I’ve been reading the U.S. Department of Justice’s PR on their Domestic Marijuana Eradication Program and various outside commentary, finding that marijuana is the largest cash crop in the United States, with an estimated $35.8B value to growers, overshadowing corn and wheat together (which total only $30.8B).
Jeffrey Miron, a visiting Harvard professor studying the situation at the behest of the Marijuana Policy Project suggested that legalization would not only save $7.7B (it’s about $10.1B today) in eradication efforts, it could also generate $6.2B in sin taxes. Five hundred economists (including Milton Friedman) subsequently wrote an open letter to the Bush administration calling for the legalization of marijuana. The DEA’s response was: it’s a drug and therefore needs to be eradicated, the trade encourages violent trafficking groups, and they have no way to tax Mexican trafficking groups.
Coffee (caffeine) is a drug, but the DEA isn’t raiding Starbucks, at least not forcefully. Too much sugar will make your kids behave erratically and long term abuse can cause diabetes, but the DEA isn’t seizing the cache of sodas, cookies, and sugary cereals at local grocery stores. Tobacco (nicotine) is as addictive and harder to kick than heroin, but the DEA is not storming the gates at Philip Morris. Strike infantile defense number one.
The DEA apparently doesn’t recognize that the dangerous elements transporting the stuff are dangerous because marijuana possession and distribution has been deemed illegal. Law abiding and enforcement fearing folks generally steer clear of such risky enterprises. Mom and pop stores don’t want to risk a raid by the DEA or the local sheriff, but gangs fit the risk/reward profile and are willing to meet the market demand. If we gave the DEA spokesperson a couple more IQ points and turned drug policy into a tool for hunting down criminal elements in society - at least the government strategy would be believable (probably the real truth behind the ban). Unfortunately, even if that were the case, the most effective means of dismantling gangs and organized crime is to take profit out of the equation, not to pursue participants through sporadic paramilitary action. Without the risk of illegal distribution to justify the healthy profits, gangs wouldn’t be able use drug distribution to finance their other ventures. Strike infantile defense number two.
Finally, tobacco and alcohol are both legal commodities (one of which was formerly prohibited), yet both are taxed despite the ready availability of Puerto Rican rum; Canadian, Russian, and Polish vodka; Scotch whiskeys; Nicaraguan, Honduran, and Dominican cigars; etc. all of which are also paying taxes. Society doesn’t share the DEA’s view - even JAG’s all American Cmdr. Harmon Rabb enjoys a Cuban cigar when he can get one. The end result of blockading Cuban products is to make them less available at higher cost to a smaller (elite) audience, tax free. If it weren’t for the ready availability of similar quality Caribbean derived cigars and alternative tobacco products, Cubans would probably be smuggled in much larger quantities. Strike infantile defense number three.
Jon Gettman (a pubic policy wonk that contributes articles to High Times) estimates that domestic eradication and enforcement efforts cost taxpayers $42B annually. Despite $1B in cash seizures and exhaustive interdiction and eradication efforts, the trade that escapes DEA action is estimated to be $113B annually. If the DEA were a business, Wall Street would have shut them down years ago with that performance record.
To put the $42B cost of the War on Drugs in perspective, consider that the Three Gorges Dam and hydroelectric plant on the Yangtze River generates 22.5 gigawatts, providing power for all of Shanghai (a city of 20 million people), at a construction cost of ~$25B. [ By comparison, the Grand Coolee Dam, the largest electric power generating facility in the United States, produces six gigawatts (the equivalent of six modern nuclear power plants). ] So, the War on Drugs is costing the American taxpayer the equivalent of $42B / $25B * 22.5 = 37.8 gigawatts of new power generating capability every year. It should be clear that the War on Drugs represents a truly massive drain on national productivity. Even if North America’s power consumption is not expanding at a rate of 37.8 gigawatts annually, imagine what could be done with $42B in reduced taxes, improved health care, education, or public transportation systems.
