As it turns out, my hatred of the drug war didn’t prevent me from enjoying Narcos. That’s because it mostly focused on Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín drug cartel, who was responsible for thousands of murders. Using drugs may be a victimless crime, but murder certainly isn’t, so I had no problem with them going after Escobar and his cartel.

Focusing on the murders is actually pretty common in movies and TV shows about the war on drugs, and I think it’s a tell: If they showed the actual war on drugs — cops dragging away drug users and low-level dealers — the cops serving as protagonists would look like violent asinine busybodies. Nobody wants to watch that. So the cops are pretty much only shown going after murderous drug dealers, because that’s a lot more heroic than busting street kids, factory workers, and college students.

It’s a different story when it comes to Narcos: Mexico. We’ve only seen the first season so far, but it’s already pissing me off. It’s set in the 1980s, before the events of Narcos, so it can show how the drug war “began” with the DEA confronting the Guadalajara Cartel run by Félix Gallardo.

Like its predecessor, Narcos: Mexico has narration from a DEA agent:

Now, a lot of people don’t want to hear this story. They want to pretend it never happened. But fuck that. It happened. Look, I can’t tell you how the drug war ends. Man, I can’t even tell you if it ends. But I can tell you how it began. Or at least when we realized we were in it.

…

Sometimes you need somebody to wake you the fuck up and tell you the shooting has started. In this story… that guy’s name is Kiki Camarena

That’s DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who we immediately see getting hauled off by cartel enforcers. The story then backs up to when Camarena was working in the U.S. and decided to take a new position down in Guadalajara, Mexico. Camarena’s abduction is not much of a spoiler since his murder in 1985 is a matter of DEA history.

Do you smoke pot? I guess it’s okay if you do. There are laws now that say it’s cool. I don’t agree with them. But it’s not up to me.

I’m not sure who’s narrating all this, but damn right it’s not up to him. That’s my whole problem with the war on drugs — drug warriors sticking their noses in where they don’t belong. Is anybody forcing them to do drugs? No? Then fuck all the way off.

As for Camarena, he’s depicted as smart and likeable, but to my eye, he also comes off as a bit of an asshole, in a narc kind of way. In the third episode, we hear the story of why he has a black eye in his DEA identification. His wife Mika explains:

Mika: The week Kiki got accepted into the DEA, we’re at this wedding. Actually, we crashed it, but Calexico’s so small, everybody knows each other. So we have a few drinks, everything’s fine. Then this kid comes to the table to tell his mom he can’t go to the bathroom because there was a guy in there smoking pot. So, brand-new federal agent here is like, “I got this,” heads off the the bathroom.

Listener: So what happened?

Mika: Well, it wasn’t one guy, it was four. So, he says to them, “We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”

Kiki: Turns out the easy way was to beat the shit out of me.

Mika: All this for a joint, right? So I ask him, “Was it worth it? Are you happy now?”

Kiki: And I said, “I had them on possession, but now I have them on assault, so damn right it was worth it.”

What a colossal asshole! He crashes a wedding he was never invited to, and then he disrupts the wedding by starting a fight trying to arrest some of the actual guests, all because they are committing the victimless crime of smoking pot. I’m not saying he deserved what eventually happened to him, but neither did he deserve a paycheck from the taxpayers.

The show doesn’t just make me angry, it also makes me sad. There are so many murders. At one point, the show depicts the 1984 DEA-led raid on the 2500-acre Rancho Búfalo marijuana crop, conducted by Mexican Marines. Counting both sides, at least a dozen people were killed. Over some weed. What a stupid, stupid thing.

The drug war killings keep happening over and over, in both incarnations of Narcos. From cops and politicians murdered for trying to fight the traffickers, to random people forced to take sides between the traffickers and the police, to all the victims of Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror, the death toll from the drug war is in the thousands.

At times I found myself wondering how much the people of Mexico and Columbia resented the Americans whose drug consumption funded the cartels and paid for all the violence. Of course it didn’t have to be that way. None of it had to be that way. If it weren’t for the war on drugs, Americans could have been buying their weed from domestic growers or peaceful Sinaloan farmers.

And Enrique Camarena wouldn’t have ended up another life sacrificed to the war on drugs.

The initially unnamed DEA agent who narrates the story keeps calling the death of Enrique Camarena the first shot in the drug war. He may be right as far as Central and South America are concerned, but the war on drugs started here in the United States over a century ago, when Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. It was, and still is, a war against the American people.

It’s essentially a religious war — morally and philosophically indistinguishable from the early Christian church’s brutal suppression of blasphemy, the Taliban’s war against modern music and trimmed beards, or whatever they’re whipping people for in Saudi Arabia these days. It’s not as bad as the Nazi Holocaust or other historic atrocities, but it’s a similar kind of callous evil, and with tens of thousands dead — hundreds of thousands if we include wars between the traffickers — it could get there yet.

The DEA narrowly avoid being the villains of Narcos and Narcos: Mexico only because the drug traffickers are even worse. Of course, the cartels would never have become so powerful without the crazy profits that became possible when drugs were outlawed. Outlawing drugs didn’t stop the production and sale of drugs. It just ensured that outlaws would be in charge of drug production and sales.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Libertarian Watches “Narcos”

I heard about this because my local neighborhood criminal defense blogger, Matt Haiduk, had a few things to say about the “street value” estimate, using an analogy to ketchup:

If I cut out the middleman I can actually get 60 gallons- or 7680 ounces of ketchup! At a price of of only $457.20 it comes out to a street value of…

…how would I even know? What am I going to do with 60 gallons of ketchup? I couldn’t eat it all before it went bad- that’s nasty. I couldn’t repackage and sell it to my friends- I don’t have anywhere to store it, I can’t ship it, and I definitely don’t have “60 gallons of ketchup” worth of friends.

There is no street value to 60 gallons of ketchup. There’s only wholesale value. And that wholesale value is A LOT lower per-ounce than the personal use bottles I buy.

Read the whole thing.

Matt’s ketchup analogy gets at the problem, but I’m going with a different analogy. Let’s talk about fine handmade wood furniture, like this beautiful Shaker Style desk from Vermont Woods Studios:

As depicted, made out of Cherry wood, putting this desk in your office will cost $5,274.

