In a Salon essay published today, Alecia Phonesavanh recalls the night her 19-month-old son, Bounkham (a.k.a. Bou Bou), was horribly injured by a flash-bang grenade tossed into his crib during a fruitless drug raid in Habersham County, Georgia. “It’s been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to my sleeping baby,” she writes, “and he’s still covered in burns. There’s still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs. At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid to look.”
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The ACLU mentions declining public support for the War on Drugs as one reason to reconsider the ferocity with which it is waged. But while de-escalation would be welcome, it does not address the fundamental immorality of responding to peaceful transactions with guns and handcuffs. Even if reforms like those recommended by the ACLU encourage police to be more judicious in their use of force, unjustifiable violence will always be a defining feature of drug prohibition.
While members of Congress may have championed Prohibition laws on the House floor, many of them happily broke the rules in any of the 3,000 speakeasies scattered throughout downtown Washington. And when members needed to restock their personal hooch supply, they turned to one man: George Cassiday.
During his time as a booze distributor on the Hill, Cassiday estimated that four out of five members of Congress drank—and many of them availed themselves of Cassiday’s services. Congress even gave Cassiday his own storeroom in the basement of the Cannon office building.
The problems purportedly addressed by stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimums are of the government’s own making. Thus, if we got to the root, the “need” for these bad policies would disappear.
Stop-and-frisk is largely aimed at finding youths who are carrying guns and drugs. Mandatory minimums are directed at drug sellers. It’s not hard to see what is at the root: drug prohibition. When government declares (certain) drugs illegal, those drugs don’t disappear; instead they move to the black market, which tends to be dominated by people skilled in the use of violence. Because the trade is illegal and the courts are off-limits for dispute resolution, contracts and turf will be protected by force. Those who operate on the street will find it wise to be armed.
So, as a result of prohibition and its attendant violence-prone black market, in some parts of town a percentage of young men will likely be walking around with guns and drugs. Seeing this, politicians and law-enforcement bureaucrats turn to stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimum sentences. But the only real solution is to repeal prohibition. There’s no need for intrusive police tactics or prison terms.
In a free society, government has no business telling us what we can and can’t ingest or inject. Before drug prohibition, America had no drug problem. It’s prohibition that created the problem, just as alcohol prohibition gave America organized crime on a large scale. As we’ve seen, when government tries to ban drugs, it creates bigger problems by putting drugs in the streets and gangs in control.
Who Is Teaching Your Children? And What Is Being Taught?
Sure, professional athletes have a certain celebrity appeal, but can they really convince Americans to embrace a product that a growing number have already written off as a shit sandwich? But to really win hearts and minds … Hey! How about using the public schools to recruit their captive audience of students to the cause, and then set the kids loose to proselytize their families on the glories of Obamacare? That should work wonders.
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So public school teachers get paid taxpayer dollars to preach Obamacare to their co-workers and the students, so the kids will then go home and sing the glories of the health scheme to the same taxpayers who are funding the whole process. Everybody wins!
If this experiment in using the public schools as a medium for spreading the good news works out as school officials and health insurance exchange managers hope, expect more in the future.
Drug prohibition has failed. Drug usage rates have not declined, and illegal drugs are more available—and cheaper—than ever before. At the same time, the costs of the drug war are staggering. More than $1 trillion taxpayer dollars have been spent. More than 50,000 SWAT raids occur each year. Hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders are wasting their lives away in prison at our expense. And more than 60,000 people have been murdered in Mexico over the past six years.
AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR provides a brief history of drug prohibition, beginning with Nixon’s declaration of war in 1971 and ending with Obama’s broken promise to allow states to determine their own medical marijuana policies. AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR chronicles how, over the past 40 years, the drug war has escalated from a small domestic program mostly focused on treatment to the multi-billion dollar international war it is today.
Are the horrors unleashed by drug warriors – not only on actual and potential users of substances declared legislatively to be ‘unlawful,’ but also on innocent men, women, and children – conceivably outweighed by whatever benefits this war might bestow?
