What word best describes the War on Drugs?
The right answer is All of the Above. Politicians have ruined lives and wasted money in a futile campaign to stop people from recreational drug use.
It may be true that people who use drugs are being stupid. Or even immoral. But the key thing to understand is that it’s a victimless crime.
Actually, that’s not true, there are victims. They’re called taxpayers, who have to finance the government’s drug war. And there are secondary victims thanks to bad laws (dealing with asset forfeiture and money laundering) that only exist because of the drug war.
Speaking of which, here’s another horror story from the drug war.
A report by the Justice Department Inspector General released Wednesday found that the DEA’s gargantuan amount of cash seizures often didn’t relate to any ongoing criminal investigations, and 82 percent of seizures it reviewed ended up being settled administratively—that is, without any judicial review—raising civil liberties concerns. …the Inspector General reports the DEA seized $4.15 billion in cash since 2007, accounting for 80 percent of all Justice Department cash seizures.
Here’s the jaw-dropping part of the story.
…$3.2 billion of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges.
In other words, the government took people’s money even they weren’t charged with a crime, much less convicted of a crime.
Drug users also can be victims. Heck, sometimes people are victims even if they’re not users, as we see from this great moment in the drug war.
“They thought they had the biggest bust in Harris County,” Ross LeBeau said. “This was the bust of the year for them.” A traffic stop in early December led to the discovery of almost half a pound of what deputies believed to be methamphetamine. The deputies arrested LeBeau and sent out a press release, including a mug shot, describing the bust. According to authorities, the arrest was due to deputies finding a sock filled with what they believed to be methamphetamine. …After the arrest, LeBeau was fingerprinted and booked into a jail where he spent three days before being released. The problem came after two field tests, performed by deputies, came back positive for meth. Later a third test was conducted by the county’s forensic lab which revealed that the kitty litter was not a controlled substance. The case was later dismissed.
And more bad things like this are probably going to happen because the Justice Department now wants a more punitive approach to victimless crimes.
C.J. Ciaramella of Reason reports on the grim details.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to seek the toughest charges and maximum possible sentences available, reversing an Obama-era policy that sought to avoid mandatory minimum sentences for certain low-level drug crimes. …the overall message is clear: Federal prosecutors have the green light to go hard after any and all drug offenses. …The shift marks the first significant return by the Trump administration to the drug war policies that the Obama administration tried to moderate. In 2013, former Attorney General Eric Holder ordered federal prosecutors to avoid charging certain low-level offenders with drug charges that triggered long mandatory sentences. The federal prison population dropped for the first time in three decades in 2014, and has continued to fall since.
Some Republicans are unhappy about this return to draconian policies.
“Mandatory minimum sentences have unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated too many minorities for too long,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said in a statement. “Attorney General Sessions’ new policy will accentuate that injustice. …Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), although he did not directly criticize Sessions, wrote in a tweet Friday morning that “to be tough on crime we have to be smart on crime. That is why criminal justice reform is a conservative issue.”
For what it’s worth, Sessions isn’t the only one who deserves blame.
While it’s easy to point the finger at Sessions, …Congress ultimately passed the laws the Justice Department is tasked with enforcing. Lawmakers in Congress had a golden window of opportunity over the past three years to revise federal sentencing laws—with bipartisan winds at their back and a friendly administration in White House—and failed miserably.
And there is a tiny bit of good news.
…the Office of National Drug Control Policy… Trump plans to reduce the agency’s budget by 95 percent… there are plenty of actual harm reduction advocates who would be happy to see the agency close up shop.
Though don’t get too excited.
…you know what federal agency with drug policy ramifications is not dormant? The Justice Department. …In the grand scheme of the drug war, who might occupy the ONDCP’s bully pulpit matters less than the army Sessions is building.
So don’t hold your breath waiting for better policy.
Here’s another reason why the war on pot is so absurd. As reported by the Daily Caller, people without access to marijuana are more likely to get in trouble with opioids.
Opioids continue to claim 91 lives a day across the U.S., but new research shows medical marijuana programs are drastically cutting down on rates of painkiller abuse. Research from the Journal of the American Medical Association is adding to a growing body of evidence showing states with medical marijuana programs have lower rates of opioid related overdoses. Patients who are offered pot as an alternative treatment for chronic conditions are increasingly shifting off their prescription opioids entirely, reports WLBZ. The researchers found states with medical marijuana programs in 2014 had an opioid overdose rate roughly 25 percent lower than the national average.
Last but not least, an article in Reason explains how greedy politicians are undermining the otherwise successful pot legalization in Colorado.