Now suppose the cops stop and confiscate a truck hauling a container full of milled Cherry lumber. The maximum load limit for standard 40-foot shipping container is 57,759 pounds (just under 29 tons). The standard unit of measure for rough wood is the board-foot, which is a 1ft by 1ft piece of wood that is 1 inch thick. Since Cherry wood weighs about 50 pounds per cubic foot, we can calculate that the container holds 13,862 board-feet of Cherry wood.

Given the dimensions of the desk above, I think a woodworker could make the whole thing — top, back and side panels, drawers and legs — from about 80 board-feet of lumber. Thus the truck is carrying enough wood to make 173 executive disks selling for $5,274 each, for a total of $912,402. In other words, by the logic of drug “street value,” the cops just confiscated a truck carrying Cherry wood with a “street value” of almost a million dollars.

But really, they didn’t. What the cops got was a raw material that could eventually be converted into an end consumer good worth a lot more, through the application of rather a lot of labor. But until that labor is applied and paid for, the value of what they got is a lot less — about $95,000 by my estimate. (And even that is assuming small lots at retail prices. A wholesaler would probably offer less.)

It’s the same with the cocaine. Raw cocaine on the truck is of comparatively little value. It doesn’t become valuable until it’s actually in the noses of the people who will be using it, and it takes a lot of work to get it there. That 16.5 tons of cocaine would have to be diluted with filler, broken down into smaller packets, and transported to stash houses around the country, where it would be cut and broken down further into 1 kilo bricks and then eventually into ounces and grams and even individual lines of cocaine for sale to end users. This requires couriers, drivers, packers, and chemists, along with security and lookouts and people to supervise them.

The cocaine intercepted by the government, like the Cherry wood in my example, is just a raw material that has yet to go through a production and distribution process that will add a lot to its value. Trying to calculate its “street price” is like finding a pile of clay and pricing it as pottery, or finding $50 worth of canvas and paint and pricing it as a $500 finished painting.

Drug warriors might object that I am missing the point: They could accept that much of their billion dollar valuation depends on labor that is yet to be done, and then they could argue that by stopping the cocaine in its raw bulk form, they are preventing it from fueling all that future criminal labor that would be involved in getting it out onto the streets. By stopping the cocaine now, they are stopping a bunch of criminals from earning a billion dollars distributing it.

That’s probably a pretty fair argument. But let’s examine why it’s so profitable to distribute cocaine: All of the steps in the distribution process have to take place while the cops are actively trying to stop them. It costs money to secure the operation against law enforcement interference, and even then, getting arrested is still a huge risk for everyone involved, so the price of cocaine has to include both the cost of avoiding arrest and a premium paid to people to accept the substantial risk of arrest that remains.

Just how large are the costs of risking or avoiding getting arrested? Well, it turns out that cocaine has a legitimate medical use as a topical anesthetic during sinus surgery. Last I heard, medical grade cocaine sold for this purpose at a cost of about $30 per ounce, or a little less than $1 million per ton. I can’t find current pricing, but if that still holds, then the 16.5 tons of cocaine seized by the cops would be worth about $15.8 million dollars if it were legal. In other words, if we accept the U.S. Attorney’s office’s claim that the cocaine has a street value of $1 billion, we can estimate that police attempts to suppress the cocaine trade have driven up cocaine prices by 6200 percent!

And all of it goes into the hands of criminals, thanks to the war on drugs.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How Much is 16.5 Tons of Cocaine Really Worth?

The District of Columbia is poised to completely legalize pot, which will be the most ringing of government endorsements of societally destructive personal conduct, in a malfunctioning culture that should not be placed at further risk.

I find it amazing that Jack thinks that by making something no longer a crime, the government is giving it a ringing endorsement, as if there is no middle ground for conduct that is undesirable but nevertheless tolerated in a free society. One of the most vivid descriptions of the banal evil of totalitarianism is that “everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.” Endorsement is not truly compulsion, but in conflating legalization with endorsement, Jack is nevertheless seeing the world in an oddly totalitarian frame.

One of the errors in Jack’s reasoning is to think that the path from ethics to policy is as simple as “behavior X is bad, therefore we should make behavior X a crime,” without giving due consideration to the costs of doing so. Those costs can be especially high when it’s not just behavior X that is criminalized, but a superset of behavior X and a bunch of other behaviors Y and Z that are thought to be somehow related to behavior X.

John Belushi died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine, but the anti-drug laws don’t just prohibit giving someone an overdose of those drugs. They make it a crime even to use these drugs even in safe quantities. In fact, the mere sale and possession of these drugs is prohibited. And Jack is arguing that Belushi’s heroin and cocaine use is somehow relevant to marijuana law, even though marijuana is a completely different kind of drug. We’ve even gone so far as to criminalize certain cash transactions because they might be used to hide money that might have come from selling illegal drugs. And we allow police to violently invade people’s homes when they are suspected of possessing both drugs and toilets down which to flush those drugs. The people on this page are dead because we’ve followed a policy of outlawing drugs without considering all the consequences.

It also makes me furious that a talent like [John Belushi] gave himself so little time to entertain us, because he killed himself with an insatiable appetite for illegal drugs.

While it’s tragic that John Belushi died, it seems odd to lament the loss of being entertained by him in a post advocating continued drug criminalization. John Belushi wouldn’t have had much time to entertain us if he’d been in prison on drug charges. And let’s be honest, most of the rest of the writers and cast of Saturday Night Live would have been right there with him in the cell block. I’m guessing getting raped in the showers would have killed their sense of humor.

(Yes, if drug cops had thrown John Belushi in prison, he might have lived. But John Belushi is an exception. Most drug users don’t die from it. Most don’t become addicted. How many of them are you willing to imprison against their will to stop a guy like John Belushi from killing himself? I’d have trouble justifying any answer other than zero.)

Jack seems to argue that Belushi owed us some sort of duty of entertainment, and that to ensure that people like him continue to entertain us, we need to be able to lock them in a cage for using drugs. This is kind of a creepy claim on some other person. I’d be willing to dismiss it as just my imagination, except that he also takes a similarly paternal interest in black people:

This overwhelmingly black, poor, educationally-challenged and struggling population needs competent, trustworthy leadership and an injection of values. It is a community, after all, that idolized the late Marion Barry, a mayor who smoked crack on the job, and never apologized for it. It’s not surprising that the adults in the District would tell the young African-Americans that it’s cool to spend their your money to get stupid, to avoid clear thought rather than practice it.