Nativism is the arch-enemy of the freedom to travel, as its adherents believe they can use the coercive power of the government to impair the freedom of travel of persons who are unwanted not because of personal behavior, but solely on the basis of where they were born. Nativism teaches that we lack natural rights and enjoy only those rights the government permits us to exercise. Continue reading ‘Immigration and the Freedom to Travel and Nativism’ »
Scientists now believe that the increasing toxicity and strength of catnip is responsible for a sharp uptick in press coverage of cats killing prey. Birds! And mammals! And snakes! (But not marsupials, or honey badgers, thank goodness.)
There ougta be a law!
Feral cats do want to be loved. And they do want to eat – birds – mammals – snakes.
Outdoor cats account for the leading cause of death among both birds and mammals in the United States, according to a new study, killing anywhere between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds each year.
The mammalian toll is even higher, concluded researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ranging between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion annually.
The analysis, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggests feral and owned cats pose a far greater threat than previously thought. One study in 2011 estimated cats in the United States kill roughly half a billion birds annually.
“I was stunned,” said ornithologist Peter Marra of the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute. He and Smithsonian colleague Scott Loss, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Tom Will conducted the study.
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They defined “unowned” as farm cats living in barns, strays living outdoors that may be fed by humans, and feral cats that fend for themselves — all of which might live alone or in colonies. The study notes that Washington, D.C., alone has an estimated 300 outdoor cat colonies.
When a law bans exchanges wanted by everyone directly involved a number of things happen:
1) The exchanges continue;
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15) The vast network of beneficiaries of the law applaud and lobby for its continuation, vilifying all opposition;
16) Everyone gets more and more discouraged and inclined to hate all humanity. This list is probably too short.
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It is not enough to simply ban exchanges that have consequences we don’t like. The costs of doing it should be compared with the costs of not doing it. Those costs usually dwarf the costs that would arise from unhindered transactions.
So we now have a politician directly dictating medical policy to doctors at city hospitals. Some of us have been raising red flags about [Philosopher King] Bloomberg’s ban on smoking in privately-owned bars and restaurants, his ban on trans-fats, the farcical ban on large soda sizes, and his other paternalistic policies for years now. This is what happens when government decides it should have the power to protect us from ourselves. Let’s be clear, here. This policy is going to cause needless suffering. People who genuinely, legitimately need pain medication aren’t going to be able to get it. And guess what? Addicts and thrill-seeking teenagers will find other ways to get high.
Since the announcement, I’ve seen some reaction on the Internet expressing hope that [Nanny] Blooomberg is afflicted with some chronic pain condition, so he’ll be able to feel firsthand the suffering he’s causing with this policy. I wouldn’t go that far, though I understand the sentiment. But that also misses an important component of this policy: It only applies to the city’s public hospitals. Which means it will largely be poor people who are forced to suffer pain that can easily be treated. If [Nurse] Bloomberg’s ever afflicted with long-term, chronic pain, he’ll certainly get all the medication he needs to be comfortable.
One telltale sign that we’ve entered a bona-fide drug war hysteria is when government officials start treating people suspected of abusing whatever drug is causing the latest mass case of the vapors not as human beings–as citizens with rights–but as an enemy.
There are so many reasons why drug prohibition is objectionable, it is hard to enumerate them all. In my Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition, I try to systematically survey just the “consequentialist” arguments against this socially-destructive social policy. If I were to revise this article today, I suppose I would emphasize even more than I did how destructive the “War on Drugs” has been to the black community, perhaps especially because of the incarceration of thousands of black men, depriving their children of fathers, but also because of how the black market profits from the illicit drug trade supports the gang structure that preys upon the community and sucks up its kids. Then there is the differential enforcement of drug laws in minority communities. And I would emphasize how the abnormal profits to be made from black market drugs is systematically destroying the entire political culture of Mexico. All this to stop some people from getting high.
But, as I said, the problem with assessing the War on Drugs is that there are so many harmful “side effects” of drug prohibition that it is difficult even to know where to begin. This article is my effort to be as comprehensive about these effects, yet still be accessible. Here is the abstract:
