transitional drug policy

TRANSITIONAL DRUG POLICY

What do we have to show for the current "War on Drugs"? Bulging prisons? Alienated youth? Crime caused by high drug prices? Innocent citizens raided by mistake? Inner city neighborhoods shot up by rival drug gangs? One tenth of incoming drugs being intercepted? Meddling in foreign countries akin to the early stages of the Vietnam War?

What is the alternative? Legalization? There is a compelling argument that illegal drugs cause much the same problems that illegal alcohol did during Prohibition, problems that were largely cured by repeal. For all the fine theory, however, there is the practical political problem that alcohol was a mainstream cultural phenomenon, while drugs are associated with deviant and dissolute subcultures. Across the board legalization is not a program likely to get anyone elected anytime soon. Neither would abolition of all regulation of alcohol and tobacco, as far as that goes.

While not quite kosher libertarian, however, such policies are far better tailored to the recognized dangers these mainstream intoxicants present and do not create the massive ill effects of the drug war. There are perhaps politically viable alternatives to complete legalization, modeled somewhat on current alcohol and tobacco policies, tailored to the specific dangers of particular drugs. If the life of the law is not logic but experience, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, then we need to accumulate a different sort of experience before any final policy can be made.

As a biochemical matter, there is nothing more dangerous about marijuana than tobacco and alcohol. Existing regulations can be easily adapted, such as not driving under a specified influence and no sales to minors. It may well cause the same health hazards as tobacco, which its present illegal status obscures. Imprisonment for use or even sale of marijuana to adults is a complete waste of law enforcement needed for crime with real victims and intitates a significant portion of the population to evasion of the law. If marijuana were regulated much as tobacco and alcohol, it would be removed from the criminal subculture and would not likely lead to use of other illegal drugs.

Opiates in and of themselves do not cause violent behavior. Opiates such as morphine and codeine have long had medical uses, They can cause cravings intense enough to push people into crime, however, if only because their illegality makes their prices exhorbitantly high and available only within a criminal subculture. Folk wisdom has it, however, that legal opiates would be no more expensive than a pack a day cigarette habit. Some sort of opiates should be available under medical supervision, if only to remove them and users from criminal circles.

There are various drugs which do in and of themselves cause violent behavior, such as crack, cocaine, LSD and various amphetamines. Although alcohol has long been known to cause violent behavior and has recently been implicated by the federal government in some 40% of violent crime, a common approach is not likely to be politically acceptable anytime soon. Thus they have to be separated from those that do not cause violent behavior in and of themselves. There is nothing unlibertarian, however, about holding purveyors of such substances responsible for violent behavior of uses, just as dram shop laws hold bartenders responsible for the drunken behavior of customers.

Legal availability of marijuana and opiates ought to divert drug use from the truly dangerous varieties. A selective drug legalization ought to mitigate most of the evils of both drug use and the war on drugs. Who knows, maybe someone might even get elected on such a platform

Bork's pixalated idea of "original intent"

Chicago, Illinois 60622 September 6, 2005

To the editor, Harper’s:

Cass Sunstein was nowhere near hard enough on the halfway originalists. (Harper’s, September 2005) What have all of them missed, just for starters? Robert Bork, The Tempting of America, says it is heresy to deny that judges are bound by the law, i.e., original intent (p4). He then says a lot of New Deal and Great Society cases were decided wrongly on that basis, but have become too much a part of the fabric of society to change now (p158). He accepts paper money. even to the point of questioning judicial sanity (pp155, 157, 158), and the draft (p122), without the slightest examination of original intent.

Why fulminate merely about judges creating rights not in the Constitution, but not powers? Helvering v. Davis (1936) held Social Security to be an emergency power to spend ourselves rich, not an enumerated power. How long before it creates its own emergency?

Former Federal Reserve secretary Bray Hammond wrote in his 1957 Pulitzer prize winning Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, Chapter 4, quite a complete history of the monetary clause: "...These decisions removed whatever constitutional inhibitions ever existed upon the power of Congress to authorize anything it wishes as money. Thus, in the course of 150 years, changes in monetary and business habits, in governmental responsibility, in statutes, and in jurisprudence have strengthened the Constitution's ban on issues of money by individual states but have nullified completely the original intent that the federal government should have no power to make anything but the precious metals legal tender. "... One can either consider the departure from the original intent a calamity or hold that the original intent, though wise at the time, could not possibly endure...." (pp109-110)

When the framers said, "raise and support armies," they meant paid professional armies. There is compulsory military service, but under the militia clauses,. It is certainly not intended to reduce American citizens to mindless tools of the government, nor to send them halfway around the world, whether or not they are needed for emergencies at home, such as Katrina. This we can see from the Federalist Papers, the debates in the First Congress on the Bill of Rights, and Story’s commentaries. If we know what to look for, the 1980s Perpich v. DOD cases show the National Guard is unconstitutional as a commingling of army and militia.