In 1974, a couple of friends pooled their cash and bought a pound of marijuana for $100 (believe it or not, for personal consumption). At the time, marijuana was selling for $15 an ounce in Chicago, so they were saving over 50% by buying in bulk. Today, 1/4 ounce of marijuana sells for $140 in Los Angeles. So eradication efforts have been very effective in driving the street price up, if they haven’t suppressed availability. Analogous to Cuban cigars, the poor can no longer afford to imbibe on a regular basis, so the middle class is supporting the trade, and it’s an increasingly rare luxury for the poor. Prohibition hasn’t stopped the marijuana trade, but it has placed the poor at an ever increasing economic disadvantage.
THC content has more than doubled since 1995, echoing the introduction of distilled spirits during the Prohibition, due to improved economies of scale in border smuggling, transportation, and distribution. Cocaine exhibits the same correlation between strength and legal status. In Bolivia and Columbia where coca grows wild, locals chew leaves for a stimulative effect like coffee, but in markets where cocaine is illegal, you couldn’t buy a coca leaf to save your life; instead you get the highly refined and concentrated pure form of the drug because it’s more efficient to get it to market in that form. If the ever increasing strength of street drugs were government’s principal concern, the best course of action would be to legalize and regulate it, so concern over drug strength must not be government’s motivation.
Likewise, if government were really concerned about the health and well being of what it calls ‘drug abusers’ it wouldn’t criminalize their behavior, it would treat them like they were afflicted with a medical condition and allocate spending toward rehab, not seizure of property, prosecution, and incarceration of users and growers. When you look at how many otherwise law abiding young people have lost scholarships and otherwise experienced severe secondary effects as a result of a possession conviction, the ‘concerned government’ posture is simply untenable. If governments were really interested in positively influencing the lives of inner city (predominantly black and Hispanic) kids, we’d certainly stop disproportionately arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating them for largely innocuous, victimless behaviors.
Perhaps we’re really spending hordes of taxpayer money simply to reinforce the faceless power of government. If so, who does government serve? Perhaps, just as the Grail serves God (an interesting linguistic twist) in Arthurian legend, government is indirectly on a mission from God. However, if that’s the case, the trouble is that the United States is not Iran nor any other sort of theocracy - church and state are supposed to be separated and government is specifically proscribed from establishing religion (in this case supporting it’s objectives). It certainly shouldn’t be going on quests in the name of God. If the concern over drug use is really distress over declining morality or some other rendition of good Christian ethos, government should reserve that territory to churches and back out of the equation.
Marijuana is central to the religious practice of Mahayana Buddhists, the Kasai tribes of the Congo, Tibetans, Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church (Rastafarians), and other minority religious groups, so it could be argued that marijuana prohibition confounds the practice of these religions, thereby acting to establish religions that do not include such practices. There is a move to recognize Rastafarianism as bona fide religion in Spain. Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines also struggle with marijuana prohibition as a Rastafarian civil rights issue.
The roots of drug prohibitions against opium, marijuana, cocaine, LSD, etc. have been motivated by fear and prejudice and fueled by ignorance. Continued prohibition exacerbates economic divisions and class tension and makes possible organized crime’s billions in tax-free profits. Perhaps the real motivation is the opportunity for selective enforcement. The more behaviors we criminalize, the more we facilitate the use of law as a weapon against classes, races, and more selective targets of oppression.
The Netherlands’ marijuana policy echoes their approach to prostitution, yet despite its ready availability, only 20% of the population smokes. In the U.S. where the DEA actively burns and confiscates, while incarcerating users, growers, and distributors, 42% of the population has smoked marijuana (although a tiny minority apparently didn’t inhale). About 61% of the U.S. consumes alcoholic beverages, so marijuana prohibition can’t be motivated by concern about its recreational use or we wouldn’t have alcoholic beverages either. A few bloggers have asserted that Anheuser-Busch and other liquor manufacturers lobby for marijuana prohibition and eradication because marijuana represents a competitive threat to alcohol’s monopoly position as the sole legal recreational drug. If suppressing the rights of 42% of the population to make their own choice in recreational drugs doesn’t strike you as bully majority politics, shouldn’t we be concerned about government spending $42B annually to enforce the liquor industry’s monopoly on recreational drugs? Let the liquor industry fund their own war on their competition.
