It is an experiment, a learning experience, and part of the new way — a Web 2.0 sort of thingy plus a little “reality” TV.
Those of you who know me understand that I am not a real writer (yes, I know I can string words and sentences together in a coherent fashion that is sometimes entertaining) because writers are compelled to write, whether or not they’re any good at it, and I am not.
I have numerous interests and I don’t really have an inclination to write about all of them. The vast majority of my writing is about drug prohibition because that is a subject about which I feel passionately, even if such discussions are out of style in light of the progress of our war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, and the trials and tribulations of this contemporary era in history — especially the antics of our current elected government.
My “drug war rants” toward prohibitionists (as well as the folks who think melodramatic assertions of the peoples’ right to get high on whatever substances we please will win friends and influence people for the drug policy reform movement) won’t stop until the American people come to their senses about this boondoggle that has found more success masquerading as a solution to itself than actually accomplishing its “mission,” which has something to do either with protecting the people from themselves, or the potentially disruptive economic ramifications of converting a $500 billion per year underground industry into a legal and regulated enterprise that labels its products and pays its taxes — more to come on that later.
Right now, I am interested in making videos and I am learning how to use non-linear video editing software, which is pretty easy because it’s all drag and drop. Of course, deciding which clips to drag from the collections and drop onto the timeline is somewhat more challenging. I now understand how some Hollywood directors wind up producing three-hour long epics that put movie audiences to sleep.
Then there is that age-old question of subject matter. Do I really want to just spew my unpopular opinions and peculiar notions to a camera? Who would want to watch that?
Since I have no hope of avoiding the multitudes that surround me almost 24 hours per day, I thought of making them a part of the project, too. I’ve never been really big on watching “reality television,” but it might be fun to produce — and it might even catch on.
Nonetheless and either way, I appreciate all your feedback, even if it is negative, because anything is better than living in a vacuum that needs vacuuming every day.
People who want to see tighter enforcement of our drug laws are unwittingly in league with the gangsters who profit from drug prohibition, the ultimate de-regulation policy.
Drug dealers do not see our drug policies as deterrents to their underground enterprises, but rather as incentives. Those who manufacture and sell outlawed drugs are among the staunchest of prohibitionists. The notion of “legalization” is as much an anathema to them as it is to the families and friends of people whose lives have been lost or ruined by drug abuse and/or addiction.
Without drug prohibition, there would be no unregulated, unlimited, and untaxed underground drug market and potentially destructive psychoactive substances would be far less accessible to children.
Drug policy reform advocates do not actually wish to see illegal drugs “legalized,” we want to see unregulated drugs regulated because our nation’s drug problem is far too complex to be dealt with via an oversimplified policy of prohibition. If we are to ever have any hope of re-gaining control of the market in certain psychoactive drugs, that market must be brought out of the shadows and into the light.
Drug policy reform is not a matter of some “right” to recreational drug use; it is a matter of wresting the control of a multi-billion dollar enterprise away from gangsters and placing it into the hands of responsible businesspeople.
My question is: Will society continue to be duped, by the false promises of drug war rhetoric, into sacrificing the lives and futures of its children in order to protect and defend the special privileges that drug prohibition affords to gangsters?
Because prohibitionists are usually rather averse to participating in any sort of debate in which the untenability of the drug war — a.k.a. Prohibition II, the sequel with a much bigger budget, a lot more hype, and a far higher body count — might be exposed, I thought I was onto something interesting when I ran across an Orlando Sentinel article entitled, “Should Marijuana be Legalized?” The September 8, 2006 report heralded the news of “The Great Debate: Heads vs. Feds,” in which Steven Hager, editor-in-chief of High Times magazine, and Bob Stutman, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent, discuss both sides of the issue of whether marijuana should be “legalized.”
I was soon disappointed, however, when I learned that this “Great Debate” is not really a debate at all. High Times has some exclusive video highlights of “Heads vs. Feds” and, if they are an example of what transpires at these events, then they are not truly debates, but rather exhibition matches between two gentlemen who have been, for a number of years, performing a very popular routine before standing-room-only crowds.
It’s a road show, an intellectual “concert” tour that can be booked through a company called Wolfman Productions, which has in its roster a wide variety of speakers and debaters who are available to perform discussions of numerous topics.
Now, entertainment is all well and fine, and fun is a Good Thing, but it does not truly raise awareness about just how deadly and destructive our prohibitionist drug policy really is, no matter how many thoughts this “Heads vs. Feds” production might promote in the minds of its audiences.
