It’s not unusual any more to see people in Libertarian circles attacking the war on drugs as a waste of tax dollars and an infringement on personal liberties. In my opinion, that is misguided thinking that comes from trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world.

Imagine this in Hillary Clinton’s voice:  “It’s not unusual any more to see people in Conservative circles attacking welfare as a waste of tax dollars and an infringement on personal liberties. In my opinion, that is misguided thinking that comes from trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world.” So we’re off to a good start already.

For example, you often hear advocates of drug legalization say that we’re never going to win the war on drugs and that it would free up space in our prisons if we simply legalized drugs. While it’s true that we may not ever win the war against drugs, we’re not ever going to win the war against murder, robbery and rape either.

I think it’s also true that we’ll never “win” the war against terrorism either, but John doesn’t seem to have much of a problem fighting that one.

Moreover, it’s true that it would free up lots of space in our prisons if we legalized drugs, but you could say the same thing about most crimes. In fact, we could reduce the crime rate to zero and save enormous amounts of money on police, lawyers, and courts if we simply made everything legal. But, that doesn’t mean it would be a net plus for society.

Let’s try this absurd argument from the other side.  “If we’re seriously about getting rid of the market for drugs, we could do so and and actually claim victory in the drug war if we just threw everyone in prison.”

Another point that’s often brought up is that if we legalized drugs, we’d be able to tax them and bring in more revenue for the state. But, how is that working out with alcohol and cigarettes? In 2004 and 2005, 39% of all traffic-related deaths was related to alcohol consumption and 36% of convicted offenders “had been drinking alcohol when they committed their conviction offense.”

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.  If I had a couple of drinks, my usual inhibitions would be lowered.  If then, because of my lowered inhibitions, I risked my own life to run into a burning house and save two kids, does this mean that alcohol causes people to be heroes? 

When it comes to cigarettes, adult smokers “die 14 years earlier than nonsmokers.”

The longer people live, the more they become a drain on the healthcare system.  Cigarettes cause people to die younger.  So, is the conservative position now that it is the government’s job to do everything in its power to make sure people live as long as possible?  Because that’s more or less the justification Hillary and Obama and the rest of the neo-socialist Democrats use when trying to implement socialist healthcare.

But, will we ever get rid of tobacco or alcohol? No, both products are too societally accepted for that and perhaps more importantly, the government makes enormous amounts of revenue from their sale. Do we really want to get into that same position with Crack, Acid, or Meth? Do we really want to be sitting around 10 or 15 years from now saying, “Gee, we’d like to get rid of heroin, but how could we replace the revenue we make from taxing it at an exorbitant rate?”

A couple of points here.  First, it appears that John would favor banning alcohol and cigarettes if we didn’t depend on the revenue stream.  The government makes money from them, therefore we’ll never get rid of them.  Thus it follows that if drugs weren’t revenue generating we should be rid of them.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my main problem with the contemporary conservative movement in this country.  Anyone remember back in the good old days, when being a conservative meant believing in limits on state power and the primacy of the individual?  Those days are long gone. 

The GOP has degenerated into a party of social authoritarians who still claim the noble mantle of limited government.  John would swear up and down that he still believes in freedom, liberty, and limited government, but then he’d also be perfectly fine with a SWAT team kicking down your front door, throwing in a flash-bang grenade, then charging in wearing paramilitary gear and pointing MP5’s at you just to prevent you from smoking a joint.  That’s not freedom, it’s not liberty, and it sure as hell has nothing to do with limited government.  It’s doing exactly what liberals do, using the awesome might of the state to guarantee that everyone acts in accordance with the narrow strictures of their own set of social values.

The second point is that, only someone who is utterly clueless about drugs would lump crack, acid, and meth together.  I’d be willing to bet that John has never done a drug in his life, or if he has his use of them would be limited to a few hits off a joint in college, ala Bill Clinton.  To show just now nonsensical this grouping is, it would be like John writing an article in favor of universal healthcare and saying, “Do we really want to live in a society where the government allows people to suffer from hangnails, cancer, and decapitation?”

UPDATE:  Here’s a third point, which I am adding in based on a comment I just left to this post.  John’s point is that if we were to legalize drugs, we wouldn’t actually be able to generate any revenue from them because the drug dealers would be able to undercut us on price.  This is a ridiculous idea.  Why?  Because some local drug dealer wouldn’t have the efficiency in either manufacturing or distribution that a legitimate enterprise would.  Who do you think could make and distribute cocaine more efficiently, underground dealers or a major American pharmaceutical company?

