This isn’t by any means an exhaustive analysis of the second part of the Stossel LP presidential debate but I wanted to share the video now before too much time passes and this becomes irrelevant.
In this second part, Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera each posed a video question regarding drugs. O’Reilly said he had a question for “the libertarian geniuses” which it seemed that he thought he really had a question that would stump them. As it turned out, O’Reilly’s question made him look like a fool. What he thought was a fast ball was actually a hanging curveball that any libertarian worth his or her salt would have hit out of the park (It’s clear that either he doesn’t watch Stossel’s show because he crushes these kinds of questions on a regular basis). All three candidates indeed did hit it out of the park (bonus points for Petersen for calling O’Reilly a pin head).
Geraldo’s question was a bit more nuanced: Should government have programs to help drug addicts? Among the three candidates, I thought McAfee had the best answer. Treatment cannot be forced on those who don’t want it.
From there, Stossel addressed more of the issues in which libertarians are outside the mainstream.
Combining the two parts of the debate together, my opinion hasn’t changed much. I feel like Austin Petersen “won,” I liked much of what John McAfee had to say (he has a great voice too; he should get into broadcasting), and if anyone “lost” it was Gary Johnson.
All of that being said, any one of these individuals is lightyears better than what the blue and red teams are offering.
So… hardcore drug warriors out there… I have a very simple question for you…
Why?
You can’t stop people from getting high. It’s NOT POSSIBLE.
It literally does not matter how far you go, you cannot stop it.
We can’t stop heroin from getting into supermax prisons, where there are no visitors allowed, and everyone is body searched in and out.
I just had a dedicated drug warrior fully sincerely advocate that we completely seal the border, and that every vehicle, container, and person should be fully cavity searched.
When I pointed out that cavity searches didn’t stop heroin from getting in to supermax prisons, he said that we need to have full walls on all the borders, and boats to patrol the coastlines to stop smugglers.
You can’t stop people from getting high. This is not an issue of sealing the borders.
Even if you actually sealed the borders successfully, then they would just grow it here.
How exactly would you stop that?
It would require constantly patrolling millions of acres of property, both public and private; searching all greenhouses, and all forests, and all fields of any kind, at least once every 90 days… in the entire country.
Doing so… aside from the massive violations of peoples rights, would require millions of law enforcement officers dedicated to it.
That would cost more than the entire budget of the United State by the way.
Even if you manage to completely eradicate all opium poppies, and all coca plants on the planet, they will just synthesize it in labs… and by labs, I mean, any quiet room with an electrical outlet, or anywhere you can run a generator, or a blow torch.
If you completely ban all substances that people could get high with, you ban thousands of legal products with legitimate and critical uses, including a huge number of critical medications.
You also have to ban all lab equipment, or closely license and track its sale. And all chemicals of all kind… and many kinds of foods. And most kinds of flowers.
And all machine tools, and glass blowing equipment… and blow torches, and pipes and tubes and sand…
And you’ll have to dig out and burn out millions and millions of acres of plants.
We have 7,500 miles of border. We have 13,000 miles of coastline.
You can make it a death penalty offense to posses, sell, or use drugs, or get high. Many countries do in fact… and people still get high.
This dedicated drug warrior said that it didn’t matter what it took, it didn’t matter what it cost… It didn’t matter if it wouldn’t work at all… That we had to do it anyway.
When I asked why, he said:
“Because to do otherwise would be to surrender”
Then I asked “Surrender what? To who?”
He said “Surrender to the junkies and the dealers”
I asked “Surrender what?”
He refused to answer.
And again I asked “Why”
He refused to answer.
I said “You’re advocating a police state, in order to stop people from getting high. Why?”
He refused to answer.
So… I have a very simple question for you…
You cannot possibly stop people who want to get high, from getting high.
You can’t make it illegal enough. You can’t ban or control enough. It’s not possible… you have to know that it isn’t possible..
Prohibition PROVED beyond all possibility of doubt that it’s impossible.
The last 45 years of the “War on Drugs” have proved beyond all possibility of doubt that it’s impossible.
Maximum security prisons prove beyond all possibility of doubt that it’s impossible.
But you still think we have to do it… No matter what it takes… No matter the harm it causes… No matter what rights get violated…No matter how much power it gives the state. No matter how much it costs…
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.
Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra
Every day fleets of law enforcement officers, from the DEA on down to the local police department, head out onto the streets armed with guns and hair-trigger fears for their own safety.
If they were going to fight the good fight against violence and theft, we could be unreservedly grateful. All too often these armed ingenues, represented by unions, covered by workers comp, and unwilling to tolerate any degree of risk to their person, instead spend their time enforcing petty, bullshit laws that accomplish nothing more than mindless bureaucratic authoritarianism—and revenue for overspent budgets.