Whereas Jack would rather put the District of Columbia’s young African-Americans in prison, because there’s no way that a five-year stretch in a cage will teach them bad values, impair the quality of their education, or break up families, right?

This isn’t just paternalism, this is the perpetual false argument that we need to punish people “for their own good,” that we ought to punish people for doing things we consider unwise, that some people just can’t handle freedom. It’s no wonder that Jack has trouble understanding why some black people see similarities between the modern incarceration state and slavery. Southern slave owners would have said that Africans are too simple and child-like, that they needed the slave owners to take care of them and see to it that they were good Christians. Drug warriors say that we have to imprison black people so they won’t do drugs. Every oppressive system has an excuse for why some people have to suffer.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience.”

— C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock” (1948)

For the record, I think C.S. Lewis is wrong about the robber barons. They’re worse, because they don’t have consciences to trouble them, and cannot be encouraged by reason to change their minds, because that would be to oppose their own interests.

But that doesn’t let the moral busybodies off the hook, because it turns out you don’t have to hate people to cause them a lot of harm. The well-meaning can do quite a lot of damage with the best of intentions.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Tyranny of the Well-Meaning

Let me state this in the clearest terms possible: the problem of drug use is not solved with drugs!

No, but that’s not really the point of legalization.

Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise.

It appears that His Holiness hasn’t quite passed the word to the rest of the team. The Catholic Church, to its credit, runs rather a lot of addiction rehab facilities, and they take a different view. One of the first addiction recovery services I found, Catholic Charities, Diocese Trenton, has this to say about addiction: “No matter which kind of addiction, it is important to recognize that addiction has nothing to do with one’s morality or strength of character.”

In fact, the overwhelming sentiment toward addicts by the people who treat them is one of compassion. For the Pope to imply that they are evil goes against the basic principles of addiction treatment, including the addiction recovery services offered by his own church.

But perhaps I misunderstand. Perhaps the Pope is distinguishing between the addict and his or her addiction. Perhaps the latter is evil, and the former is only its victim. Hate the sin but love the sinner and all that. Fair enough. But under those terms, those of us who favor legalization are also trying to help the sinner.

To think that harm can be reduced by permitting drug addicts to use narcotics in no way resolves the problem. Attempts, however limited, to legalize so-called “recreational drugs”, are not only highly questionable from a legislative standpoint, but they fail to produce the desired effects.

If the Pope believes that, then the Pope has a limited understanding of the desired effects of drug legalization. If all currently illegal drugs were legalized tomorrow, I wouldn’t use any of them. I want drugs legalized because I want the police to stop sending armed SWAT teams to raid homes and shoot dogs. I want police to stop shackling people and hauling them off to be locked in cages for years. I don’t want legalization because I want drugs. I want legalization because I want the police to stop killing innocent pastors and setting babies on fire. That would be a “desired effect.”

Substitute drugs are not an adequate therapy but rather a veiled means of surrendering to the phenomenon.

I don’t know enough about addiction therapy to say whether methadone and other substitutes are an effective treatment for drug addictions. But I’m pretty sure the Pope’s plan to lock drug users in cages is not therapy either.

Here I would reaffirm what I have stated on another occasion: No to every type of drug use. It is as simple as that. No to any kind of drug use. But to say this “no”, one has to say “yes” to life, “yes” to love, “yes” to others, “yes” to education, “yes” to greater job opportunities. If we say “yes” to all these things, there will be no room for illicit drugs, for alcohol abuse, for other forms of addiction.

On this I personally agree with the Pope. I’ve said “no” to illegal drugs all my life, and I plan to continue to do so. I rarely even drink booze, and that’s legal. Where we differ is that I don’t want to force my lifestyle on other people.

Ken Lammers has some commentary of his own:

…I find this to be a distillation of my personal beliefs about drugs. Legalization is unlikely to do the user much good. It will just switch the dealer from some guy on a corner to some guy behind a 7-11 counter.

Ken apparently doesn’t see any contradiction between those last two sentences. Buying drugs of uncertain origin, purity, and composition from a guy whose real name you don’t know is a dangerous way to get high. A drug user would be much safer buying a carefully manufactured product from a storefront backed by a corporation that wants to preserve the value of its brand and which can be hit with a multimillion dollar class-action lawsuit if the product is defective. I’m guessing that will do drug users a lot of good.

Also, the guy behind the counter at 7-Eleven isn’t going to wrestle him to the ground, throw the cuffs on, and haul him off to jail. That’s also good.

And I doubt that any cocaine producing Columbian cartel could ever match the predatory nature and capabilities of Big Pharma. After all, the Medellin cartel can’t run ads during the super bowl or deliver its product to every single grocery store, pharmacy, and convenience store in America – Proctor & Gamble (pepto bismo) and Bayer (aspirin) already do.

Here we come to a more profound difference between my views and Ken’s (or the Pope’s). I think that having digestion aids and pain medication conveniently available just a few minutes away is one of the advantages of our modern civilization. The Walgreens down the block stocks thousands of items — canned soup, milk, batteries, shampoo, condoms, light bulbs, toys, memory cards, makeup, candy — and it’s open 24 hours, so I can get what I want, when I want it. I think making high-quality recreational drugs available on the same basis is a good thing. It’s certainly better than having the manufacture and distribution of recreational drugs controlled entirely by criminals.

Anyone who believes addiction will decline in such an atmosphere is either naive or choosing to turn a blind eye to reality.

One distinction that seems not to be recognized by the Pope, and maybe Ken Lammers, is that drug use is not the same as drug addiction. People can use drugs without becoming addicted or ruining their lives, and there are far more casual drug users than addicts, even for relatively scary drugs like meth and heroin. When it comes to a less dangerous drug like marijuana, millions of people have proven that safe use is possible. Plenty of marijuana smokers have gone on to have normal, successful lives, including the current President of the United States. And his predecessor. And the one before that.