Think of it like this:  Can you imagine how expensive a commodity like sugar would be if it had to be brought into the country in a balloon stuck up someone’s ass?

Moreover, the drug legalization crowd claims that we can manufacture drugs here in the U.S., tax them heavily, thereby making money for the government, and yet still be able to sell the drugs cheaper than the dealers can. That would seem to be a dubious proposition. Drug dealers who pay no taxes, have no unions, and don’t have to pay their labor the minimum wage, may very well be able to produce drugs more cheaply than corporations in the U.S. that will be under strict FDA guidelines (It typically costs a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market), that will be faced with a never ending stream of lawsuits, that will have to pay taxes, and then, additionally, will have to sell a product that will be taxed to the high heavens. That means it’s entirely possible that the cost of illegal drugs could go up, not down, with the government running the show and that would be a problem in and of itself because currently, “16% of convicted jail inmates said that they committed their offense to get money for drugs.”

Which, of course, explains the thriving black market for cut-price tobacco and alcohol that we see in this country.  “Yo, man, I need some smoke, and I just can’t afford that 50 cents a pack tax.”

This is a dumb argument, and makes John sound like someone who doesn’t understand the free market, something his previous writings clearly indicate otherwise.  There are brands of alcohol aimed at every income market, from the richest patrician old money to the lowest bum wanting to drink in an alley.  You can buy a pack of smokes for less than a buck in most places, even here in Taxifornia.  So the idea that drugs would be taxed heavily in no way means that they wouldn’t be affordable.  I’ve provided two examples in support of my position, whereas John just makes the claim, despite the unfortunate fact that reality doesn’t fit the assertion.

Of course, the number of people using what are currently illegal drugs would skyrocket if they were legalized…

John provides no basis for this ridiculous assertion, he just makes it.  Here’s how it works.  I live in Los Angeles.  Within a ten block radius of where I live I could buy just about any kind of drug you want:  marijuana, LSD, cocaine, crack, meth, ecstasy, and so on.  And, unlike John, I’ll admit that I like drugs.  When I was a young man (late high school, early college) I used to do a SHITLOAD of drugs.  I’ve never smoked crack and I’ve never injected anything, but I’ve used various combinations of marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, and cocaine.  (My mom is going to shit a canary if she reads this paragraph.) But, it’s true.  Now, as an adult, I might smoke a little marijuana, but I also like drinking Jack Daniel’s.  They help me relax after a stressful day at work.  I come home, make a drink or smoke a bowl, lay on my couch and watch TV.  Now, according to John’s calculus, I should be some strung-out drug-addled loser who breaks into houses to get money to feed my drug habit.  The reality of the situation is that this year I’ll make over $100,000, I have a job with an enormous degree of responsibility in a highly technological field (right now I’m supervising 16 people), and I’m about as normal a guy as you’ll ever meet. 

Not only have I done drugs in the past, but I’ll admit that I liked the effect they had on me.  (I’m not going to cop out like politicians and talk about how it was a valuable learning experience.  I got high and liked it, period.) Now I have enough money to where I could buy all the drugs I like in any amount I choose.  I wouldn’t even have to get in my car to find drugs, I could walk.  And yet, mysteriously, I’m somehow able to control my base animal impulses to try harder and harder drugs.  According to John’s reasoning I shouldn’t even exist, I should have kept going until I overdosed.  In response, John might claim that I’m the exception to the rule.  My entire life experience tells me otherwise.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that John had a family member with a drug problem.  Bill Clinton used exactly the same justification when he was president, pointing to the problems his brother Roger had with drugs, saying that since his brother turned into a drug-addled loser criminal, then this was inevitable for anyone who used drugs.  The fact that Roger Clinton was a loser to begin with doesn’t figure into Bill’s equation.

To put all this in perspective, I know a guy with a PhD in computer science who likes to take cocaine and go dancing on the weekends.  He’s smarter than John and I put together, but occasionally he likes a little blow.  And, as someone who’s done it in the past, cocaine gives you an AMAZING high.  You clearly understand why it was so popular with stockbrokers in the 80s.  You feel like you can take over the world.  You walk in a room and you’ve got the confidence to tell yourself “I could fuck every woman in here.” You feel wonderful.  But, once again, according to John this guy doesn’t exist, because drugs would make him kooky.

I know a lot of people who recreationally use drugs.  These are educated, intelligent people with families, who run businesses, respect the law, pay their taxes, and contribute to society.  They also like to put intoxicants in their bodies.  In fact, during my life the vast majority of the people I have known have, at one time or another, done drugs.  Out of these people, I can count on one hand the number of times any of them had serious problems because of doing so.