Samuel Dubose was missing a front license plate. Walter Scott had a broken brake light. Caroline Small was sitting in her parked car. Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes. James Boyd was camping in the wrong place. David Garcia was feeling suicidal. Zachary Hammond was on a first date with a woman carrying ten grams of marijuana. Freddie Gray was …
Does anyone even know?
These are the “crimes” for which they died.
In July, protestors at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix interrupted Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley to heckle their talking-point platitudes and demand concrete proposals for addressing police abuse. O’Malley, whose tough-on-crime polices as mayor of Baltimore sent its police department into a downward spiral of violence and corruption, had little to offer. Earlier this week Scott Walker, the only candidate in the first GOP debate asked a question on the topic, came up with nothing more tangible than better training, more support, and “consequences.”
Some of the protestors, who have continued to interrupt Sanders’ appearances, focus on racism. An independently worthy cause, ending racism is nevertheless not enough to solve police abuse. Racism is a sufficient cause of such problem, but not a necessary one.
No. The problem is you.
You have to stop supporting all the petty laws that can ultimately be enforced only with violence. Sex-for-money between consenting adults. Sale by and to and ingestion of substances by peaceful adults. Jaywalking, loitering, broken tail lights and the myriad thousand other nonviolent offenses that exist for no greater purpose than that the upper castes may express their disapproval of those who achieve less than Stepford levels of respectability.
Every law, every rule, every regulation—from cigarette taxes to fines for broken brake lights to driving without a license to civil penalties for refusing to make a wedding cake—carries with it the implicit edict that you are willing to have officers in uniforms kill people to enforce it.
Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh was sleeping when police threw a flash grenade into his crib during a raid looking for a suspect alleged to have sold $50 worth of illegal drugs. No drugs were found, no arrests made; the suspect no longer lived there.
That you are willing to throw flash grenades at babies to keep grownups from ingesting methamphetamine (even though you know once thusly tasked, cops will lie to get those warrants). That you are willing to put that cigarette-tax dodger in a chokehold. That you are willing to kill those Oregon bakers if they won’t pay the fine for not baking the cake, and try to lock their door when the sheriff comes to execute on that judgment. You will risk violence by sending thuggish swat teams into legal medical marijuana dispensaries to terrorize customers inside. You would rather that poor mother with the broken brake light or the expired plates pay her fine to your government than feed her children. You are willing to shoot a man in the head for only having a rear license plate on his vehicle.
Yet the insidious evil of treating citizens like municipal ATM machines takes place on an even smaller level than civil asset forfeiture. An official shake-down system also exists in the form of excessive tickets for petty offenses, doled out to those who cannot afford to fight back (disproportionately poor and minority), and then ballooning and escalating into ever more unmanageable sums until arrest and jail time result.
There are no debtors prisons in the U.S.A. Unless the creditor is the government. Then you’re fucked.
The Justice Department’s scathing report on the Ferguson, Missouri police department documented the disturbing end-game of such practices: a situation where 25% of the city’s revenue came from fines imposed by an unsupervised police force prone to excessive use of force. Jack Hitt at Mother Jones has reported on another Missouri suburb where, in response to a legislative cap on revenue that could be generated via traffic stops, the city enacted a whole host of other petty, bullshit laws (against such menaces as basketball hoops in the front yard, overgrown hedges, disorderly window blinds, and pants worn to low) and increased its non-traffic related arrests by 495%.
For the affluent this may be nothing more than an annoying shadow tax system to prop up an overreaching government that spends so far outside its means it pays tax dollars to research how robot-provided Swedish massage affects rabbits’ recovery from exercise. For the poor, knowing their lives will be ruined by fines they cannot afford to pay, jail time, job loss, and mandatory minimums that destroy families, it is why they run.
It is also why they kill.
Because at its worst, this system of official shakedown invites the very threats that put officers on edge. Dionne Wilson, widow of a slain California officer, understands this only too well. Her husband Dan Niemi showed up to investigate a noise complaint and found himself facing Irving Ramirez, who had a history of drug incarcerations. Carrying both guns and drugs when confronted, and desperate not to go back to jail, Ramirez shot and killed Officer Niemi. Wilson used to wonder why Ramirez was ever let out of prison.
It is easy to blame the problem of police violence on racist cops with (the gender neutral equivalent of) small dicks and big Napoleon complexes. It is harder to take responsibility for the crap laws and fiscal irresponsibility that make bad cops inevitable.
We are posting this as a public service and informational notice, for our cannabis using, interested, curious, or just plain liberty oriented readers and friends…
It seems the controversial $1.1T spending bill that is preventing the U.S. government from shutting down is chock full of surprises.