Colorado…voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, transforming the popular stuff from a prohibited vice to a substance that could be produced, bought and sold without the hassle of hiding dealings from the authorities and the fear of arrest for voluntary transactions. Yet the marijuana black market is still going strong over four years later, with many sellers and customers willing to take a chance on legal consequences rather than make a risk-free deal. …the driving force behind the black market…is taxes so sky high and regulations so burdensome that they make legal pot uncompetitive. “An ounce of pot on the black market can cost as little as 180 dollars,” according to PBS correspondent Rick Karr. “At the store Andy Williams owns, you have to pay around 240 dollars for an ounce. That’s partly because the price includes a 15 percent excise tax, a 10 percent marijuana tax, the state sales tax, and Denver’s marijuana sales tax.” Colorado also piles on expensive regulatory requirements to get a license.
This is not a surprise.
I wrote back in 2015 that the tax burden was excessive.
Indeed, I even wondered if legalization in Colorado was a good thing if the net result was a big pile of tax revenue that could be used to expand government.
The libertarian part of me says Colorado made the right decision, though the fiscal economist part of me definitely sees a down side.
And that down side may become an even bigger downer.
Governor John Hickenlooper wants to increase the marijuana sales tax from 10 percent from 8 percent. “It seems kind of odd that at the same time they’re trying to do something about the black and gray markets they’re going to ratchet up the taxes and drive more people to the black and gray markets,” state Sen. Pat Steadman (D-Denver) commented.
P.S. I wonder if Senator Steadman realizes he just embraced the Laffer Curve?
P.P.S. It’s worth noting that voices as diverse as John Stossel, Mona Charen, Gary Johnson, Pat Robertson, Cory Booker, John McCain, and Richard Branson all agree that it’s time to rethink marijuana prohibition.
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I don’t and never will use drugs, however, I support them being legalized. Mainly due to the fact that there would be a drastic reduction in crime. Commission of some crimes seem to be the end result of drug addicts not being able to resolve their addictions, so they persist in the same behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place. Also, the war on drugs is a war on basic freedom.
News source: The Lund Report
“Oregon House Approves Bills Decriminalizing Drug Possession”
By Chris Gray
“House Bill 2355 decriminalizes cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and ecstasy, so long as an offender does not have any prior felonies or more than two prior drug convictions. House Bill 3078 reduces to misdemeanors certain property crimes, which are often associated with drug use.”
https://www.thelundreport.org/content/oregon-house-approves-bills-decriminalizing-drug-possession
[…] Republished from International Liberty. […]
Nixon’s war on drugs has raged since 1971…. with no appreciable reduction in the overall availability of narcotics to the general population… it’s dollar cost is inestimable… as is it’s toll in human suffering… it is time to re-think the country’s relationship with it’s citizens who engage in recreational drug use…
criminal organizations operating internationally represent a threat to national security… international drug distribution systems can be used to deliver any type of contraband… from heroin cut with fentanyl to underage sex workers… the biggest threat is a weaponized biological agent… mixed into the drug supply… and distributed to our major cities across the nation… that scenario alone is reason enough to reform our approach to recreational drug use…
perhaps there are lessons to be learned from Portugal…
“Drug policy of Portugal”
“From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
Sort of like a pendulum isn’t it? Yes, it was outrageous to put simple drug users in jail, as they were not really criminals- just making themselves happy, or solving some other deep-rooted problems. Perhaps pot legalization will solve a lot of it. We certainly don’t want our kids sitting in the living room of a person who traffics in illicit substances, and is more than willing to take them to that next level when they discover how harmless that first step is. If the government will legalize pot and GET OUT of the middle of it, we can put that problem behind us. As for the other stuff, I hope they get it right this time. Let’s have our judges actually start using judgment. And put the bad guys away. Obama and company tended to put them all in one category- perhaps because of his drug addled past. It is for certain that tightening our borders will also help resolve a lot of this problem. If we stop the fire hose that is shooting across now, it might be easier to spot the garden hose of drug dealers traversing the border by hiding amongst them.
Perhaps the author can explain what good results from drug use? Does it create better citizens, happier families, healthier individuals, better living conditions? In the absence of these things what can we expect besides widespread crime, corruption, sewer morality, broken families, poverty and an endless cycle of despair.
Show me one society that has embraced drug use that is happy, prosperous, and an model to emulate.
The only reason I could support unbridled drug use is that in ten years we will have cleaned out the gene pools. And that perhaps would be a good end result.