… so we’d see a new wave of drug addled burglars if we “legalized it.” Now, maybe you think that’s not the case. Some people certainly argue that if illicit drugs were legalized, their usage would drop. However, the fact that drugs are illegal is certainly holding down their usage. Just look at what happened during prohibition if you want proof of that. Per Ann Coulter in her book, “How to Talk to a Liberal if you Must:”

“Prohibition resulted in startling reductions in alcohol consumption (over 50 percent), cirrhosis of the liver (63 percent), admissions to mental health clinics for alcohol psychosis (60 percent), and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct (50 percent).”—P.311

Given the astonishing level of documented evidence where Mann Coulter has used dubious figures, my general rule of thumb is that if an article contains a statistic from one of her books then it’s time to just stop reading it.  However, for the sake of discussion let’s continue.  I haven’t read the Coulter book John quotes, because after I saw how much I was lied to in the first one I swore I’d never read another.  But from the once sentence here it seems that she’s arguing about all the wonderful benefits of Prohibition.  I wonder if she also mentions the other benefit of prohibition:  the rise of organized crime.

Look, this is not difficult.  When there is a demand for something—drugs, booze, gambling, hookers, etc.—then organized crime will rise to meet it.  So, we have two options, we either reduce the demand or we reduce the supply.  We have about as much chance of reducing the demand for these vices as we do trying to get Shi’ites and Sunnis to stop killing each other so that leads to the supply.  And we spend BILLIONS of dollars every year on paramilitary gear, planes helicopters, armored vehicles, etc., just so we can stop people getting high.  Does John think that the Founding Fathers of this country would have put up with this shit for more than one second?  Of course they wouldn’t have.  This is why I will state, once again, that if you are a conservative in the sense of a belief in individual liberty and limited government, then YOU CANNOT SUPPORT THE DRUG WAR.  (Note, too, that there is a difference between not supporting the drug war and supporting the use of drugs.  I know a lot of people who oppose the drug war who never touch the stuff themselves.)

So, now we have organized crime making billions off of our demand for drugs, a demand which WILL NEVER GO AWAY. 

That’s what happened when alcohol was made illegal. However, on the other hand, if we make drugs legal, safer, easier to obtain, more societally accepted, and some people say even cheaper as well, there would almost have to be an enormous spike in usage.

Certainly that’s what happened in the Netherlands where “consumption of marijuana...nearly tripled from 15 to 44% among 18-20 year olds” after the drug was legalized.

This is a completely meaningless statistic unless, like John, you happen to think that smoking marijuana is some kind of destructive force in and of itself.  Let’s take a look at the reality of drug use in the Netherlands.  They have a policy of separating the soft drugs—marijuana, hashish, mushrooms, etc.—from the hard drugs.  How has this worked on the overall rate of drug use?  Let’s ask the Dutch Ministry of Justice.

“The number of addicts in the Netherlands has been stable - at 25,000 - for many years. Expressed as a percentage of the population, this number is approximately the same as in Germany, Sweden and Belgium. There are very few young heroin addicts in the Netherlands, largely thanks to the policy of separating the users markets for hard and soft drugs. The average age of heroin addicts is now 36.”

What?  You mean legalizing the soft drugs meant that fewer people were trying the hard drugs?  But that goes against the entire premise of the drug war!

“Cannabis use among young people has also increased in most Western European countries and in the US. The rate of (cannabis) use among young people in the US is much higher than in the Netherlands, and Great Britain and Ireland also have relatively larger numbers of school students who use cannabis.”

But how can that be?  According to Ann Coulter prohibition was a wonderful success!

“The figures for cannabis use among the general population reveal the same pictures. The Netherlands does not differ greatly from other European countries. In contrast, a comparison with the US shows a striking difference in this area: 32.9% of Americans aged 12 and above have experience with cannabis and 5.1% have used in the past month. These figures are twice as high as those in the Netherlands.”

My God, has the whole world gone mad?  How can this be?  In America all drugs are illegal, so this should mean that drug use here is lower, right?

But, some people may say, “so what if drug usage does explode? They’re not hurting anyone but themselves.” That might be true in a purely capitalistic society, but in the sort of welfare state that we have in this country, the rest of us would end up paying a significant share of the bills of people who don’t hold jobs or end up strung out in the hospital without jobs—and that’s even if you forget about the thugs who’d end up robbing our houses to get things to pawn to buy more drugs. Even setting that aside, we make laws that prevent people from harming themselves all the time in our society. In many states there are helmet laws, laws that require us to wear seatbelts, laws against prostitution, and it’s even illegal to commit suicide. So banning harmful drugs is just par for the course.