The risk of arrest and prison is part of the cost that the drug user pays when deciding to consume illegal drugs, so legalizing drugs is the economic equivalent of lowering the price. In addition, everyone in the supply chain incurs a risk of arrest and prison just for handling the drugs, and they all demand compensation for the risk, which results in a high price for the final consumer. So legalizing drugs will also reduce the actual price charged to consumers. Economics 101 tells us that lowering the price will increase the consumption, so I fully expect drug use to go up if drugs are legalized.

Whether drug abuse or addiction will also go up is more complex question. If some percentage of drug users are destined to become drug addicts, then increasing the number of users will increase the number of addicts, assuming that the new users are just as likely as the original users to develop addiction problems.

On the other hand, industrialized production and distribution will reduce impurities and variations in quality, reducing health complications and making overdoses less likely. And I think that increased social acceptance will make it less likely that drug users will be excluded from their communities, less likely that they will have trouble finding jobs, and more likely that they will be able to get help when they need it, especially since they can ask for help without fear of being arrested. Even for those who are addicted, the low cost of recreational drugs will reduce the financial burden of addiction. Finally, legalized drugs will directly benefit both casual users and addicts by eliminating the risk of arrest and imprisonment, and the reduction in enforcement efforts is a benefit in itself — no more late night raids, no more innocent grandmothers getting shot, no more puppycide.

I believe that legalizing drugs will probably increase drug consumption, but I think it will also reduce the harm caused by drugs, including the harm caused by law enforcement agencies and the justice system. That’s why we sometimes call it harm reduction. I suppose it is a “compromise,” but it’s not a compromise with evil, it’s a compromise with reality.

The Pope, on the other hand, seems to be engaged in magical thinking: He apparently believes that if we say “No to every type of drug use” then people won’t abuse drugs. He doesn’t seem to realize that his version of saying no necessitates the creation of a massive government program of spying on citizens, violently assaulting them, and throwing them in cages.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Pope On Drugs

Actually, I lied. It wasn’t an Islamic terror cell, it was something called the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team, which is led by Sheriff Joey Terrell from Habersham County, Georgia. They killed Pastor Jonathan Ayers back in 2009 because they thought he was involved in drugs, and they decided to violently confront him before they bothered to confirm the facts. Their more recent victim, the baby, was burned just a few days ago:

A 19-month-old boy critically injured when a police device was tossed into his bed has a 50 percent chance of surviving, his parents said today. But a northeast Georgia sheriff defends the officers’ actions, calling it a tragic accident.

Sheriff Terrell refuses to admit there’s a problem:

“The last thing you want is law enforcement to injure someone innocent,” Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There was no malicious act performed. It was a terrible accident that was never supposed to happen.”

Well what the fuck do you think is going to happen if you throw a flash-bang grenade through a doorway when you can’t see where it’s going to land? Those things may not be as deadly as fragmentation grenades, but they still explode with enough heat to start a fire. Plenty of people have been injured by flash-bang grenades.

Terrell further explains:

“Our team captain asked the normal questions – is there children?” Terrell said. “If there’s children involved in a house, we do not use any kind of distraction devices in those houses. We just don’t take the chance on it.”

But there were no indications of children in the home.

“According to the confidential informant, there were no children,” Terrell said. “When they made the buy, they didn’t see any children or any evidence of children there, so we proceeded with our standard operation.”

Even when they don’t directly injure people, flash-bang grenades still stun and disorient people, which means they are an indiscriminate assault against anybody in the room, including people who present no threat to the entry team. In many cases, the raid teams are serving search warrants, which means there may not even be proof yet that anyone in the house committed a crime. So I’m not particularly impressed by their concern for children, since they seem to have no qualms about harming innocent adults.

While Terrell said the sheriff’s office takes ownership of its decision to enter the home, that was necessitated by the man who was selling drugs there.

No. No it wasn’t. Nobody forced the task force to try to arrest that guy, in that place, on that day.

“The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,” Terrell said. “Wanis Thonetheva, that’s the person I blame in all this. They are no better than a domestic terrorist, because they don’t care about families – they didn’t care about the family, the children living in that household – to be selling dope out of it, to be selling methamphetamine out of it. All they care about is making money.

“Look what they made me do.” It’s the argument of the psychopath. Every schoolyard bully uses it. Every wife beater. Every guy who knifes someone over an argument in a bar. Every cop who butts in where he doesn’t belong and hurts someone.

“They don’t care about what it does to families,” Terrell said. “It’s domestic terrorism and I think we should treat them as such. I don’t know where we can go with that, but that’s my feelings on it. It just makes me so angry! I get so mad that they don’t care about what they do, they don’t care about the families or the people they’re selling to.”

As Jacob Sullum points out, it wasn’t a drug dealer who put a baby in the hospital with critical burns. That was Sheriff Terrell and his drug warrior task force. So ask yourself, who are the real terrorists here?

About a decade ago, when the U.S. military began fighting in Afghanistan, we started hearing stories of the violence the Taliban would commit in the name of their religious beliefs. I remember in particular that they were attacking men for shaving their beards (it’s still going on in the region). It’s one thing to have sincere religious beliefs, but it takes a special kind of derangement to want to use violence to force others to conform to them.

We’re seeing another example with the Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria who have kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls because its members have religious objections to the education of females, and they think they have the right to violently prevent other people from doing things that conflict with their beliefs.

Given that drug use is a consensual act and that the drug laws are more than a little arbitrary in what they allow or prohibit, Sheriff Terrell’s task force is violently enforcing conformity with what are essentially religious beliefs about the evils of drugs. They are the American version of Boko Haram and the Taliban.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Terrorism In America

Let me address a few of the judge’s points:

When you distribute a substance that you know is poison to another person that is a violent act. Period. End of story.

I recently purchased a deadly concoction that goes by a variety of street names. It consists of a mixture of toluene, methyl tert-butyl ether, benzene and trimethylbenzene, and a little bit of naphthalene. This substance is toxic, carcinogenic, and flammable. When burnt, it gives off a poisonous gas. My dealer goes by the name “BP,” and he hangs out here:

If that’s not bad enough, I frequent Home Depot and Pep Boys, and the chemicals for sale in just one of either of those stores could probably kill a thousand people. Then there’s Walgreens, where my pharmacist sells many chemicals that are quite dangerous. Heck, there’s danger even out in the aisles: An over-the-counter bottle of 500 Extra Strength Tylenol capsules has enough acetaminophen to kill at least a dozen people.

