mark Kleiman, a professor and director of UCLA’s Drug Policy Analysis Program. Kleiman argues that lack of political attention to drug policy is a good thing. “Politicians are incapable of dealing with it,” he said.
Despite high-profile arrests and record annual seizures, he said, a steady supply of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine has been available in the U.S. since President Nixon famously declared drugs to be America’s “public enemy No. 1.”

One thing I’ll say about about John Hawkins piece In Defense of the Drug War at Right Wing News — it’s drawn a tremendous amount of fire from the libertarian and conservative (read: not authoritarian) circles (it’s less likely that many of the liberal sites have noticed it).
Read this exceptional and insightful analysis by Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast: My response to In Defense of the Drug War.
Also, a couple of nice pieces at Code Monkey Ramblings (here and here).
Also, Mona has a little good fun at my expense at Unqualified Offerings and JohnJ over at RightLinx responds to me both in his post and in comments.
(In addition to the ones I listed below).

DEA head Karen Tandy on the recent extradition of Mexican cartel leaders:

Number of violent Mexican criminals extradited: 15
Distance and time traveled to get them here: 750 miles and 2 hours
Number of Mexican drug cartels impacted: 4

U.S. and Mexican victory against powerful drug syndicates: priceless.

Um… no. There are a number of prices attached to that extradition. It’s just that the American people are paying Karen Tandy’s exorbitant MasterCard bills.
And, of course, all the extraditions will do is create violent competition for job openings as other criminals rush in to fill the black-market void and go for the profits.
So, a more accurate description…

Number of violent Mexican criminals extradited: 15
Distance and time traveled to get them here: 750 miles and 2 hours
Number of Mexican drug cartels impacted: 4

U.S. and Mexican victory against powerful drug syndicates: valueless.

“bullet” Two new additions to Guest Drug WarRant from submitters (remember that readers are always welcome to submit items for Guest Drug WarRant, or you can discuss items at the messageboard).

1. Fascist Insect — a diatribe rejected by Wikipedia
2. End the War on Drugs — a letter by Ned Behrensmeyer published in the Quincy Herald Whig

“bullet” I’ve started a page for the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” Supreme Court case. I know there are some who say that it’s the wrong case for drug policy reformers to touch, but as a drug policy reformer and free speech advocate and educator, it’s one I can’t possibly ignore.
Additionally, I have serious concerns that Kenn Starr and the amici curiae (which includes D.A.R.E.) are trying to get the Supreme Court to expand the power of schools to determine that any speech by students anywhere that conflicts with their zero-tolerance/drug-free/abstinence-only message can be censored.
Plus I kind of like the idea of the little Alaskan lawyer against Ken Starr, the U.S. Government, D.A.R.E., and the National School Board Association.

We’ve been subjected to some pretty extraordinary moronity in recent days.
Let’s start with Right Wing News’ John Hawkins writing in Human Events Online: In Defense of the Drug War. At first I was interested because I thought “Hey, maybe this will be an actual thoughtful attempt to be pro-drug war that will be interesting to debunk.” But no. Tired old fallacies and unsupported false assumptions.
And the kickers in the article that really make it not worth the bother…

1. Hawkins refers to some specific data regarding alcohol prohibition, and uses as his source… a book by Ann Coulter. How stupid is that? That’s like me giving statistics on relative dependency rates of various drugs and quoting the characters that Cheech and Chong play in Up In Smoke as the source!
2. Hawkins plays the “murder” card. In “rebutting” the legalizers’ call for not jailing so many people, he notes that we’re not going to win the war on murder, robbery and rape, either. This is that delightful combination of straw man, slippery slope, and reductio ad absurdum fallacies (which also occur elsewhere in Hawkins’ piece).

The murder nonsense also showed up in the Wichita Eagle, where there was an outstanding OpEd by Jack Cole of LEAP: War on drugs has been a whopper of a failure on Tuesday, which was followed by a “rebuttal” yesterday (Legalization would be a mistake) by U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren, who spews the same fallacious propaganda line:

Should we legalize murder because we’ve been fighting it since Cain killed Abel, yet murder persists? Should we decriminalize sexual assault, because the billions we have poured into eradicating it could have been better spent by treating the effects “as a medical problem”?

