Category Archives: The War on Drugs

Continuing to Think About Police and Police Culture

Government Regulation, Police Watch, Politics, Property Rights, The Bill Of Rights, The War on Drugs, War on Terror

There has been a significant amount of blogging activity and discussion around “no knock raids“, police culture, Police Militarization, giving the police the benefit of the doubt, and much more.

First, some credit. Radley Balko, The Agitator, has been blogging on this topic for quite a while. He has the best collection of posts on the problems that I have seen, including a Raid Map. It provides details of botched paramilitary police raids over time that Radley has collected. For those of you that think things are okay, this might be eye opening for you.

It seems evident that there is a problem. Innocent citizens die and cops get off with, at most, a slap on the wrist. People don’t trust cops and instead view them with suspicion and distrust. Cops conduct no knock raids on flimsy evidence, use armored vehicles, where every podunk town has a SWAT team and uses them. Then we have, just to make sure everyone realizes that it isn’t the party that’s in power that’s the problem, the BATF and Waco, where Koresh could have easily been taken into custody without the massacre that ensued and where the BATF used para-military playbooks even though they were counter-productive and created a worse situation. I could go on for pages with these sorts of examples, but Radley has already provided them for us. Why don’t we just stipulate that there is a problem.

Let’s define the problem, then. I won’t bother with the conservative definition of the problem, aside from saying that the idea that agents of authority should be automatically respected, that the Drug War is somehow moral and that police should have significant para-military capability is a set of ideas I cannot get on board with. I will point out that the men that founded our country were suspicious of the government and designed our Constitution (as well as the state governments they helped to create) to put boundaries on our government and its agents. While many will try to separate the government and the voluntary agents, saying that those agents are doing their job and the policy is really the problem, I point you to the War Crimes Trials in Germany and Japan after WWII. We established there, as a point of law and morality, that “following orders” is not a reasonable defense.
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Adam Selene
https://thelibertypapers.org/2006/11/22/comrades-i-hereby-declare-the-revolution/

The GOP Must Move To The Center and Lose Limited Government Voters

Individual Rights, Politics, Property Rights, Religious Liberty, The War on Drugs, Theory and Ideas

In yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, former New Jersey governor and EPA head Christine Todd Witman had an interesting column:

Moderate Republicans paid a heavy price in the GOP’s loss of control of Congress.

After the 2004 election, pundits were predicting the dawn of a generation of Republican dominance. Karl Rove was being hailed as the “architect” of this coming era. His strategy of solidifying the hard-right base of the GOP by feeding them a steady diet of extreme positions on social issues that would, in turn, motivate them to flock to the polls was credited with securing President Bush’s reelection and retaining control of Congress.

This month, the limits of that strategy became clear. In more than a dozen House districts in which moderate Republicans had long succeeded, voters apparently decided they were no longer willing to empower the hard-right of the GOP by electing moderates who would contribute to a Republican majority.

Actually, Rove’s strategy did more than just turn moderates and independents against the GOP, it kept fiscal conservatives and libertarians home on election day. The Religious Right has no interest in shrinking the welfare state, they merely want to make sure the money goes to their churches, abstinance programs, persecuting homosexuals, censoring the media, and teaching religion in government schools. But back to Governor Whitman’s column.

I believe, however, that within the results of this year’s electoral defeats are the seeds of future Republican victories, but only if those seeds are planted in the center of the political landscape.

President Bush has to lead the Republican Party back toward its traditional, philosophical roots of respect for and belief in the individual, fiscal responsibility, pragmatic and realistic foreign policy, and real environmental stewardship.

The million dollar question is what does she mean by “lead the Republican Party back toward its traditional, philosophical roots of respect for and belief in the individual, fiscal responsibility, pragmatic and realistic foreign policy, and real environmental stewardship”? Fortunately, Governor Whitman has both a record and an organizaton she runs to examine.

From the It’s My Party Too website:

IMP-PAC is an umbrella organization that provides a place for moderate Republicans to reach out to one another and support those who believe in basic Republican principles such as:

Recognizing that tax cuts not only leave money in the pockets of those who earned it, but, when combined with restrained spending and balanced budget, help to stimulate the economy;

Supporting an engaged foreign policy and a strong national defense;

Continuing the Party’s recognition that government does have a role to play in protecting our environment; and

Respecting the individual as evidenced by limiting government interference in their lives.

Okay, rhetorically at least, classical liberals and libertarians can do business with the moderates. Now let’s see if the results back up the rhetoric.

Recognizing that tax cuts not only leave money in the pockets of those who earned it, but, when combined with restrained spending and balanced budget, help to stimulate the economy

Governor Whitman’s record in New Jersey is that of a tax cutter, on this point, so far so good. Furthermore, the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership’s page on deficit reduction contains nothing that a libertarian or a classical liberal can object to. However, when you look on their past accomplishments page, you’ll find quite a lot of objectionable proposals such as Federally funded terrorism insurance and support for the Davis-Bacon wage controls and Federal funding of stem cell research.