Given the USA Patriot Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, the Telecommunications Privacy Act, proscriptions against prostitution, and a network of drug prohibitions, the United States is just steps away from the police state tyranny we observe in Singapore. Sure the sidewalks are clean enough to eat off of and the police have particularly smart looking uniforms, but I’d feel no consolation after being fined for spitting on the sidewalk, even if the cop just walked out of a photo shoot for GQ. You can put Demi Moore’s face on tyranny, but no amount of attractive PR can make up for the resulting oppression.
If you grant police the power to invade private property and confiscate colocated assets, you foster tyranny. Naive supporters believe that U.S. government is or will be the first benevolent Big Brother, or think they have influence or inside information about where it will strike next, but the reality is that it’s a mountain of shifting sand with a complex nature that only a climatologist has a prayer of predicting. Perhaps they don’t remember Dalberg-Acton’s warning that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” They ignore the capricious nature of enforcement and the deliberate and inadvertent human errors involved. The targeted classes are therefore not the only victims of enforcement, interdiction, and confiscation - police have gotten bad information and raided tomato hydroponics operations, or they go to the wrong address and kill people.
Once law enforcement has a tool (a law) to use against individuals, it inevitably gets used indiscriminately. Sheriff Chris Abril and Assistant District Attorney Doug Munday of Polk County, North Carolina repeatedly applied the state’s marijuana laws to arrest and prosecute Steve Marlowe, a known medical marijuana advocate. The third arrest included coercion of a local informant to provide probable cause - all for the purposes of distracting the local press from the sheriff’s own trial in a statutory rape case. Once laws are on the books giving individuals in government the opportunity to exercise selective enforcement, those laws will inevitably be applied to support the personal agendas of the law enforcement individuals involved.
Politicians, the most conservative and opportunistic marketing sensitive elements in society are beginning to catch the wave. In the 2008 presidential campaign, every single Democratic candidate promises to stop the DEA raids on state sanctioned medical marijuana labs. It’s probably the most visible struggle between overarching federal control and states rights in fifty years. The presidential candidates that would level the playing field between alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana (by legalizing it) are the only ones that really understand freedom…
- Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel
- Texas Rep. Ron Paul
Every other candidate would either take halfway measures like halting DEA raids in states that have legalized medical marijuana (without addressing the role of the federal government)…
- New York Sen. Hillary Clinton
- Illinois Sen. Barack Obama
- North Carolina Sen. John Edwards
- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson
those that believe we should grant doctors the first right of refusal in all things related to health, thus denying individuals the right to self-medicate…
- Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich
those that haven’t read or didn’t understand the medical reports regarding marijuana’s analgesic, antidepressant, and appetite stimulating benefits…
- Delaware Sen. Joe Biden
- New Hampshire Sen. Sam Brownback
- New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
- Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee
- California Rep. Duncan Hunter
- Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
those that prefer to duck the issue by passing it to state legislatures to decide…
- Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd
- Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo
- Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson
and finally, the truly deluded who believe marijuana is a gateway drug, that society needs to be protected from itself, and government always knows best. The last two qualifiers used to be exclusive Democratic territory, but the group is populated solely by staunch Republican…
- Arizona Sen. John McCain
Or is it just that McCain digs government power and thinks we can ‘manage’ tyranny like we’re managing AIDS. He’s certainly the strongest advocate for ’staying the course’ in Iraq.