As you may know, much to the dismay of marijuana activists and lovers of democracy everywhere, the bill smacked down Washington DCs referendum that legalized recreational marijuana in the nation’s capital. What you may have missed (because those shifty politicians are doing everything under the table) is that the bill also quietly, but effectively lifted the federal ban on medical marijuana.
Let us be VERY clear… NO the federal government has not legalized, or ended the federal prohibition of medical marijuana.
No, really, they didn’t, no matter what High Times says.
Manufacture, distribution, transportation, storage, sale, possession, and use, of Marijuana are all still federal crimes. Further, they are automatic disqualification on a background check, or a drug test, or a security clearance etc… etc…
They also make one a prohibited person with respect to firearms, explosives, and destructive devices.
Yes… even in Washington and Colorado.
All they did in this omnibus appropriations bill, was to partially defund and deprioritize enforcement of federal marijuana prohibition, against medical marijuana dispensaries only (NOT grow ops, or users) in those states with medical marijuana, between January and September.
That’s it.
Here is the actual text, of the portion of the bill in question:
“Sec. 538. None of the funds made available in this Act to the Department of Justice may be used, with respect to the States of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, to prevent such States from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana. Sec. 539. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used in contravention of section 7606 (“Legitimacy of Industrial Hemp Research”) of the Agricultural Act of 2014 (Public Law 113-79) by the Department of Justice or the Drug Enforcement Administration.”
There has been no real change in the law, there is just a change in the administration of a small subset of enforcement.
In fact, this action makes getting the changes we need in the law harder and less likely.
Far worse though, it furthers the toxic notion that we can just arbitrarily, capriciously, and disparately, choose to not enforce the law, when we feel like it… But then any time we change our mind we can go ahead and start enforcing it again.
This disrespects and debases the very foundation of rule of law.
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.
Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra
VIENNA (Reuters) – Moves by some U.S. states to legalize marijuana are not in line with international drugs conventions, the U.N. anti-narcotics chief said on Wednesday, adding he would discuss the issue in Washington next week.
Residents of Oregon, Alaska, and the U.S. capital voted this month to allow the use of marijuana, boosting the legalization movement as cannabis usage (of things like this tom ford pink kush) is increasingly recognized by the American mainstream.
“I don’t see how (the new laws) can be compatible with existing conventions,” Yury Fedotov, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told reporters.
Asked whether there was anything the UNODC could do about it, Fedotov said he would raise the problem next week with the U.S. State Department and other U.N. agencies.
The Oregon and Alaska steps would legalize recreational cannabis use and usher in a network of shops similar to those operating in Washington state and Colorado, which in 2012 voted to become the first U.S. states to allow marijuana use for fun. With this boost in the pro-marijuana movement, Oregon and alaska marijuana laws had to change to regulate the use of marijuana.
Of course, as Reuters points out, Uruguay has done it on a national level and states within the US are following suit to other countries by allowing certain patients access to buy weed online or through physical dispensary stores. Many states in America have legalized the use of marijuana, but only for medicinal purposes, not recreational, and most of these people would have to obtain a medical marijuana card from their doctor before being allowed access. Of course, different products like CBD oil allow people to buy their own medical cannabis with ease, and many decide to go down this path instead, especially if they’re unable to go through their doctor. This can help a lot of people.
However, it should be interesting to see how the discussion will shape up since the anti-UN crowd also tends to encompass the anti-drug crowd.
First, I’d like to take a moment to mention how great it is to be posting something to The Liberty Papers. In 2009, I joined with a friend in a project he had started where we blogged about area politics. I’d blogged a little bit here and there before about whatever random things, but my libertarian streak had never really gotten a chance to fly.
Suddenly, I had a platform. To say it changed my life was…well, a significant understatement. It lead to me getting to know some pretty cool people, many of whom are here at The Liberty Papers. It gave me the opportunity to first write for a local newspaper, and then eventually buy it. While that didn’t necessarily work out, it was yet another example of me being able to write a lot of words in a fairly short amount of time. So, I did like a lot of people and decided to write a book. Bloody Eden came out in August and is available at Amazon (or your favorite book website for that matter).
Now that we’ve gotten the history out of the way, a bit about the politics. First, I’m probably best described as a classical liberal. At least, that’s what every “What kind of libertarian are you?” quiz has told me, and they’re probably right. I’m a constitutional libertarian, for the most part. If the Constitution says they can do it, it doesn’t mean they should, but if the Constitution says they can’t, then they can’t. It just doesn’t get any simpler than that.
I look forward to contributing here at The Liberty Papers.
This isn’t by any means an exhaustive analysis of the second part of the Stossel LP presidential debate but I wanted to share the video now before too much time passes and this becomes irrelevant. 
So… hardcore drug warriors out there… I have a very simple question for you…