Ethyl alcohol can cause mental impairment, erratic behavior, vomiting, coma, and death, but we’re allowed to buy it, flavored or unflavored, from thousands of stores in nearly unlimited quantities. In some states, the government itself will sell you ethyl alcohol for human consumption.

Then there’s nicotine, a chemical that occurs naturally in plants, probably to protect them from consumption by animals. In concentrated form, it is more toxic than cocaine or methamphetamine, and it has been used as an agricultural pesticide. It is also a legal recreational drug in tobacco smoking products, even though long-term inhalation of tobacco tar causes serious lung problems, including cancer. The military sells tobacco products to soldiers tax-free, and use of tobacco is a right of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

On the other hand, many illegal drugs are safer than you might think. Crystal meth is basically the same chemical as Adderall — except for the methyl group that gives meth its name — and in clinical trials both drugs produce similar effects. Ecstasy’s effects on serotonin levels are similar to dozens of prescription medications, and it takes a large amount to produce a fatal overdose. Even heroin is pretty safe as long as you don’t overdose, although withdrawal can be harsh. And marijuana is famously safe, with a total number of overdoses ranging between zero and one, depending who you ask.

What creates the public health risk of drug abuse is not just the chemicals themselves, but our relationship to them. Consequently, when it comes to evaluating the public health risk of certain chemicals, it’s not the most poisonous ones that present the greatest threat, because people don’t use those recreationally: No one injects gasoline or bleach into their veins to get high. The drugs that are likely to be abused are the ones that are actually pretty safe.

And so our society has made choices about which drugs to allow and which ones to criminalize, but because they are all mostly safe, our choices have been guided more by culture than by toxicology, which has made them somewhat arbitrary. Heroin used to be legal, but now it’s illegal. Alcohol was legal for thousands of years, then we made it illegal here, and then we made it legal again, although it remains illegal in some countries. Cocaine was legal for a while, then became illegal, although it still has medical uses. Tobacco was legal when Europeans first encountered it here, then it was made illegal in some states, then it became legal again, and now it seems to be drifting back toward illegality.

(My favorite drug, caffeine, has relatively few side effects, and has only ever been illegal in a few countries.)

Many of the problems we associate with illegal drugs have arisen because they are illegal. The drugs are manufactured at high concentration so they can be smuggled more easily. They’re supposed to be diluted as they get closer to the end users, but sometimes higher concentrations get through, leading to overdoses. Even when diluted properly, users tend to minimize the opportunities to get caught using the drugs, which means taking the drugs at longer intervals, but in much larger doses. Injectable drugs are not kept sterile, and they are adulterated with dangerous additives. Users of needle drugs have trouble getting clean needles, so they reuse them and share them.

We saw these kinds of problems with alcohol during prohibition. Hard liquor was easier to smuggle than beer and wine. Quality sucked, and improper distillation could accidentally produce products dangerously high in methanol. Things returned to normal when alcohol was re-legalized.

Moreover, the connection between guns and drugs is beyond dispute. Not every purveyor of drugs uses or carries a gun, but the world where they operate organizes around one thing and one thing only, guns.

In response, I’d like to point out that the connection between guns and Richard Kopf’s profession is also beyond dispute. As a federal judge, he spends every working day inside a secure compound, surrounded by more armed men and women than any drug dealer in the United States.

Not only do these armed employees of the state provide security for Kopf and his fellow judges, but they are ultimately responsible for carrying out his will. Convicted defendants may submit peaceably, but they do not do so willingly. No one would agree to spend a decade in a cage at Judge Kopf’s word without a small army to put them inside and another to keep them there. In fact, the only reason people even show up in Judge Kopf’s court for judgement is because men with guns have brought them there in chains, often after first assaulting them in their homes and dragging them out. (Less violent surrenders may be arranged, but always under the threat of violence.)

Of course, Judge Kopf plays a role in a system that is intended to improve social welfare by fairly applying laws created by democratically elected legislators, within the bounds described in a written constitution. For all its problems, it’s still a good idea, whether it’s avenging murders and catching thieves, or resolving torts and enforcing contracts.

Unfortunately, few of these services are available to people whose means of earning a living has been declared illegal. Drug dealers can’t call 911 when somebody rips them off. Nor, out of fear of getting caught, can they operate out of storefronts with security cameras, or deposit their daily income safely in a bank. So they need to provide their own security,  and that means men with guns, just as it does for Judge Kopf.

Of course, many of the people who sell drugs illegally are also willing to break other laws, and as with any business, there’s competition, so some of them are willing to use violence to drive out their competitors. If selling these drugs was legal, their competitors could go to the police for protection — maybe ask the city council for more protection for honest, hard working business people. Better yet, they could settle their differences with competitors in the courts rather than in the streets. But as long as drug dealing remains illegal, that’s not an option. Their only choices are to fight violence with violence or go out of business. Which is why drug dealing is so immersed in violence.

Well, illegal drug dealing is immersed in violence. Walgreens and CVS compete with price cuts, convenient locations, 24-hour service, web sites, and coupon deals. Liquor dealers stopped shooting at each other when prohibition ended, and now compete with better flavor, more convenient packaging, clever commercials, and busty spokesmodels. Medical marijuana stores compete with diverse inventories, friendly customer service, and pleasant shopping environments. Only criminals deal with competitors using violence (rent-seeking protected industries excepted).

(Law and economics professor David Friedman argues that one of the reasons organized crime exists is to act as a sort of court system for criminals. Crime bosses resolve conflicts between underlings and decide when it’s permissible to use violence, e.g when it’s okay to hit a made guy. This presumably reduces strife and increases profitability for everyone involved.)

I’m not saying that every defendant brought before Judge Kopf is just a businessman looking to make a living. In some sense, quite the opposite: Making a drug illegal drives out honest business people and gives violent thugs an advantage. This does not excuse them from their violent acts, but neither does it excuse the legislature from creating the environment which allows them to thrive.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Drug Laws Are Not Victimless

CHAMPAIGN — Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle on Tuesday said former President Ronald Reagan deserves “a special place in hell” for his role in the war on drugs, but later she regretted what she called her “inflammatory” remark.

