The American Bear

› Drugs and the National Security State | Lewis Lapham

… Alcohol serves at the pleasure of the players on both sides of the game, its virtues those indicated by Seneca and Martin Luther, its vices those that the novelist Marguerite Duras likens, as did Hamlet, to the sleep of death: “Drinking isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can’t drink without thinking you’re killing yourself.” Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren. “The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.”

The observation is in the same despairing minor key as Billie Holiday’s riff on heroin: “If you think dope is for kicks and thrills you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio and living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.” She goes on to say that in Britain the authorities at least have the decency to treat addiction as a public-health problem, but in America, “if you go to the doctor, he’s liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops.”

Humankind’s thirst for intoxicants is unquenchable, but to criminalize it, as Lincoln reminded the Illinois temperance society, reinforces the clinging to the addiction; to think otherwise would be “to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree and never can be reversed.” The injuries inflicted by alcohol don’t follow “from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.” The victims are “to be pitied and compassionated,” their failings treated “as a misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace.”

… Whether declared by church or state, the war against human nature is by definition lost. The Puritan inspectors of souls in seventeenth-century New England deplored even the tentative embrace of Bacchus as “great licentiousness,” the faithful “pouring out themselves in all profaneness,” but the record doesn’t show a falling off of attendance at Boston’s eighteenth-century inns and taverns. The laws prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the 1920s discovered in the mark of sin the evidence of crime, but the attempt to sustain the allegation proved to be as ineffectual as it was destructive of the country’s life and liberty.

Instead of resurrecting from the pit a body politic of newly risen saints, Prohibition guaranteed the health and welfare of society’s avowed enemies. The organized-crime syndicates established on the delivery of bootleg whiskey evolved into multinational trade associations commanding the respect that comes with revenues estimated at $2 billion per annum. In 1930 alone, Al Capone’s ill-gotten gains amounted to $100 million.

So again with the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20 billion a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state. [++]

› L.A. repeals its ban on pot stores | latimes.com

After struggling for years to regulate storefront pot shops, the Los Angeles City Council retreated Tuesday, voting to repeal the carefully crafted ban on medical marijuana dispensaries it approved a few months ago.

The move shows the political savvy of the increasingly organized and well-funded network of marijuana activists who sought to place a referendum overturning the ban on the March ballot, when the mayor and eight council seats will be up for grabs.

It also leaves Los Angeles, once again, without any law regulating an estimated 1,000 pot shops, which some describe as magnets for crime and others call a source of relief for those who are desperately ill.

The council’s 11-2 vote came after an impassioned plea from Councilman Bill Rosendahl, a medical marijuana patient who is fighting a rare form of cancer. Looking gaunt and speaking in a faint voice, Rosendahl asked his colleagues how sick patients like him would be able to acquire the drug if the ban remained in place. [++]

› The West goes to Pot | Charles Davis

… The crazy thing is not that a few people are getting pot prescriptions for what some perceive to be mild afflictions - the same thing happened with “medical” liquor during alcohol prohibition; the problem was the prohibition - but that any grown, mature human adult needs a special piece of paper from a state-licensed medical professional to purchase and possess a plant that at worst leads to jam bands.

This fall, voters in three states - Washington, Oregon and Colorado - will have the chance to go further than California ever has by legalising the use marijuana for all persons over 21. They have the political establishment against them - nine former heads of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have called on Attorney General Eric Holder to campaign against legalisation, just as he did when it was put up for a vote in California in 2010 - but they also enjoy greater numbers than ever: A majority of non-elected Americans now believe that drug prohibition has been a costly exercise in futility and that cannabis should just go ahead and be legal already.

When it comes to progressive change, history shows that the public always leads and, when they’re done getting in the way, the politicians eventually follow. But before our leaders can be led, they’re liable to double down on disaster, as President Obama has by further militarising the war on drugs, a war responsible for ruining lives from Honduras to Hollywood. Someday, though, as demographics shift - as old people die off, frankly - we’ll look back and wonder not at the absurdity of “medical” marijuana, but at the insanity of raiding homes and putting human beings in tiny, terrible rape cages over something that grows in the ground and makes people happy.

› Javier Sicilia Talks to L.A. | Caravan For Peace 2012

Let me start with a few verses from “Not Dark Yet” by Bob Dylan:

[…] I’ve been down on the bottom of a World full of lies/ I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes/ Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear/ It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there […]

We blame this darkness, which has not stopped threatening Mexico and the United States, and which portrays the face of hundreds of thousands of dead, disappeared, persecuted, tortured, butchered, displaced and incarcerated; for all of them, I ask for a minute of silence.