Supporting an engaged foreign policy and a strong national defense

What do they mean by supporting an engaged foreign policy? I found nothing on foreign policy from Governor Whitman or the Republican Main Street Partnership.

Continuing the Party’s recognition that government does have a role to play in protecting our environment;

Government involvement in the environment usually means less property rights and more regulation with questionable benefits.

Respecting the individual as evidenced by limiting government interference in their lives

By this, they usually mean only in regards to abortion. It was the great moderate Republican, Nelson Rockefeller that gave us the notorious Rockefeller Drug Laws that gave us life sentences for drug possession.

Rhetorically, moderate Republicans talk a good game, when you actually look at them, you’ll find they’re no allies of limited-government supporters and instead are merely another branch of big government conservatism.

Kevin Boyd
I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.
https://thelibertypapers.org/2005/11/22/a-bit-about-kevin/

The War On Drugs: The Afghan Front

The War on Drugs

As part of the war in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have engaged in an effort to wipe out the opium trade that has existed in that part of the world. Not surprisingly, their efforts have been less than successful:

U.S. and European efforts to end heroin production in Afghanistan have done little to hamper the drug industry and have hurt the country’s poorest people, according to a new report by the United Nations and the World Bank.

The report, released today, is the latest indication of the difficulties faced by the British-led effort to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crop, which drives the economy in parts of the embattled nation and has helped to fund a resurgence of the Taliban. The report says the production of opium, whose poppies are used to make heroin, permeates daily life in Afghanistan and eliminating the illegal drug trade there could take decades.

If anything, the eradication effort seems to have increased the importance of opium to Afghanistan’s economy as it creates shortages and drives up prices:

The opium trade accounts for about $2.7 billion in Afghanistan’s economy — equal to more than one-third of the nation’s gross domestic product — and is responsible for thousands of jobs, the report says. The Taliban government, which had harbored al-Qaeda, virtually eliminated opium production in 2001, before U.S.-led forces toppled it. Production has soared since, even as the United States and its allies have stepped up efforts to kill fields of opium and persuade farmers to grow other crops.

Opium has remained the nation’s most lucrative crop by far, and drug traffickers — through incentives and intimidation — have kept farmers in the opium business across Afghanistan, which the United Nations says produces about 87% of the world’s opium. Last year, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan produced 4,100 metric tons of opium, nearly as much as the biggest harvest in 1999. The United Nations predicts a record harvest in 2007.

And, not surprisingly, the War on Afghan Drugs has led to other criminal activities:

Counter-narcotics efforts also have fueled corruption, the report says. Farmers who can afford it have bribed local officials to preserve opium crops, while the poorest farmers have been driven deeper into debt when their crops are destroyed, the report says. Investigators found several instances in which farmers planned to replant opium to pay their debts.

The report also says local government officials sometimes help drug lords drive competitors out of the market in exchange for a cut of the profits or protection payments.

Anyone who’s followed the War on Drugs in the United States and South America would not be surprised by this at all.

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com

Arguing the Drug War

Police Watch, The War on Drugs

Over at Jason Pye’s blog, he wrote a post bemoaning the prevalence of no-knock raids, and asking what we can do to improve a situation which is clearly not working. Quite a long comment train followed regarding the entire drug war.

Head on over and take a look. The main tactics of argument on the other side are twofold– First, they claim drugs are bad and if they’re legalized, the world will go up in flames. Second, that if we want to really solve the problem, we need to fight harder.

I’ll address the second point first. The specific argument from one opponent was:

I realize it’s the law that they’re taking issue with, Jace. I happen to believe that more effort is needed in treating criminals like criminals with stiffer penalties, jail sentences and deprivation of luxury…….but we haven’t done that yet because some folks can’t stomach the thought of that kind of inmate treatment.

I wonder what we’ve been doing since the war on drugs began? Since then, we’ve seen stiffer penalties and jail sentences, where we now have “three strikes” laws and mandatory minimums for drug offenses that are worse than rape sentences. While we haven’t made prison into a dank, dark dungeon just yet, it sure as hell ain’t the Ritz Carlton.

But look at the tactic. We’ve been fighting the War on Drugs harder and harder for many years. Would we have accepted such long minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders when the drug war began? Would we have accepted paramilitary-style no-knock raids back then? Would we have accepted making possession of large sums of money evidence of a drug crime back then? Would we have accepted the destruction of civil liberties that has been a hallmark of the drug war?

We see no evidence whatsoever that we’ve made the drug problem any less prevalent than it was before the drug war began. We have made the inner city much more violent and dangerous, full of gang warfare fueled by the profits of drug sales. We’ve incarcerated hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of nonviolent drug offenders, at huge expense to the taxpayer.