Wow.  John supports the nanny state when the nanny state mentality provides justification for his own anti-drug position.  He says these things are “par for the course.” There’s been a whole lot of stuff in this country that has been par for the course which we subsequently recognized where moral and societal evils.  Slavery, for one.  Every civilization in history has engaged in slavery, but it was ended solely by people in the West, first the British and Europeans, followed by the United States.  I’m sure that there were slaveowners who said, “Hey, this is just the way it is.  It’s par for the course.  Why go change anything?” In 1994 Newt and the Republicans came in and created sweeping changes to the welfare system, which have been astonishingly successful.  Fabulous cash and prizes from the government were first started by FDR, then expanded exponentially by LBJ.  Newt, refusing to accept the lame “par for the course” standard, took a stand and revolutionized things.

Now, if you’ll remember, there was much wailing and emotionalism and gnashing of teeth on the part of the liberal Democrats.  They told us emotional stories about starving kids living in alleys, about mothers sleeping in cars, about how the fabric of society would fall apart if we were to dare touch the crown jewel of the nanny state.  Of course, none of that happened.  Well, here it is 13 years later.  It’s the people on my side of the fence who are playing the Newt role, trying to end a wasteful, intrusive, useless, destructive government program, and it’s John and people on his side of the fence wailing and weeping that America will come to an end if we dare to let people smoke marijuana.

And make no mistake about it, drugs do wreck a lot of lives.

Of course.  Lots of things wreck lives.  That doesn’t mean it’s worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year, not to mention creating massive police state powers, just to prevent those lives from being wrecked in the first place.  Anyone remember the good old days, when conservatives were in favor of letting individual people make their own decisions, then living with the consequences of doing so? 

Of course drugs aren’t the only things that wreck lives and not every person who does drugs ends up as a crackhead burglar or a dirty bum living in an alley. Heck, Barack Obama, a man some people would like to see as our next President has used cocaine—and doesn’t it seem like every few weeks we read about another celebrity who comes out of rehab and goes on to have a successful career?

Exactly.  And if you think our current president didn’t do a little tootski when he was at Yale I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sure, that’s true. But, every person who plays Russian Roulette doesn’t end up with a bullet in his head either.

This is a totally ridiculous analogy.  There is a one in six chance of you getting a bullet in your head when you play Russian Roulette, and every time the trigger is pulled the odds increase:  5-1, 4-1, and so on.  Drug use is NOTHING like this.

Look at the flip side of the equation. How many homeless people are drug addicts?

No idea.  Probably a lot of them.  But since most of them can’t afford food, let alone drugs, mostly they drink cheap, disgusting alcohol.

How many women have had crack babies?

Ah, the ever-reliable crack baby myth.  Let’s see what the US government itself says here.

The full extent of the effects of prenatal drug exposure on a child is not completely known, but many scientific studies have documented that babies born to mothers who abuse cocaine during pregnancy are often prematurely delivered, have low birth weights and smaller head circumferences, and are often shorter in length.

Estimating the full extent of the consequences of maternal drug abuse is difficult, and determining the specific hazard of a particular drug to the unborn child is problematic for many reasons. Multiple factors—such as the amount and number of all drugs abused; extent of prenatal care; possible neglect or abuse of the child; exposure to violence in the environment; socioeconomic conditions; maternal nutrition; other health conditions; and exposure to sexually-transmitted diseases—can contribute to the difficulty in determining direct impact of prenatal cocaine use on maternal, fetal, and child outcomes.

Many recall that “crack babies,” or babies born to mothers who used crack cocaine while pregnant, were at one time written off by many as a lost generation. They were predicted to suffer from severe, irreversible damage, including reduced intelligence and social skills. It was later found that this was a gross exaggeration. However, the fact that most of these children appear normal should not be overinterpreted as indicating that there is no cause for concern. Using sophisticated technologies, scientists are now finding that exposure to cocaine during fetal development may lead to subtle, yet significant, later deficits in some children, including deficits in some aspects of cognitive performance, information-processing, and attention to tasks—abilities that are important for success in school.

So while nobody will dispute the concept that drugs are not good for a fetus, the idea that there is a whole generation of tenage crack zombie children wandering the streets is just ridiculous.  Here’s another quote john is probably not aware of.