We have reached, as Dylan says, the “bottom of a world full of lies” underneath war, especially when it comes to such an absurd war as the one against drugs. We call such bottom death, humiliation, illegal trade of guns, money laundering, criminalization, corruption, fear, horror, prisons, the strengthening of crime and government violence. For the same reason, we refer to it as the crisis of democracy, the annihilation of freedoms and the contempt for immigrants. This bottom of pain is also, as the song of Dylan says: “a burden that seems more than we can bear”.

The burden we bear upon us contains the weight of our dead, of our missing ones, of those displaced, of our criminalized and humiliated immigrants and, in my case, the weight of the murdering of a good, professional and athletic son, who had never tried drugs; an innocent victim of this imbecilic war just as thousands more. Despite this tragedy, that we have not ceased carrying as a burden for over a year, instead of looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes as Dylan says, we are looking for something, always looking for something in everyone’s eyes: relief, justice and a path to peace. We have done so in Mexico, traveling across the country and holding a dialogue with everyone. We now do it here, traveling across the United States while intending to also hold a dialogue with you, because if Mexico has grave responsibilities for this war that is sinking everything into darkness, the United States also has a part in this. This war began here 40 years ago, when president Nixon decided against all sense of democracy and forgetting what had formerly happened with the prohibition of alcohol in the 30’s, that drugs are not a matter of freedom, of the market and the government’s control, but a matter of national security that had to be fought through violence.

Since then, in order to protect the 23 million drug consumers in the United States, this nation initiated this war that has destroyed Colombia and which now in turn is destroying Mexico, Central America, and is also menacing to destroy in the medium term the United States itself. This is nothing but the imposition of barbarity over civilization, of violence over peace and the triumph of authoritarianism over democracy. [++]

› On Drugs and Democracy | Inge Fryklund

The UN Office of Drug Control (UNODC) has thoroughly documented the violence, crime, and corruption linked with the worldwide heroin and opium trade. The U.S. news media report every day on the mayhem and corruption of government officials caused by the drug wars in Mexico, Colombia, and other points south of our border. In Afghanistan, the Taliban tax the opium trade and protect poppy farmers from eradication, fueling the insurgency and our 11-year war.

However, these problems are all consequences of drug prohibition, not of the drugs themselves. In legal terms, drugs are malum prohibitum (wrong because prohibited by law) rather than malum in se (inherently wrong, such as theft or murder). During the U.S. experiment with Prohibition (1920-1933), alcohol was malum prohibitum; as soon as it was legalized, it again became a normal regulated, traded, and taxed consumer product.

We need to rethink our prohibition of drugs. What problem are we trying to solve by making drugs illegal? Have we chosen the most effective and affordable solution? Are the collateral consequences worth it?

[…]

After spending more than four years in Afghanistan and seeing first-hand the impact of our drug policies—consequences most Americans never see—I have come to the conclusion that we persist on this course primarily because the costs of our drug policies are borne by other countries, not by us. In contrast with our experience under Prohibition, the corruption of American police and politicians by the drug trade is a relatively minor problem. Demand within the United States is just not high enough to necessitate much bribery.

The serious corruption is instead all on the production end, and this we have succeeded in outsourcing to foreign countries. Our war on drugs is fought on the territories of countries such as Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico. The headless bodies in Mexico barely make the inside pages of American newspapers (imagine if dozens of mutilated bodies were dumped in suburban Maryland). We have requisitioned foreign turf for our war on drugs. Citizens of these countries have no voice in the matter. Their leaders’ acquiescence to U.S. policies undercuts electoral accountability, and corruption of their police and courts undermines the rule of law. We have compromised democracy in our own hemisphere.

In Afghanistan, we have failed to connect the dots between drugs and corruption. At the July 2012 donors’ conference in Tokyo, donor after donor urged President Karzai to combat corruption. However, as long as we insist on the illegality of poppy, we are making a demand that cannot possibly be met. [continue]

› At DEA, We Made the Drug Problem Worse, Not Better | Sean Dunagan, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)

The war on drugs has failed. Its failure has been so categorical and self-evident that the statement itself is bromidic. By any reasonable metric of success—addiction rates, violence, the availability of drugs in our schools— it’s clear that our 40-year jihad against certain plants and chemicals has done far more harm than good. Despite this, the federal government’s drug war strategy, which is founded upon aggressive law enforcement and mass incarceration, remains unchanged. We continue to arrest nearly a million people a year for marijuana offenses. We remain the world’s leading jailer, with an incarceration rate more than five times the global average. And this year, the federal government will spend nearly $4 billion more on drug law enforcement and interdiction than it will on drug treatment.