We’ve been “fighting harder” ever since we started, and we haven’t made the problem better, as drugs are just as easy to find on our streets as they’ve ever been. But we have made the unintended consequences worse. One wonders just how far they’ll go to fight harder? Where is their limit, if no-knock raids resulting in the deaths of the elderly and three injured cops aren’t it?

But then comes the question of whether we could do better with a method of treatment rather than prosecuting a ruthless drug war. The same opponent demanded evidence:

Show me some “evidence” that legalizing drugs in America “with our mentality” is a better option.

So I did:

http://www.umich.edu/~umisl/articles/dec.htm

It references a 1994 RAND study on how to solve the issue:

In formulating such a policy, a good starting point is a 1994 RAND study that sought to compare the effectiveness of four different types of drug control: source-control programs (attacking the drug trade abroad), interdiction (stopping drugs at the border), domestic law enforcement (arresting and imprisoning buyers and sellers) and drug treatment. How much additional money, RAND asked, would the government have to spend on each approach to reduce national cocaine consumption by 1 percent? RAND devised a model of the national cocaine market, then fed into it more than seventy variables, from seizure data to survey responses. The results were striking: Treatment was found to be seven times more cost-effective than law enforcement, ten times more effective than interdiction and twenty-three times more effective than attacking drugs at their source.

The RAND study has generated much debate in drug-research circles, but its general conclusion has been confirmed in study after study. Yes, relapse is common, but, as RAND found, treatment is so inexpensive that it more than pays for itself while an individual is actually in a program, in the form of reduced crime, medical costs and the like; all gains that occur after an individual leaves a program are a bonus. And it doesn’t matter what form of treatment one considers: methadone maintenance, long-term residential, intensive outpatient and twelve-step programs all produce impressive outcomes (though some programs work better for certain addicts than for others).

Now, I thought that would score some points in this one. I thought that a serious academic study by a respected organization like RAND would carry some weight. After all, it’s not like this is a pro-drug organization; this wasn’t printed in High Times. Nor are they an obviously libertarian group like the Cato institute. If anyone’s study should hold weight, I would think it’s a group devoted to offering serious academic study to the way our government works. But not so:

This study is just that-a study- using numbers and “survey” responses not Human Beings- with today’s mentality. It has some impressive points but you’ll never get this concept to fly in this day and age.

How do you argue with that? I went on to argue that we’ve seen this before (the Prohibition of alcohol), which of course wouldn’t be accepted as evidence because alcohol isn’t as bad as “drugs”. I went on to argue that other countries have seen success with treatment programs, but that was responded to with “These other countrys you refer to don’t have the U.S. Constitution’s protection, the American mentality or Civil Rights activists around every corner…”

I think it’s clear what was going on. When points were brought up by my opponent, and I answered them, my answers were not accepted. It had nothing to do with the merits of my answers, because for any answer I gave, an excuse was offered. My opponent was not interested in actually arguing the merits of the case, he had made up his mind and was looking for any excuse not to change it. That’s what we’re fighting with. It’s a mentality that says “drugs are bad, and there’s absolutely no line that can’t be crossed fighting them.” It doesn’t matter if the collateral damage of fighting against drugs, drugs which are supplied through a violent black market, are worse and more expensive than treating drug users. It doesn’t even matter if it will work, when the people you’re arguing against aren’t listening.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

The Greatest Threat To Our Rights

The War on Drugs

The Bush Administration would have us believe that the greatest threat to our rights comes from al Qaeda and its allies. However, as McQ states in a post at The QandO Blog, the real threat comes not from our enemy in the War on Terror, but from a war being fought much closer to home:

It seems absurd to have to write about something which you feel should be obvious to everyone. The War on Drugs is a war on liberty and that simple truth is demonstrated almost daily on the streets and in homes around our nation.

This isn’t an attempt to say drugs are good or that drugs should be sold to children or that we should happily give over our lives to getting high, anymore than I’d claim alcohol is good, should be sold to children and we should spend our lives getting drunk. Obviously I don’t endorse any of that.

And I’m not interested in the usual and prosaic “so you want our children to have access to drugs?” response. Wake up, will you … they already have access to drugs in quantities and types you can’t imagine. The War on Drugs hasn’t stopped that in the least, nor will it ever. All it has done is drive up the price.

We’ve seen the costs of that war played out before us over the last week as more news comes out about what increasingly looks like the totally unjustified shooting of an elderly woman in Atlanta. In reality, though, it’s a story that has been playing itself out, over and over, again for at least the past thirty years. The more the government tries to crack down on illegal drugs, the further they erode the civil liberties of everyone in the country.

We’ve been having this debate for years now. In 1989, the late Milton Friedman sent an open letter to then Drug Czar Bill Bennett where he said:

“Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore …Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.”

Bennett, of course, didn’t listen back then and we’ve continued to pay the price. How many more innocent elderly women will have to die before things finally change ?

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com
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