Of course, the “Heads vs. Feds” show would likely not be nearly as entertaining if it was presented as an honest debate about the principles of prohibition, instead of as a tiresome litany of the same questionable science and skewed statistics of which drug war propaganda has consisted for decades being “refuted” with anachronistic “hippie” rhetoric and an impassioned defense of the “counterculture.”
Clearly, this “Great Debate” is not intended to produce a “winner” as that would likely diminish its amusement value as a thought-provoking spectacle for its largely “pro-legalization” audiences – not to mention that Mr. Stutman might not care to play his “Fed” role opposite a “Head” who exposes the preposterousness of the boondoggle known as the “war on drugs,” instead of pulling punches and leveling the playing field with weak and uninspired arguments that are even more feckless today than they were back in the 1970s.
Mr. Hager’s best one-sentence arguments for “legalizing” marijuana are:
The medical marijuana and industrial hemp issues are important and they are related to the larger goals of drug policy reform, but they should be left out of a debate about the merits of interdicting certain human behaviors and habits as they cloud the issue with facts and ideas that distract listeners from the core argument against drug prohibition, which is that it is, in fact, the “drug problem,” and it has been masquerading as a solution to itself for almost a century.
I believe it is a given that adults have the right to ingest whatever substances they may find relaxing and/or enjoyable, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. But this assertion does not win friends or influence people, it is proselytization that is usually aimed, as a rallying cry, toward the already converted.
Nobody who has been taught by decades of drug war propaganda to fear the potential consequences of drug policy reform really cares that potheads feel oppressed because they might go to jail for breaking laws that are currently on the books in all 50 states.
Marijuana laws might not pass the old “laugh test” for those of us who know better, but most people don’t know better and their attitudes toward those dark and frightening things of which they wish to remain ignorant are deeply ingrained. Plus, they don’t want to touch anything called “counterculture” with one of those proverbial ten-foot poles, let alone make an effort to understand it, or to attempt to cultivate some sort of grudging respect for it.
Indeed, we should stop expanding and privatizing prisons. We should also stop funding corruption with the artificial inflation and price supports that prohibitionist policies unintentionally provide to the criminal element.
These are the issues with which reformers should go on the offensive because the only way to be perceived as winning a debate is to put your opponents on the defensive and keep them there for the duration.
Harsh on the drug warriors! Don’t let them back you into a corner, in which you become obliged to defend recreational drug use, the counterculture, and all manner of scary crime and overdose statistics that are laid squarely at the feet of your opposing viewpoint as the consequence of your failure to conform to the fears, uncertainties, and doubts of teeming masses of brainwashed asses!
Make the drug prohibitionists defend drug prohibition!
A few choice harshing points for the thoughtful reformer’s arsenal:
Don’t let drug warriors get away with that “soft on crime” routine that frightens so many of our politicians. Prohibition is not just soft on crime, it creates it and it’s helpful to it because the “war on drugs” is the ultimate de-regulation policy.
To the proprietors of an underground economy that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, interdiction is nothing but a small line item in their loss columns, part of the cost of doing business, which barely affects their huge, tax-free, bottom lines.
Don’t fall into the “alcohol trap” in which the prohibitionist agrees that perfectly legal alcohol is, by far, the most widely abused drug whose irresponsible use causes much death and destruction, but then follows up with rhetoric about how this is the best example of “why we don’t need another legal drug,” as if millions of people are not already using the illegal drug, and as if the drug laws are all that stand between a sober, productive society and a nation of “stoned-out zombies.”
Don’t be intimidated by the alcohol death statistics, for not only do they include a wide array of alcohol-related illnesses, accidents, and crimes, they are not representative of the vast majority of alcohol users who enjoy alcohol responsibly and moderately, and without incident. It’s the two-percenters who get all the attention, especially when they die of alcohol poisoning, which is a euphemism for an overdose.
(While we’re on the subject of overdoses, this seems a fit place to mention that, during the course of over 5000 years of recorded history, there has never been a single overdose death attributed to marijuana alone – and that is most decidedly not due to the lack of an honest effort.)
Comparisons of the modern drug war with Prohibition (1920-1933) can be a drug warrior’s worst nightmare because, when they are effectively and accurately applied, they become very convincing arguments that render any and all possible defenses of modern drug prohibition baseless and vulnerable.
Nevermind whether or not Prohibition reduced alcohol use, there is no way to tell anyway because, just like it is with the modern “drug war,” nobody knew who was selling what to whom, or for how much. The Prohibition era statistic that matters most is the murder rate, which began to climb steadily with the ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1920, and did not begin to fall again until several years after the ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933.
Ask a drug warrior to describe the difference between Al Capone and Pablo Escobar and see how he or she changes the subject, dismisses the question as irrelevant, or tries to dance around the obvious similarities with arbitrary rhetoric about “nowadays.”