Now anybody who has at least a 12th grade education knows that this argument is intellectually dishonest, yet we continue to hear it from people who should know better. This leads me to believe that those who say it:

1. Know better, but are willfully attempting to deceive the public, or
2. Are so blinded by their hatred of drugs, drug users or the class/social status/political viewpoint/race of people who use drugs, that they are unable to see the faults in their own arguments.

Those in the first category I can do nothing about, other than hope that one day their fate will be that of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
So let me try a simple exercise for those in the second category who are too blinded for their hatred for all things drug-related…
Imagine, if you will, that through some strange and irrational set of circumstances, the wearing of gloves on your hands has been made illegal (maybe it was to prevent those who had been masturbating from hiding the hair that grew on the palms of their hands — who knows why these laws get passed sometimes). Now in many parts of the country it gets cold, and people would wear gloves to stay warm regardless of the law, and some of them would get caught and put in jail. This had no real effect on the numbers of people wearing gloves (or masturbating, for that matter). So perhaps you suggested that wearing gloves should be made legal — that we should stop filling jails with people who were merely trying to keep their hands warm. But some ignorant moron says “Everyone knows we shouldn’t legalize murder, so we shouldn’t legalize glove-wearing either.”
Do you understand how stupid that sounds?
Now there are plenty of other differences between Murder and Marijuana, including the notion of victim, and there is also the factor to be considered of the actual effective purposes of, and reasons for, enforcement and incarceration (the discussion of which has been unfortunately AWOL in this country in recent years). But ultimately, those don’t really matter in this sense, because even the notion of analogizing the legalization of drugs and the legalization of murder is bereft of logic.
And as we speak of the lack of logic, let us now turn to one who should have excellent intellectual training. Someone who has gone to law school and become a Judge, and even teaches law and finance at a university. Someone like Timothy G. Hicks.
Timothy Hicks was the judge for a sordid case involving two men (Sibson and Weissert) who were involved in selling marijuana. Although the case had many complexities, apparently Weissert hired a couple of men to steal the drugs and money from Sibson, and in the process, Sibson was killed in his home. Anyone seeing this story would see a tale of murder and home invasion, resulting from criminal greed.
But not the Honorable Timothy G. Hicks. According to the Muskegon Chronicle:

Before sentencing Weissert, Hicks addressed what he called a series of “urban myths.”
“Urban myth number one” is that “drug use is a victimless crime,” Hicks said from the bench. “Here we have orphaned children, devastated families.”
Myth number two: ” ‘It’s only marijuana,’ ” Hicks said. “Marijuana is as evil as the rest of this stuff. … Marijuana indirectly caused all the carnage.” […]

Now fortunately Phillip Smith at Stop the Drug War has saved me the time of having to stoop to responding to this reprehensible sewage, and has already made many of the points that immediately jumped out in my mind…

The robbers went after the marijuana dealer because there were valuable items they could take. Would the judge have railed against alcohol if someone had been murdered in a liquor store robbery? […]
I wonder if the judge would call cold, hard cash “evil” because someone robbed an armored car to steal some. […]

I wouldn’t be surprised if he blamed a woman being attractive as a cause of her own rape. And you know, I’ve often heard that escaping criminals have committed murder to avoid being taken before a judge. Wouldn’t that make the judge indirectly to blame for the murder? (It makes as much logical non-sense as Hicks’ position). This man has no business practicing law or teaching students.
It bothers and disturbs me that I had to even write this post. And I find it somewhat ironic that those who write in favor of prohibition always seem not to have full mental acuity, and you find the drug legalizers appealing to intellectual reason and facts.
Marijuana. Murder. Not the same. One is the premeditated killing of another human being, and the other is a leafy plant.

Update: If you really want to be depressed, check out some of the ignorant rantings in the massive comments section of Hawkins’ blog entry.
2nd Update: Several fiskings of the Hawkins nonsense — from the conservative xrlq: This Is Your Brain on Drug Wars. Any Questions?, from Liberty Papers: A Lame Defense of the Drug War, and from Walter in Denver Dumbest Thing I’ve Read Today.
On the other hand, RightLinx links approvingly to Hawkins, with a moronic addition:

If society feels that making a substance illegal is in its best interest, it should have the freedom to do so.

What a horrendous use of the word “freedom.”