I think that’s a little more partisan than necessary — it’s not as if the Democrats tried to roll back any much of the war on drugs — but Preckwinkle sounds like she’s got the right idea:

Preckwinkle was defending the recent move by the city of Chicago to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana by allowing police to write tickets, saying out-of-whack drug laws unfairly lead to more minorities behind bars.

Downstate Republican state Rep. Chapin Rose of Mahomet questioned whether such an approach includes drug treatment for those who are ticketed. Preckwinkle said no, arguing that drug treatment should be part of the health care system, not criminal justice.

That seems right. Usually when authorities talk about treating drug use as a health issue, they mean that instead of forcing drug users into a cage, they’re going to force them into drug treatment. But forcing people into drug treatment doesn’t work very well, and by using force they’re actually doing the opposite of what they’re saying: They’re turning a health issue into another way to punish people.

“Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first or the last, but he was certainly the most prominent at the very beginning,” Preckwinkle told the Tribune in a phone interview.

…

“Drug policy in this country has been in the wrong direction for 30 years,” she said. “I think that’s something they should acknowledge. If I had it to do over again, I certainly wouldn’t say anything quite so inflammatory. But my position basically remains the same.”

I’ve heard that a lot of people in local governments have expressed that sentiment in private but are afraid to say anything in public. It’s good to hear a sittling politician say it out loud.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Preckwinkle Damns a Drug Warrior to Hell

That’s not what the DEA did when they discovered that someone was using Craig Patty’s truck to transport marijuana. Instead, they teamed-up with the thief:

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

It didn’t work out so well for them, and it worked out even worse for Chapa:

Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers – all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

Not only did the DEA get an informant killed, but one of the cops on the scene was accidentally wounded by a shot from another cop.

Patty’s truck was also damaged in the attack, and since that truck was about half his business, he’s facing a lot of financial problems. His insurance company wasn’t much help:

Copies of letters and emails from Patty’s insurance company state that it won’t pay for repairs because the truck was part of a law-enforcement operation. Patty drew from his 401K retirement fund to repair the truck, which was out of operation for 100 days.

That doesn’t sound right. The truck wasn’t part of a law-enforcement operation. The truck was being used by a thief. That the thief was acting under the direction of the DEA is not Craig Patty’s fault.

In any case, Patty is now going after the DEA for the cost of repairing his truck.

In documents shared with the Houston Chronicle, he is demanding that the DEA pay $133,532 in repairs and lost wages over the bullet-sprayed truck, and $1.3 million more for the damage to himself and his family, who fear retaliation by a drug cartel over the bungled narcotics sting.

…

Houston lawyer Mark Bennett, who is advising Patty, said if Patty’s initial claim is not resolved, the next step would be to sue.

I don’t know much about tort law, but I’m guessing Patty is going to have a hard time getting anything out of the DEA. After all, the truck wasn’t damaged by the DEA but by a bunch of criminals, and it’s a drug cartel, not the DEA, that Patty’s family is afraid of. Of course, if you or I had stolen Patty’s truck, and some criminals had shot it up, I’m pretty sure we’d be held responsible for whatever damage it suffered as a result of our crime.

All of this happened because the DEA agents forgot they’re supposed to be fighting crime rather than abetting it. When the DEA discovered Chapa had misappropriated his employer’s truck to haul marijuana, they could have just arrested him for it and returned the truck to its rightful owner. Then Chapa would still be alive, the police officer wouldn’t have been shot, the truck wouldn’t have needed repairs, and Craig Patty’s family wouldn’t be looking for cartel goons around every corner.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at When Cops Forget To Fight Crime

It’s simple statistics. The more times you send armed teams to break into people’s homes, the more times people will get killed. It’s the inevitable consequence of such a policy. No amount of propaganda and posturing can beat the math. So sometimes the victim is a 92-year-old grandmother, sometimes it’s a mother with her baby in her arms, and sometimes it’s a United States Marine.

But last Wednesday, on January 4th, police in Ogden, Utah raided the house of Matthew Stewart, and something unusual happened: The cops lost the gunfight. Stewart is a military veteran, and unlike the aformentioned Marine, when the SWAT team came through his door, he apparently didn’t hold fire. Officer Jared Francom was killed, and five other cops were wounded. Stewart is still alive.

When cops win the gunfight and kill an alleged offender during a drug raid, there’s usually a complete news blackout while they “investigate.” Months may pass before they even release the name of the cop who pulled the trigger, if they ever do. In this case, however, the roles are reversed, and it’s a cop who’s dead, not a lowly civilian, so the law enforcement establishment has gone into high gear. Weber County Attorney Dee W. Smith has already announced that he will seek to have him executed.

I guess the investigation proceeds a bit faster when the deceased is someone the cops care about, and the shooter isn’t a cop.

(By the way, if you’ve been following the excesses of the War on Drugs, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the police officers conducting this raid were part of a multi-jurisdictional task force. In this case, calling it a “task” force must not have sounded macho enough to the commander, so it’s something called the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force.)

Other than the reversal of victim and shooter, however, the shooting of officer Francom was a pretty typical drug raid death. By which I mean it was completely unnecessary. From media reports, the raid appears to have been executed to serve a search warrant for a marijuana grow operation. Not only is that an inherently non-violent activity, it’s not even the sort of thing where a criminal could dispose of the evidence if the cops moved too slowly. There was no point in turning this into a violent incident.

DEA Agent Charge Frank Smith doesn’t see it that way:

“It’s not a legalization issue, it’s not an immigration issue, it’s a public safety issue. If someone is willing to shoot it out with police, who is self-medicating on marijuana, what’s to say he’s not willing to walk out his house and start shooting his neighbors?” Smith says.

Well, there’s the fact that he didn’t walk out of his house and start shooting his neighbors. From all the reports I’ve read, he didn’t start shooting until armed cops invaded his home.