Try to avoid using the words “legalize” and “decriminalize” as not only have these terms become propagandized, they never really made any logical sense at all because the solution is not to “legalize” illegal drugs, but rather to regulate unregulated drugs.
Advocates of drug policy reform — whom prohibitionists sometimes refer to as “drug legalizers” — understand the true intent behind those words, but the larger society has been well-trained to equate them with chaos and anarchy.
A large, but shrinking, majority still believes that drug prohibition acts as a deterrent to the black market. In order to dispel this drug war myth that is so deeply ingrained into the public sentiment, reformers will need to clearly demonstrate how drug prohibition created and continues to enable the black market.
Simply demonizing the black market is not enough; prohibitionists already do that when they defend the drug war as “the solution” to it when the fact of the matter is that the black market in unregulated drugs became a low-risk, high profit business because of — not in spite of — the “war on drugs.”
Drug prohibition prevents the regulation of the drug business, but not the manufacture, sale and use of drugs. No authority or agency really knows who is selling what to whom, where they are selling it, or for how much.
Prohibitionist policies have never produced results that justify their cost to taxpayers, but they did create and continue to support a wealthy class of tax-exempt black market profiteers.
The black market drug business has no consumer advocacy agencies or fair business practice and pricing associations. Black market drug dealers, growers, manufacturers, and consumers who have grievances cannot go to a court of law to settle their differences or turn to law enforcement in the event of theft or fraud, so they settle their disputes with violence, which is the primary reason why we must regulate these currently unregulated drugs.
In a contest of “Heads vs. Feds,” the “Heads” should always win, not so much because we are entitled as citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave, but because history and pragmatism are on our side.
References:
“Heads vs. Feds: Drug War Another Regulatory Failure,” by Ralph Shnelvar, May 1, 2003, The Colorado Freedom Report.
“Heads vs. Feds Misses the Point,” by Brian Schwartz, May 1, 2003, The Colorado Freedom Report.
“Board Finds Success with Heads vs. Feds Debate,” by Shawn Rice, November 19, 2004, LOQUITUR, The Weekly Student Newspaper of Cabrini College, Pennsylvania.
“The Greatest Debate: Heads vs. Feds,” posted by CN Staff (source: BG News), December 11, 2002, Cannabis News.
“Wednesday ‘Heads vs. Feds’ Debate at MCC,” submitted by jmw, April 2, 2005, Rochester Cannabis Coalition (NORML).
“Marijuana Debated by Speakers,” by Lena Acheson, April 1, 2005, The Online Rocket, Slippery Rock University.
“Pot Talk: Student (sic) Flock to ‘Smoking’ Debate,” by Matt Perkins, March 28, 2006, The New Hampshire, The Student Publication of the University of New Hampshire.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Rate, 1900-2002. Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics.
Country music star Willie Nelson, 73, Tony Sizemore, 59, of St. Cloud, Florida; Bobbie Nelson, 75, of Briarcliff, Texas; Gates Moore, 54, of Austin, Texas; and David Anderson, 50, of Dallas were issued misdemeanor citations for possession of illegal mushrooms and marijuana after a Monday morning traffic stop in Louisiana.
State police said the citations were issued after a commercial vehicle inspection of Mr. Nelson’s tour bus in which police found 1 1/2 pounds of marijuana and a little more than three ounces of illegal mushrooms.
State police spokesman Willie Williams said there were enough drugs to merit felony charges of distribution, but all five said the drugs, which were not packaged for resale, were for their own personal use.
According to a news release, “When the door was opened and the trooper began to speak to the driver, he smelled the strong odor of marijuana.” All 5 suspects were released after the citations were issued.
24 ounces is a lot of pot! Many people are hauled in on trafficking charges for holding a mere 24 grams — and no law enforcement officer would believe that more than a joint’s worth of weed was merely “head stash.”
I have to wonder if the same misdemeanor charges would have been applied had the average age of the suspects been 22 instead of 62, or if one of them was not a celebrity, or if their skins were a little darker…
And we all know the answer to that one, whether we want to admit as much or not. Sure, we like to think that our laws are applied fairly and equally without consideration for age, social status, or skin color.
But we nonetheless chuckle at the idea of a bunch of old geezer musicians toking on a pound and a half worth of reefers and the police letting them go with a wink and a nod while numerous others are serving mandatory minimum sentences for holding far less than 24 ounces of cannabis.
The trouble with laws that are intended to control human behavior instead of protecting and defending the rights of the people is that they cannot, as in all cases when we sinners attempt to judge the “sins” of our fellow sinners, ever be objectively applied.