We’re spending upwards of $40B in a failed bid to eradicate a substance that is demonstrably less harmful than both tobacco and alcohol, yet we’ve managed to touch so many lives in a positive way: arrested 13,000,000 people and incarcerated 705,000 since 1970, and continue to subject all of society to the whim and consequential errors of selective enforcement, exporting our prejudices and imperialist drug policies to 62 countries (where the DEA maintains active overseas offices), burning crops, confiscating property, executing military operations, killing and incarcerating people domestically and abroad. All this to save our children (I guess) from the evils of illicit drugs? I wonder how many people have died from inhaling marijuana smoke (probably zero). The U.S. and sixty-two countries too weak to defend their sovereignty in the face of U.S. bully diplomacy are certainly disrupting (in fact, ending) an awful lot of lives in a bid to suppress drug use.
The War on Drugs really takes abdication of parental responsibility to an unprecedented level. The reality is that the absolute best access to illicit drugs is your local high school. Isn’t that the converse of what we have with tobacco and alcohol? At least there, you have a high granularity of local enforcement, e.g. the 7-11 store clerk refusing to sell cigarettes to minors. Despite the notorious inconsistency of that avenue of proscriptive denial, its sheer ubiquitousness offers substantially better protection of minors than the much less evenly applied, but substantially more heavy handed police action against marijuana growers and users. It also conveniently provides an avenue for sales tax collection associated with consumption.
Government’s role used to be protect and serve, but it has morphed into the enforcement of the majority will or perhaps an idealistic American lifestyle on every element of society that can’t muster 50% of the vote to protect their right to make their own life decisions. Representative democracy was never meant to subjugate every minority to the will of the majority - it was intended as a mechanism for making every voice heard. The thing we lost since Ben Franklin’s heyday is the primacy of the rights of individuals over those of the state.
Although it started with the Sixteenth Amendment to fund WWI and expanded to meet the needs of the New Deal and WWII, perhaps the original PR sound bite for people serving government (instead of the other way around), was President Kennedy’s inaugural admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” With mandatory wealth and income taxes granting government the first (and overwhelmingly economically predominant) right to make capital planning decisions, government has also usurped the churches’ right to define marriage, the individual’s right to self-medicate, and to decide which drugs to use recreationally.
Legislative representatives can’t possibly know each of their constituents personally, yet they seem comfortable passing legislation that enforces what they deem best for all constituents, in spite of immense diversity of opinion, consequent deleterious effects on the criminalized minority, and numerous calls for legislative reform from economists, sociologists, and judges. This legislative behavior is mirrored in communist state central planning. It’s indicative of a belief in man’s superiority over Nature. The dawn of the Industrial Age and subsequent Information Age have man ‘mastering’ electric power, telecommunications, information technology, the nearby solar system, and the genome, yet like young children we have so profoundly impacted the environment that island and coastal regions have already retreated or succumbed to rising oceans, and weather in general is demonstrably more volatile, as evidenced by multiple 100 year flood events in the same geography within a decade.
Global changes in climate, run-off pesticides and fertilizer, and overfishing threaten biodiversity and our ability to harvest ocean food sources - all areas where government could make a difference, yet legislators turn a blind eye or invest paltry sums to mediate pollution, greenhouse gas production, etc. while spending extravagantly to suppress 42% of society’s freedom to use marijuana, whether medically or recreationally. Don’t we have bigger fish to fry? The places where central planning could make a difference to a continent, hemisphere, or the planet are largely being ignored, and the areas where a bit of diversity might produce the next Grace Slick, Salvidor Dali, Carl Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ray Charles, Vincent van Gogh, William Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, Jules Verne, William Butler Yeats, Grateful Dead, etc. are getting their asses whacked with a fraternity paddle labeled “To Hell with Freedom” and “To Hell with Darwin” on alternate sides. My life and millions of others are richer for the creative contributions of these and other artists and thinkers, and I willingly admit that there’s a downside - Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin being examples that come immediately to mind (though heroin, not marijuana, claimed their lives). That’s where Darwin comes in.