Agent Smith is doing a little something called “moving the goalposts.” This was originally an attempt to serve a search warrant. It should have been one swift assault with, at worst, a dead dog or two. Instead, it turned into a clusterfuck, and the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Stike Force has gotten a cop killed. So now Agent Smith is trying to reframe this as if taking out a violent threat to the community was what they planned all along.

Smith says the shooting case will be reviewed and he hopes lessons will be learned to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.

I doubt it. Police departments have been doing raids like this for decades, and they keep getting people killed.

To head off a few objections, note that I’m not saying Stewart was a good guy. For all I know, he’s an evil fuck who’s been waiting for a chance to kill a cop. Maybe he saw the raid team coming and decided to try to kill them. That still wouldn’t change the fact that it was a bad idea to send cops charging into his home.

With one officer dead, four others wounded, and a suspect who is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, this raid has caused an awful lot of misery. And if this is a typical year, there will be another 40,000 raids in the War on Drugs.

So expect more dead bodies.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Another Drug Raid, Another Pointless Death

The key to my plan is to note that these 40,000 accidents are a result of 40,000 careless people driving cars. So all we have to do to eliminate these accidents is to make sure these 40,000 people aren’t allowed to buy cars. Of course, the greedy auto makers insist on pushing their cars on everyone in the country, so some regulation will be required.

We need to impose strict production limits on U.S. auto manufacturing (and importing) to reduce the number of cars produced each year by just over 40,000, thus completely ensuring that irresponsible drivers are unable to obtain cars, which will completely eliminate all automobile deaths. This plan can’t possibly fail.

What’s that you say? You think my plan is completely stupid?

Well then, smartass, what does that mean for the DEA, which uses the exact same plan to prevent misuse of the prescription drug Adderall:

The DEA gets involved. It’s an arm of the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Its job is to make sure, to the extent you can, that drugs don’t get diverted into illicit use, drugs of abuse or potential abuse like amphetamines, the way these are.

And so it, every year, sets a ceiling on how much on the raw material, the active ingredient for a whole bunch of drugs, including these, can be made. So it’s an overall aggregate amount of raw material that the DEA regulates.

Sigh, naturally, the people who were diverting the drugs before are simply continuing to do so now. On the other hand, the people who actually need Adderall for their health and sanity are having trouble finding enough of the drug. And naturally, the price of this now-scarce drug is rising, pricing some patients out of the market, and forcing them to do without any medication for their condition or switch to less effective drugs.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Preventing Auto Accidents the Way the DEA Prevents Drug Diversion

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Tea Party Ethos Up in Smoke

Two Philadelphia police officers have been charged with criminal conspiracy, robbery, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, theft, and other related charges, according to officials.

Sean Alivera, 31, and Christopher Luciano, 23, allegedly robbed a supposed drug dealer of 20 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $24,000 as well as $3,000 in cash. It turns out that the man they thought was a drug dealer was actually an undercover officer.

So cops became criminals by stealing drugs from cops pretending to be criminals. Life is more like the Onion every day. It would be funnier, though, if it all weren’t for all the ordinary folks caught up in this mess.

(Hat tip: Bobby G. Frederick)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The War On Drugs Get Even More Ridiculous

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Not As Honest As Fidel Castro

Even so, there are a few handy tips on his web site:

Tip #3: “If you really want to be successful at highway drug interdiction then turn OFF your radar.  DRUG HAULERS DON’T SPEED!”

In other words, most highway cops are looking for speeders, so don’t speed.

Indicator #18:  “Passengers that DON’T know each others’ names is a strong indicator of drug trafficking.”

So, you should exchange names and check everybody’s memory before hitting the highway.

Tip #36-  “Be sure to turn on the A/C unit to see if the vents blow air, if they do not then that may mean there is a load of dope inside of it.”

So, don’t put so much dope in your ventilation system that it blocks the air flow.

Personally, I’m fascinated by this sort of thing. If anybody out there has a legally-acquired copy of the book and the bonus videos that they don’t want anymore, I’d love to buy them off of you.

(Hat tip, Scott Greenfield)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How To Do/Avoid Drug Interdiction

Larger ImageAnti-drug poster in the window of a gas station in Louisville, Kentucky.

The image is a little blurry because I took it with my phone, but the text reads, in part, “Trapped. Controlled. Alone. Also known as meth addiction.”

On the inside, as we were paying for our Diet Coke and snacks, I spotted this display of pot smoking paraphernalia under the cash register:

Larger ImageDrug paraphernalia on sale in the same gas station

My first thought was that they were sending a mixed message, but perhaps the real message they are trying to send is “Don’t use crystal meth, because there are much safer drugs you can use, like marijuana.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Mixed Drug Message?

Anyway, I think I’ve established my libertarian credentials well enough that I can now afford to make a libertarian confession: I hate marijuana.

When I was a teenager, I hung out with some friends who sometimes smoked pot. I remember being at parties where the smell got so thick in the air that I’d reflexively hold my breath until it started to hurt. When I finally took a breath, the smell made me want to vomit, and I had to leave. Marijuana smoke is a disgusting smell, and I can’t imagine ever voluntarily inhaling something that smelled like that. I’ve developed a visceral hatred for the weed.

I hate the smell of it so much that just thinking about it now makes be feel a little queasy. I don’t like to see pictures of people smoking it. I don’t even like seeing pictures of piles of marijuana. I can imagine the smell and it makes me ill.

(In truth, I have no idea what unsmoked marijuana smells like, having never been around it in significant quantities, but what I imagine is pretty awful.)

I hate all the gadgets that pot smokers use. I vaguely remember some friend showing me his collection of pipes and expecting me to think they were really cool because they were carved into weird shapes, or because he had fuckin’ stories about how when he bought each one and the places he used them. I hate watching pot smokers constantly fiddling with the pipes, poking at the insides for some damned reason. I hate roach clips, which always look filthy and have stupid shit attached to them. I hate all the stupid decorative bongs, and they way pot smokers get so excited about a new one.

I hate cannabis culture. I hate all the cute words marijuana smokers use — pot, weed, grass, joint, blunt, roach, spliff, toke, jay, reefer, chronic, ganja. I hate all pictures of people smoking up and all the stupid drawings of marijuana leaves and all the little cartoon figures of people smoking pot.

Kids, smoking pot doesn’t make you cool. It just makes you smell like pot.