It is believed that a mother’s use of cocaine during pregnancy can affect the fetus by allowing the drug to cross the placenta and affect the fetus’ brain, or by causing blood vessels to constrict, which would hinder the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. “It’s sort of hard to believe that something as powerful as [cocaine] doesn’t have a profound effect on the fetus,” said Keith Scott, a researcher at the University of Miami’s Linda Ray Intervention Center.

However, “Their cognitive development is normal when you control for environmental and other factors,” said Ira Chasnoff, MD, a University of Illinois School of Medicine researcher. Chasnoff has been studying children with prenatal cocaine exposure since the early 1980s.

Some researchers worry that the “crack baby” stigma may hinder children as they grow older. AEMC’s Hallam Hurt said, “Our fear is that these children won’t be given a fair chance.”

So, not only is John totally wrong about “crack babies,” he’s also contributing to the problem by adding to the social stigma of being one.  Oh, one final thought.  A couple of weeks on American idol a young girl tried out.  She is a self-described crack baby.  You can see her audition here.  This girl is 16 and can sing her ass off.  Not bad for a crack baby, huh?

How many people are in jail today because they got high and committed a crime?

How many people are in jail today simply because they got high, and getting high itself IS the crime?  If John wants to educate himself about just how many of his fellow American citizens are languishing in prison for doing nothing more than wanting to make themselves feel good he should read this page, which is just one of millions disputing the validity of the war on drugs.

How many lives have been wrecked in some form or fashion by drug use?

How many lives have been wrecked by botched plastic surgery, or e-coli infections, or any of the other countless things which affect us each day?  Is John proposing massive federal expenditures, great expansions in police power, and a huge growth in the size and scope of government to make sure that these dastardly events never ruin another life?  If he wants to be logically and ideologically consistent he will.

There’s probably not a person reading this column who doesn’t know someone who has faced terrible consequences in his life because of drug use.

As I said before, I can count on one hand the number of people whose lives have been ruined by drugs.  And, in the course of my life, I’ve known THOUSANDS of people who used drugs.

That’s why once, way back when William Bennett was the drug czar, he responded like so to a caller on the Larry King show who told him that he should “behead the damn drug dealers.”

“I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it’s difficult. But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don’t have any problem with that at all.”—Bill Bennett

Bennett was right then, he’s right now, and my guess is that most parents, upon finding out that someone was peddling drugs to their kid, would agree with him.

John has, literally, just subscribed to the type of thuggish Sharia justice preferred by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and all of the other Islamofascist nations that we’re currently at war against.  If anyone is looking for a thumbnail illustration of why I no longer consider myself a Republican but still a conservative, this is it.  A conservative wouldn’t think beheading people for crimes is a good idea, but a Bush-era Republican would.

Besides, since when do we let the anger of victims determine the appropriate punishment for criminals?  One of the bedrock principles of our legal system is the idea that the process should be as far removed from the emotional aspect of the crime as possible.  This is why we wouldn’t let the father of a murdered child sit on the jury at the trial of his child’s accused killer, for example.  So, yes, if I caught some guy selling crack to my 12 year old I’d probably want to cause him grievous bodily harm for doing so, but I sure as hell don’t think state-sanctioned beatings are appropriate as punishment.

It’s funny.  John quotes Bennett approvingly, without mentioning the inconvenient fact that Bennett is also a compulsive gambler.  I’d bet that the number of lives ruined by compulsive gambling is staggering, but since John apparently doesn’t find gambling offensive then he’s perfectly willing to let those lives be ruined.  But marijuana?  Send in the SWAT team!  However, let’s take a look at what one of our other Drug Czars has said about the drug war.

“It is clear that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of chronic drug abuse and drug-driven crime. We cannot continue to apply policies and programs that do not deal with the root causes of substance abuse and attendant crime. Nor should we expect to continue to have the widespread societal support for our counter-drug programs if the American people begin to believe these programs are unfair.”—Barry R. McCaffrey, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Since that’s the case, do we really want the federal government to take over the role of a pusher and get our kids hooked on drugs to make a profit? No, we don’t.

Of course not.  We just need to turn America into a police state.  Because John, that’s what’s happening.  And you cannot be a conservative and support a police state.  Ever.

A few questions for John.

1) Do you think we can ever completely eradicate drug use?
2) Assuming the answer to (1) is “no,” do you think there is a point of diminishing returns, where we make the police so powerful and intrusive that drug use is the lesser of two evils?
3) Which is more important to you, keeping drugs illegal, or actually reducing the amount of people who use them?
4) Would it be better to have a nation with more marijuana smokers if it resulted in fewer people using meth or heroin?