Everybody makes choices that affect the safety and future of their lives every day, be it ignorantly, inadvertently, or with fully informed consent. What you eat and where you live have a huge influence - living in the Midwest U.S. (probably the water) gives you a much higher propensity for kidney stones than people in other geographic areas - blizzards, searing heat, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, high winds, high tides, volcanoes, flash floods, etc. Living in The Maldives, Lohachara and Ghoramara isn’t just a risk, it’s not even possible any more. People don’t always choose where they live, but I have yet to hear of a sadist forcing marijuana smoke down an unwitting victim’s throat. It might not be as wholesome as eating whole wheat bread (for the gluten tolerant among us), but it’s a Darwinian life choice that individuals were able to make for millennia until governments began the campaign to protect people from themselves. If legislatures firmly believe they have a role to play in drug policy, why not take the high road and offer a socialistic helping hand when individuals need counseling or rehab? Where there is a diversity of opinion on a subject, enlightened government should allow it’s children to explore the landscape, perhaps skin their knees, and patch them up afterwards, not ground them in advance, stifling exploration, innovation, and personal growth.
Personal growth may take the form of a drug facilitated creative vision, or conversely having or observing someone have a bad experience while they are under the influence. Good and bad results are both possible, perhaps likely, but just as one does not blame concrete or gravity for a skinned knee, parents (and government) should prepare their children (people) for what they may encounter, while preparing themselves for the potential downsides. Today, the drugs themselves aren’t nearly as serious a problem as the direct and consequential results of arrest and prosecution for possession, e.g. having a criminal record, incarceration, losing a scholarship or a job, etc. Gangs and organized crime made possible by the present illegal status pose a secondary threat, e.g. turf wars and unrelated gang activity, the potential for being shot in a gang crossfire or a police raid. Finally, the potential for inappropriate application of possession, cultivation, paraphernalia, and related prohibition laws raises the possibility of being subject to a paramilitary raid on your house at five in the morning because a neighbor smelled something they didn’t recognize or because you insulted someone with the power to send you a message.
We already considered and discarded the ignorance is bliss solution with respect to sex education. Is it possible that the very same conservative political forces that argued for ignorance and abstinence are supporting the prohibition against marijuana and other controlled substances? If we as a society truly value individuality and cultural diversity, the legal structure must support the broadest possible range of acceptable behaviors instead of forcing square pegs into round holes. Drug laws in their current form are the tools of social prejudice, racial discrimination, and political tyranny and thereby windows into the Victorian souls of legislators. The legislative drive to crush cultural diversity and individual freedom is the central misdirection of governments in many of the former British colonies (Anguilla being a possible exception).
Recall a sound bite from Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility,” or Star Trek’s ‘Prime Directive’ not to interfere in less advanced cultures. Given government’s overwhelming power, what effort is being exerted to wield that power with appropriate dispassion in the face of diversity? Instead of remaining mostly aloof and only taking action when one individual attempts to deny life, liberty, property, or another’s (gray area here) pursuit of happiness, the governments of many former British colonies have adopted progressive preventative postures, ticketing people for not wearing seat belts, arresting people for driving with open containers of alcoholic beverages regardless of whether they’re legally intoxicated or exhibiting suspicious driving behaviors. Gun registration and subsequent confiscation as recently applied in San Francisco is another popular preventative measure echoing Hitler’s plan to disarm political opponents.
Some of these preventative measures have reached such a degree of invasiveness that one begins to question whether legislators really understand the concept of freedom at all. Perhaps it would be no more ludicrous to outlaw miniskirts and form fitting clothes on teenage girls because the logical conclusion of that behavior is inevitably teen pregnancy. Too extreme? Try this on for ludicrous: Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist’. This isn’t some futuristic dystopian society or a heretofore obscure Dark Age custom, we’re talking about the U.K. circa 2008. In general, enlightened societies don’t criminalize victimless behaviors, yet we are increasingly unable to let individuals choose to fasten their seat belt or even to prefer one kind of ethnic food over another. Tyranny encroaches liberty in tiny increments until life under the protection of government becomes so constrained that revolution is the only option - which is why governments (with the notable exception of Switzerland) always favor disarming the general population.
