Introduction to the Naked Truth About Drugs

For nearly one hundred years our government has been wrong about drugs, about the people who use them and the risks they pose to society. Much of what they report is blatant misinformation, if not outright lies, despite a veneer of good intentions. It is also my contention millions of Americans agree with me. And it is not just the millions doing drugs responsibly, either. It is the millions more who’ve come to see society’s approach to the drug crisis generate more harm than good. They cut across all age, income and race demographics. Over the last thirty-plus years I’ve made it a point to talk with a number of them. And listen.

What I’ve gathered reflects not so much a change of mind as it does a change of heart. We still consider drugs to be harmful, but have come to view our drug laws as worse–and many of us no longer consider legalization a four-letter word. But when Richard Nixon first convened his drug war council, escalating the conflict, hardly anyone outside of what was derisively labeled the “lunatic fringe” favored legalization. How dare we, they scolded, when marijuana tuned innocents into murderers and LSD would sufficiently scramble our DNA to produce three-headed babies. None of that was true of course, but it is what our government wanted citizens to believe. And many did.

But that was then. This is now. We have come to see the responsible use theory, the one so close to the alcohol lobby heart, parallel itself in the illicit drug environment: as not every drinker is a drunkard, so too is not every drug user an abuser.

The Naked Truth About Drugs…

All drugs were legal and cheap and readily available in America prior to 1914, and we were even encouraged to use them. Heroin was available from the Sears mail order catalog, as was morphine, opium and cocaine. But if you couldn’t wait for the mailman, all those same drugs were sold at the corner grocery or drugstore. Our addiction rate then was very low, near identical to now. And we had no drug crime [emphasis mine].

What changed it all, what disrupted our peaceful co-existence, was the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, a confluence of religious arrogance and racial bigotry, spread by a surprisingly small number of men and all tinged with political opportunism. All of which metastasized over the years and morphed into Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs.

There are a variety of sound arguments for the repeal of drug prohibition. One is the Declaration of Independence, which guarantees our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, arguing the sovereignty of our bodies. Another is the Constitution, which defines treason against our United States as “levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” We are not fighting drugs per se; we are levying war against those who use them. Meanwhile drug prohibition has enriched our enemies with hundreds of billions of dollars and will guarantee hundreds of billions more, giving more than enough aid to any comfort.

The best argument, where I believe we share the greatest commonality and the least polarity, is the one for law and order. The hugely inflated prices addicts pay for illegal drugs force many into a life of crime, committing nearly all our larceny-thefts, crimes the FBI report as non-violent. And though some addicts would just as soon shoot you as look at you, most drug violence occurs at the higher echelons of the black market, stemming from territorial and distribution conflicts. Repealing drug prohibition will bankrupt the black market and reduce the overall Crime Index by at least 50%, an argument central to the debate and hard to counter.

History is replete with drug stories and tales both good and bad, but all provide empirical data, unequivocal in its conclusion, that drugs are here to stay. So we are going to live with them one way or another. We lived in peace for over a century and have been at war nearly as long, ninety years. And rumor has it drug warriors, no longer intent on maintaining the status quo, have plans on paper just itching to be implemented that will end the drug war once and for all. It will not be pretty, making today’s methods seem almost quaint.

We drink, we smoke, we ingest and inject. It is part of who we are that no policy can change, no law. So we change our law and policy. But the biggest canard of the drug debate portrays those favoring repeal as being “soft on drugs.” Not at all true. We’re just being hard on stupidity. Whish is why ending drug prohibition is society’s smartest step toward jackhammering all those good intentions paving the way to hell.

By Daniel E. Williams
Whiskey & Gunpowder

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/introduction-to-the-naked-truth-about-drugs/

Why Don’t Conservatives Oppose the War on Drugs?

The war on drugs is a failure.

According to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: “Drug use in the United States increased in 2009, reversing downward trends since 2002.” There was a spike in the number of Americans admitting to using marijuana, ecstasy, and methamphetamine.

Yet no matter how much it costs to wage the federal drug war (more than $41 billion, according to a just released Cato Institute study), conservatives generally support it. I know of no prominent conservative who publicly calls for drug legalization. I know of no Republican candidate in the recent election (outside of Ron Paul) who has ever publicly voiced his support for the decriminalization of drug possession. Republicans in Congress — by an overwhelming majority — have even criminalized the purchase of over-the-counter allergy-relief products like Sudafed because they contain pseudoephedrine. [The sale of Sudafed isn’t illegal, but its quantities are strictly controlled so much so that the experience of purchasing Sudafed may make one feel like a criminal. — Ed.]

Negative arguments about how the war on drugs ruins lives, erodes civil liberties, and destroys financial privacy are unpersuasive to most conservatives. None of these things matter to the typical conservative because they, like most Americans of any political persuasion, see using drugs for recreational use as immoral.

The hypocrisy of conservatives who support the war on drugs but not the prohibition of alcohol should be readily apparent. But aside from a small minority of conservative religious people that long for the days of Prohibition, conservatives generally don’t support making the drinking of alcohol a crime, even though alcohol is a factor in many accidents, crimes, and premature deaths. So why is getting high on drugs treated differently from getting high on alcohol?

The reason conservatives should oppose the war on drugs is a simple one that has nothing to do with positive, negative, or financial arguments. Drug prohibition by the federal government is simply unconstitutional. Conservatives claim to revere the Constitution. They regularly lambaste judges for being activists and not strict constitutionalists. In the ‘Pledge to America” they released a few weeks before the recent election, House Republicans promised to “honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored — particularly the Tenth Amendment.”

In Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, there are 18 specific powers granted to Congress. We call these the enumerated powers. Everything else is reserved to the states — with or without the Tenth Amendment. Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to concern itself with the nature and quantity of any substance Americans inhale or otherwise take into their body. Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to prohibit drug manufacture, sale, or use. Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to ban anything. When the Progressives wanted the United States government to ban alcohol, they realized that an amendment to the Constitution was needed.

Drug prohibition is likewise incompatible with private property, individual liberty, personal responsibility, free markets, and limited government — things that conservatives claim to believe in. What happened to the conservative emphasis on families, churches, private charities, and faith-based organizations solving problems instead of looking to the federal government to solve them?

But if conservatives want a war on drugs or any other personal freedom, then from a constitutional standpoint, it is at the state level that they must wage their war. From a libertarian standpoint, state (or local) attempts to prohibit or to tax and/or regulate drugs are likewise attacks on property and freedom. But from a constitutional perspective, conservatives should be just as against a federal war on drugs as libertarians are.

So if conservatives wanted to be both constitutional and consistent, they would have to say that there should be no National Drug Control Strategy, no National Survey on Drug Use and Health, and no Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. They would have to say that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the Drug Enforcement Administration should all be abolished. And they would have to say that the Controlled Substances Act, Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, and Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act should all be repealed.

Although I would vehemently oppose their war on drugs at the state and local level, conservatives could abolish all those federal agencies while at the same time waging a relentless war on drugs — and all vice — at the state and local levels.

Why do conservatives, who profess to revere individual liberty, free markets, private property, limited government, and the Constitution continue to support the war on drugs?

Regards,
Laurence M. Vance
Whiskey & Gunpowder

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/why-dont-conservatives-oppose-the-war-on-drugs/

Endless Targets for Terror

The Number of Potential Terrorist Targets Is Essentially Infinite

Terrorists seek to kill people and/or destroy property in pursuit of a political goal. They may exercise some discrimination in selecting targets, but because people and vulnerable property are everywhere in the United States, they have a wealth of potential targets—there are about 5 million commercial buildings alone. Nothing can be done to change this fundamental condition. Indeed, it is difficult to think of something that couldn’t be a target. Even a tree in the woods, after all, could be ignited to start a forest fire.

The Number of Terrorists Appears to Be Exceedingly Small
and Their Efforts and Competence Rather Limited

Since terrorism of a considerably destructive nature can be perpetrated by a small group, or even by a single individual, the fact that terrorists are few does not mean there is no problem. However, many homeland security policies were established when the threat seemed far larger, and those perceptions may still be fueling, and distorting, current policy.

In 2002, intelligence reports asserted that the number of trained al Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000. And on February 11, 2003, Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assured a Senate committee that al Qaeda had “developed a support infrastructure” in the country and had achieved “the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the US with little warning.” By 2005, however, after years of well funded sleuthing, the FBI and other investigative agencies concluded in a secret report that they had been unable to uncover a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the United States, a finding (or nonfinding) publicly acknowledged two years later.

[The FBI has subsequently seemed to resort to cultivating their own terrorists with questionable set ups and stings; — Ed.]

The lack of true al Qaeda attacks inside the United States combined with the inability of the FBI to find any potential attackers suggests that the terrorists either are not trying very hard or are far less clever and capable than usually depicted.

It follows that any terrorism problem within the United States principally derives from homegrown people, often isolated from one another, who fantasize about performing dire deeds.

Although they someday might conceivably rise to the cleverness of the 9/11 plot, far more likely to be representative is the experience of the would-be bomber of a shopping mall in Rockford, Illinois, who exchanged two used stereo speakers (he couldn’t afford the opening price of $100) for a bogus handgun and four equally bogus hand grenades supplied by an FBI informant. Had the weapons been real, he might actually have managed to do some harm.

Political scientist Michael Kenney has interviewed dozens of officials and intelligence agents and has analyzed court documents, and he finds homegrown Islamic militants to be operationally unsophisticated, short on know how, prone to making mistakes, poor at planning, and severely hampered by a limited capacity to learn. Another study documents the difficulties of network coordination that continually threaten operational unity, trust, cohesion, and the ability to act collectively.

By contrast, the image projected by the DHS is of an enemy that is “relentless, patient opportunistic, and flexible”; shows “an understanding of the potential consequences of carefully planned attacks on economic transportation, and symbolic targets”; is a serious threat to “national security”; and could inflict “mass casualties, weaken the economy, and damage public morale and confidence.” That description may fit some terrorists — the 9/11 hijackers among them — but not, it seems likely, the vast majority.

The Displacement Effect

There is something that might be called “the displacement effect.” Terrorists can choose, and change, their targets depending on local circumstances. This process, of course, does not hold in the case of natural disasters; a tornado bearing down on Kansas does not choose to divert to Oklahoma if it finds Kansans to well protected. In stark contrast, if the protection of one target merely causes the terrorist to seek out another from among the near infinite set at hand, it is not clear how society has gained by expending effort and treasure to protect the first. The people who were saved in the first locale gain, of course, but their grief is simply displaced onto others.

There have been instances in Israel in which suicide bombers, seeing their primary targets, shopping malls, rather well protected, blew themselves up instead on the street. The Israelis count this as something of a gain since they claim that fewer people died as a consequence, a fact likely to be of little comfort to the victims’ families. Actually, however, if the goal of terrorists is to kill, a shopping mall is generally not that lucrative a target because people inside tend to be fairly widely dispersed, something that is often less true on the sidewalks outside.

By John Mueller
For Whiskey & Gunpowder

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/endless-targets-for-terror/

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