What has this strategy gotten us? The highest drug abuse rates on the planet and 50,000 corpses in Mexico. […]

I spent 13 years working as an Intelligence Analyst with the Drug Enforcement Administration before resigning last year. Over the course of that time, I gradually realized that our drug policies only served to enrich and empower the very cartels we were fighting. I could have kept up the good fight for another 50 years, and the problem would only have been worse as a result of my efforts.

In 2010, while assigned to the DEA office in Monterrey, Mexico, my family was evacuated as a result of the city’s rapidly deteriorating security situation. As I drove them northward through the desert in a long caravan of heavily-armed Federal Police trucks, trying to comprehend the barbarity plaguing the region, I recalled a wonderful verse from the Tao Te Ching: Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.

READ

› Pot Legalization Could Save U.S. $13.7 Billion Per Year, 300 Economists Say

socialuprooting:

Your plans to celebrate 4/20 this Friday could actually make the government some money, if only such activities were legal. That’s according to a bunch of economists, and some prominent ones too.

More than 300 economists, including three nobel laureates, have signed a petition calling attention to the findings of a paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, which suggests that if the government legalized marijuana it would save $7.7 billion annually by not having to enforce the current prohibition on the drug. The report added that legalization would save an additional $6 billion per year if the government taxed marijuana at rates similar to alcohol and tobacco.

That’s as much as $13.7 billion per year, but it’s still minimal when compared to the federal deficit, which hit $1.5 trillion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

While the economists don’t directly call for pot legalization, the petition asks advocates on both sides to engage in an “open and honest debate” about the benefits of pot prohibition.

“At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition,” the petition states.

The economic benefits of pushing pot into mainstream commerce have long been cited as a reason to make the drug legal, and the economists’ petition comes as government officials at both the federal and local levels are looking for ways to raise funds. The majority of Americans say they prefer cutting programs to increasing taxes as a way to deal with the nation’s budget deficit — marijuana legalization would seemingly give the government money wtihout doing either.

› Ceasefire in the War on Drugs? | Gwynne Dyer

Like those generals who used to discover that nuclear weapons were not a good thing about twenty minutes after they took off their uniforms and started collecting their pensions, we have had a parade of former presidents who knew that the war on drugs was a bad thing – but only mentioned it after they were already ex-presidents. Now, at last, we have one who is saying it out loud while he is still in office.

President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, the country that has suffered even more than Mexico from the drug wars, is an honest and serious man. He is also very brave, because any political leader who advocates the legalization of narcotic drugs will become a prime target of the prohibition industry. He has chosen to do it anyway.

“We are basically still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the past forty years,” he told “The Observer” in a recent interview in Bogota. “A new approach should try and take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking….If that means legalizing [drugs]…then I will welcome it.”

Santos has no intention of becoming a kamikaze politician: “What I won’t do is become the vanguard of that movement [to legalize drugs] because then I will be crucified. But I would gladly participate in those discussions, because we are the country that’s still suffering most…from the high consumption in the US, the UK and Europe in general.”

There are no such discussions, of course. Santos is being disingenuous about this; he is really trying to start a serious international debate on drug legalization, not to join one. But the time may be ripe for such a debate, because it is now almost universally acknowledged (outside of political circles) that the “war on drugs” has been an extremely bloody failure.

Read More →

› Is the Drug War Almost Over? Half of Americans Support Legal Marijuana | Conor Friedersdorf

Asked in 1995 to comment on the War on Drugs, William F. Buckley told the New York Bar Association that perhaps it should be ended. Waging it seemed to him counterproductive and unjust. “It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana,” he stated. And the magazine he founded soon followed suit. In 1996, National Review published a brave editorial declaring that “the war on drugs has failed,” adding that “we all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.” It was brave because just one in four Americans favored legalizing marijuana back then, and most of them weren’t movement conservatives.

Today 50 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana, according to a new poll released by Gallup. That’s a milestone. Among liberals, 69 percent want to end prohibition. Just 34 percent of conservatives agree. The prohibitionist cause is nevertheless doomed by demographics. “Support for legalizing marijuana is directly and inversely proportional to age,” Gallup reports, “ranging from 62 percent approval among those 18 to 29 down to 31 percent among those 65 and older.” The only question is how many more lives prohibition will destroy over how many years before voters end it.

If current trends persist, full legalization of marijuana will be a presidential issue as soon as Election 2016. And if the Republican nominee in 2012 is savvy, he’ll take advantage of this information: “A Gallup survey last year found that 70 percent favored making it legal for doctors to prescribe marijuana in order to reduce pain and suffering. Americans have consistently been more likely to favor the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes than to favor its legalization generally.”