I’m reminded of laws proscribing ugly people from appearing in public, or requiring cripples to limit their public errands to non-daylight hours. Is it really so hard for the intolerant to look the other way? We’re on a campaign of enforced similitude - we want neighbors like ourselves and we’re going to get congress to do something about it. At the moment, this seems to be the quest of the Republican Right in America. The problem with such quests for normalcy is that normal is no easier to define than pornography. It’s a slippery slope where some degree of liberty still exists, but it becomes easier and easier as freedoms are stripped away. In reality, nobody is functionally normal, the strongest statement that can be made is that someone has achieved average in every measurable characteristic. Were you ever to meet such a person you might actually have an unsettling feeling that they lacked character. So, the natural process of individuation works against straightjacketing society, but people are generally tolerant right up until there’s simply nothing left to take away and that’s where the Jehovah’s Witnesses plan to step in and mop up the mess.
At the end of the day, the losers in marijuana prohibition are: all people whose liberty has been abridged by legislation; medical marijuana users hoping to ward off depression, alleviate chronic pain, suppress emesis, or improve appetite; recreational drug users who prefer the lower health risk of marijuana vs. the alternatives (e.g. tobacco and alcohol); 3/4 of a million people who have already been incarcerated or tainted by a criminal record; various non-traditional religions; and farmers and entrepreneur distributors in over sixty-three countries who have had their livelihood destroyed, privacy invaded, and family members incarcerated, maimed, or killed. The winners are: the alcoholic beverage industry, the Religious Right, the criminal justice system (jobs for police, probation officers, social workers, attorneys, jailers, court recorders, judges, …), and police state power mongers.
We could certainly use the Drug War’s $42B budget for a host of constructive purposes instead of using it to destroy the lives of people with the temerity to defy government sponsored social/racial cleansing masquerading as a policy that ‘protects’ citizens from a self-inflicted activity that’s substantially less dangerous than driving a car.
We don’t need government dictating what’s best for individuals in the codification of personal relationships, self-inflicted medical practices, or which drugs to imbibe recreationally; we just need government to build public transportation systems, ensure due process and equal protection, prosecute murderers, rapists, and thieves, and attempt to prevent such crimes in the first place. In most other areas, adequate societal forces are already in play.
The overarching rule of law that is most flagrantly missing from the United States Constitution and that of other ‘enlightened’ democracies, is a clause that declares that a government consecrated by the people, for the people, … (sound familiar?) shall do no harm to the citizens under its protection. The Declaration of Independence almost goes there, but even if it did, it has no force in law. It was certainly egg on the face of King George, but within the context of the United States’ legal system, it’s just window dressing. The hippocratic oath works for physicians, shouldn’t governments be held to the same standard?
Further reading:
Marijuana Drug Threat Assessment
NORML Report on U.S. Domestic Marijuana Production
Marijuana is Safer than Alcohol
2005 US DEA Eradication Efforts by State
Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America
Marijuana Called Top U.S. Cash Crop
Security vs. Freedom: the False Choice
Giuliani, Romney, McCain Offered $10,000 to Prove Their Statements on Medical Marijuana
Does Drug Prohibition Adversely Impact African Americans?
Arguments for and against drug prohibition
A brief history of the criminalization of cannabis
The Racial History of U.S. Drug Prohibition
Presidential Candidates on Marijuana
Medical Marijuana Voting Guide
We Cannot Say Ben Franklin Did Not Warn Us
Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws
Bank Secrecy Act congressional testimony
Gun Control, By Any Means Necessary
Milton Friedman: End Marijuana Prohibition
Follow the Green: Pot Petitioners Will Go to Hempfest For Some Billionaire Schmoozn’
Towards a Culture of Responsible Psychoactive Drug Use
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
Activists kick off petition to get pot onto liquor store shelves
U.S. should follow Europe’s marijuana legalization lead
Policy Paradox: Implications of U.S. Drug Control Policy for Jamaica (subscription required)
The Economics of Prohibition by Mark Thornton. 2007, Ludwig von Mises Institute. ASIN: B000XGAFQ0