The war on drugs was lost the moment it was declared. As we should have learned from the results of that “Noble Experiment” we conducted between 1920 and 1933, outlawing things that the people, for the most part, usually enjoy without violating the rights of others does not result in orderly and unquestioning compliance, but rather in gangsterism and the corruption and violence of the black markets that naturally form to supply the demand for those outlawed things. Nonetheless, prohibitionists continue to insist that interdiction can eventually work, “if only…”
In a May 29, 2006 commentary for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Daniel K. Duncan and Edward F. Tasch of the St. Louis area chapter of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse made yet another weak and logically flawed case for the continuation of a ridiculously ineffective policy of drug interdiction that creates more problems than it solves while masquerading as a solution to itself.
The title of the editorial in question is, “Legalization is a Terrible Idea,” which, ironically enough, is a concept with which I heartily agree.
“Legalizing” currently illegal drugs will only serve to unclog our criminal justice system and eventually reduce our prison populations, but it will do nothing about the vast underground economy that supplies the neverending demand for certain uncontrolled substances.
If we are to ever have any hope of eliminating the black markets and the gangsterism, corruption and violence that go with them, we must face the reality of our human nature, abandon the pipe dream of a “Drug Free America,” and take control of the market, bringing it out of the shadows and into the light so that we can know who is selling what to whom and for how much. For this purpose, “legalizing” illegal drugs is not enough. We must go several steps farther and regulate unregulated drugs.
Strangely enough, Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch opened their editorial with a quotation from H.L. Mencken, “For every problem there is one solution: simple, neat and wrong,” an axiom that is congruent with regard to prohibitionist policies as well as the notion of “legalization.”
Untenable
Defending an untenable position is impossible if one plays by the strict rules of logic. Prohibitionists, knowing that such contests almost invariably serve to reveal the numerous weaknesses of their position, do not often engage in actual debates with tangible opponents, but rather with themselves, acting in both roles so that they may avoid the embarrassment of being faced with the inevitable exposure of the untenability of the boondoggle known as the war on drugs.
When prohibitionists implement this strategy of debating with themselves, they make numerous tactical errors, such as opening with a concession that the very policy they are attempting to defend is a failure:
So, the war on drugs is not working. Agreed. But the question to ask is, “Why?” Is it not working because using drugs is really a fine idea, and we’ve been unjust and unreasonable in not letting everyone do whatever they want to do? Or is it not working because the way we’ve gone about waging this war set us up for failure?
Without a doubt, we think it’s the latter.
Indeed, having set up a nifty little false dichotomy, Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch appear to have hit the nail on the head with that one, thereby sucking us into the illusion that the failure of the war on drugs is a matter of methodology, not the policy itself. I am not fooled — and neither is anybody else who does not take comfort in the 80-plus year-old status quo.
Ostensibly predicting that such proclamations carry no weight without subsequent proposals of ideas for more effective implementations, Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch go on to hypothesize that the trouble with the institution of drug prohibition is that it focuses upon supply instead of demand:
The premise underlying these approaches is the idea that supply drives demand: The more drugs there are, the more people use them. It is a fatally flawed assumption. The truth is just the opposite: Demand drives supply, and until we accept the significance of this fundamental failure of understanding, the strategies we come up with will continue to fail. In other words, the failure of the war on drugs is no justification for legalizing these harmful substances.
The quotation above belies the fact that we already have numerous laws and policies that are intended to address demand, such as drug courts and other “harm reduction” measures.
And nevermind the oversimplification of the complex economic theory known as supply and demand, for it is quite obviously a clumsy propagandistic segue into an emotional appeal to ignorance-supported fears of outlaw drugs — as well as the old implied threat of anarchy behind the notion of “legalization,” which is actually a prohibitionist term for a sensible drug policy that involves regulation rather than interdiction (it is for this very reason that drug policy reform activists and advocates should avoid using the “L” word and the “D” word).
Cue The Straw Men!
What would a defense of the drug war be without those thatched bamboozlers? Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch apparently understand their usefulness:
People still steal, so let’s legalize stealing. People still speed, so let’s remove all the speed limits. People still drink and drive, so let’s legalize drinking and driving. Date-rape continues; let’s legalize date-rape. The point? Shifting from one flawed premise to another solves nothing.
The classic sophism contained within the above paragraph is almost unworthy of a response, but it must nonetheless be addressed for the sake of folks who might be unfamiliar with the concept of “red herrings.”
Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch have submitted a proposition that is not logically relevant to its “conclusion.” The vast majority of outlaw drug consumers do not actually violate the rights of others while they are enjoying their favored inebriants. However, thieves, speeders, drunk drivers and date rapists most decidedly do violate the rights of their victims when they steal, speed, drive while intoxicated and rape their dates.
In what could be construed as an homage to the 18th Amendment, Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch address the question of why alcohol is legal when it is our nation’s most abused drug:
Incredibly, advocates of legalizing drugs often point to alcohol as an example of a successfully legalized drug. This is a terribly weak argument. Do they really not understand that — in terms of lives disrupted, ruined and ended before their time — the legal drug alcohol is by far a bigger problem than any other drug?
Don’t Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch understand why the 21st Amendment was ratified after only 13 years of Prohibition? Apparently not.
The Good Stuff
Aside form the fact that drug policy reformers are much better dressed nowadays than they were in the 1960s and 70s, the toughest obstacle facing today’s drug prohibitionists is, by far, our very own American history.
Juxtapositions of the modern drug war with Prohibition (1920-1933) are a drug warriors’ worst nightmare because they are the most effective and convincing arguments in the reformers’ arsenal. It is these historical comparisons that have rendered any and all possible defenses of the war on drugs baseless, ineffective and vulnerable.
Some say that by legalizing drugs, the gangs that subsist on the revenue from trafficking will cease to be a problem. Nonsense. Kids don’t join gangs to sell drugs; they join gangs to belong to something, to gain a sense of identity and to feel protected.
While it is indeed true that kids often join gangs for a sense of identity and belonging that they may not get in their homes, that sense of identity and belonging springs from the central purpose of the gang’s business interests, which do include the high risk undertaking of theft (cars, jewelry, electronics and prescription drugs), but are comprised mostly of the low risk enterprise of “dealing,” the manufacture, distribution and sale of unregulated drugs.
How about the argument that legalizing drugs would eliminate the black market in drugs and, thus, reduce the number of crimes committed to support the habits of addicts. Really? So once drugs were legalized, all the addicts suddenly would get good-paying jobs to earn the money they need to buy their drugs legally? Ridiculous.
Our policy of drug prohibition and interdiction provides the untaxed and unregulated black market with artificial inflation and price supports that sustain the high market value of certain unpatentable drugs, which would become very inexpensive under a policy of regulation and taxation.
However, while some addicts do commit crimes in order to support their habits, they are usually non-violent offenses such as, shoplifting, panhandling, and prostitution. Meanwhile, the violent crimes are most often committed by the dealers, not their customers.
The violence associated with the drug trade almost always springs from business disputes between drug dealers, their associates, and competitors because, in the realm of the anarchical underground economy, the manufacturers, distributors and sellers of unregulated drugs do not have access to courts of law and must therefore “settle” their business disputes with guns, knives and bombs instead of lawyers, mediators and judges.
Meet the New Solutions, Same as the Old Solutions
Mr. Duncan’s and Mr. Tasch’s proposed solutions involve three basic strategies: preventing young people from starting to use drugs, making sure that these prevention programs work by requiring “follow-up public education and awareness campaigns of extremely high quality and sophistication,” and a combination of a “degree of decriminalization” (the old “D” word rears its semantically ugly head) and “greater access to quality treatment programs.”
Rounding out that third “strategy,” of course, is the old prohibitionist standby: “and much more stringent enforcement of anti-trafficking laws.” This one’s been tried numerous times before only to be eschewed in favor of less draconian measures once the classic dynamic of “getting tough on drugs” is rediscovered: increases in drug law enforcement are always followed by increases in corruption and violent crime.
And let’s not forget that, in Saudi Arabia, the punishment for drug dealing is beheading — and, yet, they still have addicts.
Conclusion
Drug abuse is a public health problem that will never be fully solved because it is not a condition in and of itself, it is a side effect that has been attributed to a myriad of disorders, conditions, diseases, dysfunctions and syndromes, which are associated with self-destructive behaviors.
People don’t abuse drugs (legal, illegal, prescription or over-the-counter) simply because they exist and have addictive properties, but because the drugs mask their pain and make them feel better — until they wear off, at least.
If we are to address drug abuse and addiction as a public health problem rather than as an issue of law enforcement, then we must take our focus away from drugs themselves, regardless of their various legal statuses, for they are not truly relevant to the underlying causes of self-destructive behavior.
Mr. Duncan and Mr. Tasch believe that the public health problem of drug abuse can be solved “by honestly acknowledging what we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, I do not understand why they have not applied this formula to that other “drug problem” that causes more troubles than it solves while pretending to be the one and only solution to itself.
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Original Articles Copyright 2004-2010 by Margaret Romao Toigo