Foolishness on Drug Legalization

On CNN.com today, William Bennett has published an alarmist diatribe warning against the "dangers" of drug legalization. He warns that legalization will turn our youth into a mass of drug addicted zombies, leading to increases in crime and psychosis. A new marijuana legalization bill, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, occasioned his alarm.

My Gut Reaction: Perhaps we should ask Mr. Bennett his opinion on the legality of gambling.

Analysis: My mention of Bennett's eight million dollar gambling habit is not merely the ad hominem attack that it may initially seem. Bennett and his allies defended him by saying his gambling hurt no one but himself. A similar argument can be raised in regard to drug use. Although Bennett tries to argue that marijuana use leads inexorably to crime, personal experience suggests otherwise. For instance, members of my family have used marijuana without becoming thieves, rapists, or murderers. The devil's weed indeed.

More broadly, Bill Bennett has no more right to tell people not to use drugs than I have to tell him not to gamble. Following his logic, the state would have the right to tell people not to drink alcohol, not to gamble, and not to eat fatty foods. (Indeed, from a public health perspective, banning the fatty foods would make more sense.)

Bennett wrote the article in tones reminiscent of a nineteenth-century temperance campaigner, complete with a survey of the horrors of a drug treatment facility. Interesting, he ignores a statistic published by NORML, a group in favor of marijuana legalization, and sourced from the federal government, over fifty percent of people admitted to rehab for marijuana had either not used it at all within the past month, or had used it less than three times. These people had not gone into rehab because they had a problem; they did so because they were ordered to by the courts.

Bennett's own use of statistics is rather interesting. He says that less than two percent of enforcement is for simple possession, but only uses the federal statistics, ignoring state and local enforcement, who probably deal with marijuana possession far more often than the feds. The FBI is unlikely to chase after someone for having a joint.

Another statistic that Bennett fails to consider is that we have spent one trillion dollars on the Drug War in the past 40 years, and although we have lower rates of drug use, we are far from eliminating it. Our country no longer has the money to spend on this, unless Bennett and his fellow drug warriors are willing to pay some steep taxes to fund their little crusade.

Nonetheless, Bennett and his cohorts will cry, "The children! What about the children!" Whether someone uses drugs is their own responsibility. I could have gotten a hold of drugs when I was a teenager, but I didn't. This was not because I was afraid of some cop, but because I concluded that drugs are bad for you. The conservatives are all for personal responsibility. Why don't they apply it here?

Jamaica in Flames

According to BBC News, Jamaican authorities are trying to restore order in the capital city of Kingston after bloody clashes with forces loyal to drug lord Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Among the inhabitants of Kingston slums such as the Tivoli Gardens area, Coke is seen as a Robin Hood figure and defender of the people.

My Gut Reaction: When will we ever learn?

Analysis: This round of violence started when the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Bruce Golding, agreed to extradite Coke to the United States, where he is wanted on charges of running a drug trafficking network. As with Mexico, our attempts to enforce our draconian drug laws have spilled over into outright violence in another country. As the BBC reports, thirty-one people have died in Kingston.

What is it going to take for our government, and the American people in general, to realize that trying to legislate what people put in their bodies only leads to shattered lives? In the United States, this manifests itself in terms of a massive incarceration rate. In the third world, however, blood flows as governments seek to appease the American government and come across as allies in the War on Drugs.

To be fair, not all of the blame lies with the United States government. As Jamaican expatriate blogger The Field Negro points out, Dudus had amassed a great deal of support from the Jamaican government before the extradition order went out by renting out his gang, the Shower Posse, as political hired guns. The ruling party found the guns they used for political enforcement turned against them.

Nevertheless, the American government requested the extradition, and bears a certain level of responsibility for what has happened in Kingston.

The Drug War Run Amok, Again

Yesterday, the New York Times carried a story about a movement to criminalize yet another substance in order to protect those idiots who might want to injest it. The target this time, an herb called salvia divinorum, is the focus of legal attention by various states because it is a powerful hallucinogen. Some idiots have apparently been posting videos to YouTube showing themselves getting high on it. One Texas representative, Charles Anderson, commented: "When you see it, well, it sure makes a believer [in prohibition] out of you." (Hmm, Representative, I wonder if a video of some guys getting drunk on beer would be any more edifying.)

The fact is, the state should not be involved in determining what people put in their own bodies. If someone is stupid enough to poison themselves with some drug, that is their problem, and my tax dollars shouldn't be spent on it. We shouldn't be criminalizing people for just being stupid.

What makes this really disturbing is that salvia divinorum looks as though it could be a useful component for psychiatric medications and possibly AIDS treatments. Idiots like Rep. Anderson, in trying to protect people from themselves, will only slow the progress of medicine.

Vice Laws

Two recent news stories offer an all too saddening glance at our society’s futile and misguided attempt to regulate behavior through vice laws. Although both of these stories are being treated as tabloid / human interest fodder, they have a great deal to say about our drug and prostitution laws. None of it is good.

The first case is the arrest of Susan Febvre, who had been on the run for over thirty years after escaping from a Michigan prison. She had been facing a twenty year sentence for selling heroin. In her time out of prison, she has from all appearances completely reformed, going on to raise a middle class family and get involved in community organizations.

Now she’s being sent back to prison for nineteen years, for things that happened in the seventies…

The second case is that of the “D.C. Madam,” Norma Jean Palfrey, (One of the most disgusting aspects of the media’s treatment of these cases is their salacious focus on sex while ignoring the human aspects), who committed suicide at her mother’s house in Florida. She was facing sentencing on prostitution charges, which could potentially have carried up to fifty years in prison, although it would more likely have been six years.

Two families thrown into chaos, all because our government wants to protect people from their own decisions.

Surely I am not the only one who sees the waste in all this. Not just of individual lives, but of society’s resources. When you put a drug offender or someone in the sex trade in prison, you take up space that could hold a violent offender. That is part of the reason we have so many incidents with violent criminals being paroled and then killing people.

This is not to glamorize the drug or sex trades. Having lived in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, I have seen the horrible effects drugs can have on individuals, and the degradations prostitution can inflict upon women, not to mention the potential for spreading disease.

However, this is the result of individual choices, which should be left up to the individual, not to society. Indeed, many of the vices which are legal in our society, such as smoking, alcohol, and gambling, have their own negative effects. If we were to follow the logic we use for drugs and prostitution, these two would be illegal.

Strip Search at School

A young female student at a Middle School was recently strip searched by school faculty because another student wrongly accused her of supplying him with drugs. Reason Magazine's Hit and Run blog has the scoop.

The Ninth Circuit Court is claiming that this is not a violation of Fourth Amendment rights, even though they didn't even bother informing the parents. If there were any real sense in the justice system, the school staff who performed the seach would be registering under Megan's Law.