May 21 2009
Manifesto #4 - The War on Drugs
So a Rasmussen poll came out on Monday showing that 41% of Americans support the legalization and taxing of marijuana, with 49% opposed. Unfortunately, we Republicans are on the wrong side of the partisan break down, Democrats support this 52-37 while Republicans oppose it 28-65.
I think marijuana should be legalized for libertarian issues. Freedom means my right to swing my fist ends at your face, so if I’m not involving your face you have no right to tell me how to live. There’s other info showing that I’m right, that it’s safer than alcohol and tobacco, that it’s by far the largest cash crop in the United States at a time when we’re spending billions a year on agriculture subsidies, etc. but it ultimately all comes down to the problem with all governmental paternalism, grown people don’t need the government to baby them.
I think the discussion of marijuana legalization draws attention away from the much bigger issue, which is our attempts to eradicate cocaine and heroin markets. We spend billions upon billions attempting to eradicate drugs, and I can say without hyperbole that all we have to show for it is unmitigated disaster. Despite huge variations in the real amount of drugs seized through law enforcement the prices have absolutely plummeted.
This means supplies are increasing. Despite all of our efforts we are not stopping the flow of cocaine and heroin into the United States.
This is because spending as much as we are on eradicating cocaine and heroin markets just makes cocaine and heroin smuggling more profitable. Heroin would be cheaper than sugar if it were legal, so the smugglers get it at a price around the price for sugar and sell it for thousands. The same general principle applies to cocaine. We’ve created a market for unstoppable criminal activity, made sure it’s completely unregulated so it developed very quickly, and we made it extraordinarily profitable so it attracted the most talented at being unstoppable violent criminal forces and completely flooded the market.
And what do you expect happens when you create a market like that? Destruction, destruction, destruction. It’s destroyed huge parts of damn near every country between us and northern South America with levels of corruption and crime that have inevitably caused the deaths of thousands if not millions. It created our problems with street gangs. Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, MS-13, 4 Corner Hustlers, Gangsta Disciples, Vice Lords, they all started for all sorts of reasons but they now all exist to sell drugs . On the ground level they fight wars over marketshare which leaves thousands of people dead in our inner cities and causes levels of moral degradation visible in our worst neighborhoods.
And we’ve been doing this despite the fact that WE ARE NOT STOPPING THE DRUGS! It would still be wrong if we were stopping the drugs, but we were not stopping the drugs, they are here and they are available. Not only this, they are more available to children than alcohol or cigarettes because we eliminated the damn marginal cost in selling them to children!
It confirms what our detractors say about us. We don’t care about it because it only hurts poor people. No one gives a damn that we’re killing thousands of people in Central America, no one cares about the damage we’re doing to kids growing up in the ghetto, little Jessica who’s about to go to UCLA next fall might want to try coke and mommy and daddy want to make that slightly more difficult (and are failing miserably). It’s blatantly obvious in our willingness to tolerate the horrible violence caused by the war on drugs, and it’s made infinitely more obvious in who we try to punish in the war on drugs.
On the supply side of things we’re actually fighting a war. People are killing each other on an extremely regular basis. That’s not the case on the demand side. If little Jessica is caught just possessing the coke, she might have to do some community service and go to rehab, but she’s never in a million years going to spend any serious time in prison. If we were serious about stopping drugs in this country the answer is simple, get strict with the users. If it was a 10 year mandatory minimum for possession of any schedule 2 narcotic over 1/100th of a gram the market would disappear. The reason we don’t do that is because we only care about the rich white kids. Destroy the inner cities, destroy South and Central America, but we draw the line on Thad spending a decade in prison because he used a schedule 2 narcotic “study aid” studying for an exam at Notre Dame. This is parents trying to make it harder for their kids to get drugs and they really couldn’t care less what the humanitarian cost is or whether or not it’s even working.
Which is understandable. People care about their families more than other people, sometimes to an extreme degree, and it’d be unreasonable to expect that not to happen. It’s a terrible way to make policy. Policy needs to be made by the rational people, and this is the exact opposite.
Personally I’d like it if the drugs were legalized because up until the point that you hit me I don’t give a damn what you do to yourself. Choosing what you put into your own body seems to be an extremely basic freedom. I recognize that that’s FAR outside of the political mainstream, so whatever.
Cut the enforcement. Make it a local policing issue. Stop trying to root out the smuggling, stop screwing with Central American Governments, scrap the DEA and drastically cut the part of the FBI’s budget attempting to stop the smuggling. I know it sounds bad, but there will be no practical impact on the ability of teenagers to find hard drugs. The drugs are available despite our law enforcement efforts, the single biggest disincentive there is to consume hard drugs (aside from the fact that they’re hard drugs) is you might get busted, have a month ruined and get that on your record. The impact that has on a kid’s rationale has a much larger impact on stopping the use of hard drugs than all of the other shit combined. So stick with that. If you get caught with cocaine, you’re in for a very bad time. You get caught with heroin, you’re in for a very bad time. That’s the only thing we do that has any practical benefit and it also doesn’t cause thousands and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths.