William F. Wendt, Jr

fuller quotes from Federalist 51

This is a fuller quote from Federalist 51, which is too long for the 500 character home page introduction:

"...Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their situation, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves, so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful...."

This is a previous quote from Federalist 51:

"...But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

red, white, and blue wahabi

(Yours truly has a Saudi friend who would object strenuously to this characterization of Wahabism. The stereotype is important, however, if only because "aginners" become mirror images of what they are against.)

RED WHITE AND BLUE WAHABIS?

Would Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein ever give two hoots in hell what motivates Americans? Why, then, should we care any more about theirs?

At the September 2003 meeting of the Illinois Forum, a statewide conservative and libertarian group, John McNeal, a retired prosecutor, said all the fuss over the PATRIOT Act was over nothing, that the act was largely drug enforcement and anti-crime syndicate measures that had been around for two decades or so. Plus, some good old fashioned charity fraud investigaton, something he had done in the attorney general’s office. Picking up on the IRA, phony Muslim charities were making widows and orphans, not helping them. The Libertarians, he said, were on the wrong side of the issue and were spreading unjustified fears of the government.

At the end of the meeting a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Jerry Kohn, introduced himself. A former Republican who had voted for Bush but had since objected to his war and terrorism policies, he pointedly differed with NcNeal’s earlier remarks. As Kohn said the 9-11 hijackers had to be extremely angry to do such a thing, McNeal, two seats away at the table, stood up and said he was not going to tolerate such nonsense, that it was treasonous, and that the Wahabis were a militant sect that had been trying to take over the world since the early history of Islam. It went back and forth, Kohn being well outshouted by the vehement McNeal, citing WWII precedents for dealing with foreign saboteurs.

After the meeting Kohn’s supporters, by and large, had the better of the post-mortems. One McNeal supporter simply could not understand how anyone could legitimately object to U.S. foreign policies or to bloated military spending or to troops in over 100 countries. She said it was just my opinion and actually asked why I don’t leave, as if she owned the country.

I asked if she had ever read the Federalist Papers, especially Nos. 6 and 8, which every good conservative should know are the public case for ratifying the Constitution. She said she had, but, to me, not very believably.

Why, indeed, should any good American care what motivates terrorists or tyrants? For one simple reason, if nothing else, that we do not descend to their level or become mirror images of them. That is one reason why McNeal’s attitudes, written into law and policy, scare me a lot more than anything from overseas. How much further does such anti-terrorism, in this instance disrupting a perfectly orderly expression of opinion, have to go before it descends into home-grown Wahabism?

McNeal & Co. might recall the military proverb to judge an enemy not by his intentions, but by his capabilities. The capabilities of a home-grown red white and blue Wahabism, dogmatically oblivious to differing opinion or even to making enemies quite unnecessarily, there or here. "Projecting American power anywhere in the world," as the Navy video at the Museum of Science and Industry puts it, at least that sort, are incomparably more frightening to me than anything that Saddam or Osama might ever pull off, even a suitcase nuclear explosion.

Not that an enemy’s intentions or motivations are irrelevant at all, however "treasonous" to consider. At the risk of undemonizing the enemy, there might be a way to defuse his all too human will to fight, but not, however, a demon’s.

And let’s be careful not to demonize McNeal & Co. the way they demonize others. When will they realize that they do not ease mistrust with any such contempt of others’ opinions and most certainly not the divisiveness that undermines their war effort? By my Vietnam nostalgia, the anti-war movement was only inflamed, not cowed, by the pro-war side calling it Communists, cowards, traitors and such. Read very, very carefully, if you are patriotic enough, Federalist No. 6, about men, possessing the confidence of their countries, plunging them into ruinous wars for personal reasons, and No, 8, on people too cowed by frequent wars to resist military usurpations.

William F. Wendt, Jr.