Sorry, but I just needed to get that out there. Truthfully, I’m using the word hate for effect. I don’t hate all that stuff I just mentioned, I just find it all irritating. Except maybe the smell of pot. That I probably do hate.

I think the smell has a lot to do with it. Olfactory memories tend to run especially deep and strong. I hate the smell of pot so much that I have an unpleasant response to anything that reminds me of the smell of pot. Such as, for example, pot.

None of this means I am any less in favor of ending drug prohibition. I hated pot long before I learned to hate the drug war, and my dislike of many illegal drugs has nothing to do with how I feel about legalizing them. It will be a great day when marijuana is finally legalized.

But on a personal level, I’m not looking forward to the smell.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Happy 4/20 But Keep It Away From Me

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Failed War On Drugs

The Minnesota Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, has now ruled that Bong Water (water which had been used in a water pipe) was a “mixture” of “25 grams or more” supporting a criminal conviction for Controlled Substance crime in the first degree.  The crime is the most serious felony drug crime in Minnesota, with a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison for a first offense.

Let me make this clear: If you mix an illegal drug with an ounce of water, you can be charged with having 1 ounce of a drug mixture. Then, if you dilute the drug by adding another ounce of water, you can be charged with having a larger amount—2 ounces—of the drug mixture, even though in both cases you had the exact same amount of the actual drug.

I may not be applying the law correctly in my example, but the essence of this decision is that diluting the illegal drug with a legal substance increases the severity of the crime.

This is not an isolated example of bizarre legal thinking:

…a guy dumped his meth in the toilet.  The cops scooped the water out, weighed it, and used the weight of the toilet water as the basis for his prosecution.  Since they scooped more than 600 grams of water out of the toilet, that put him over the limit for a 1st degree felony.

The jury gave him 85 years in prison…

This is, the Court said, what the legislature intended.

This is mind-bogglingly stupid. Folks, it’s basic math and logic. I mean, we teach children how to do fractions to avoid this kind of mistake. If this is what the legislature intended, then the legislature is an ass.

(Hat tip to Jamie for both examples.)

I’ve been following the foolishness that is the War On Drugs for decades, and this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of. But this is not the first time I’ve heard of it. I can recall a case where the government wanted to use the weight of the container that held the drugs in calculating the sentence.

Tell me, the next time someone lectures me how important the rules of jury service are—don’t discuss the case, let the judge decide what the law is, follow the evidence, don’t visit the crime scene, don’t nullify—why (other fear of punishment for contempt) shouldn’t I tell them to go fuck themselves? If the legislature and the prosecutor and the judge can ignore something as fundamental as physical reality—hell, basic math—why should us jurors be impressed by any of their rules? Clearly, the rules don’t really matter.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What Is Law That Thou Art Mindful?

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration.

It’s about damned time.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Obama Keeping His Medical Marijuana Promise?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Remembering the Needless Dead

A blogging police officer complains of a manslaughter conviction for a dope dealer who killed a police officer attempting to serve a search warrant at his Chesapeake, Virginia house. (lots of the backstory here).

“Dope dealer” is kind of a stretchy term. Since drugs are illegal, there aren’t any approved stores or mailorder suppliers. Everybody who has drugs is usually willing to sell to some to their friends. Technically, that makes them drug dealers. But in reality, there’s a big difference between someone who sells to his friends, and someone who sells drugs as his job.

Since Frederick got up every morning for his job driving a delivery truck, I’m guessing he wasn’t exactly raking in the cash from his tiny grow operation.

Now, this pot head, Ryan Frederick, has been written up cloyingly in Reason and has become somewhat of a poster child for the 420-loving crowd, who see this drug bust gone awry as more evidence of the failure of the drug war and the evils of the supposedly gestapo-like tactics used by police to persecute these peace-loving pot smokers.

That’s because it is more evidence of the failure of the drug war and the evils of the methods used by police to persecute peaceful drug users. Obviously, Tom doesn’t see it that way, and I’m not going to convince him.

Example: Windypundit in turn getting upset with the blogging officer, says this:

Alright Scott, here’s something for you to think about: All this happened because Ryan Frederick was suspected of growing marijuana, a crime which has no victims. The next time you or your police buddies decide to do an armed home invasion because you think there might be evil plants inside, remember that there are hundreds of thousands of potential jurors out here who won’t mind too much if you get your ass killed. Maybe that will make you stop and think about what you’re doing.

Right. So on one side we have an angry officer, upset that a jury in Chesapeake, Va. (a very conservative community) did not find Frederick guilty of murder. On the other side, we have the dope heads and their ideological friends trying to make a Joan of Arc out of this Tidewater Toker.

Alright, I have to admit that the part where he quotes me sounds a bit harsh. On the other hand, I was responding in kind to the blogging officer’s vaguely threatening suggestion that the jurors should stop and think about what would happen next time they called the police if the responding officers knew they had voted to acquit. I wanted him—or people who agree with him—to understand what it sounds like coming back at them.

While it appears that the police might have been more cautious about using the particular informant in this case, there was evidence presented that Frederick, despite denials, knew the police were coming to his house, and indeed had been operating a grow room in the preceding weeks (not to mention the trivial fact that police knocked and yelled “Chesapeake police–search warrant” five times before having to force entry).

If I remember right, the evidence that Frederick knew the cops were coming was from informants of questionable reliability. In fact, among the parade of jailhouse snitches was one who was such a notorious liar that a prosecutor from a neighboring county felt obligated to speak up about it in the middle of the trial.

Whether the police yelled anything loudly enough for Frederick to hear is also disputed. The police say they did, but the prosecutor couldn’t find any neighbors who heard them yelling, and the defense found seven who said they didn’t.

(The situation was confusing and happening fast, so maybe the neighbors weren’t very alert and all seven of them missed the police yelling, but even if the police announced the warrant properly, that’s not the important issue. What matters is whether Frederick knew they were police. So if all seven neighbors missed the yelling, maybe he did too.)

At one point, the prosecutor even tried to imply that Frederick’s prison weight-gain showed he was unremorseful for killing a cop. I’m no lawyer, but it sounds like he was really reaching to try to prove his murder case.

And the bottom line is that the jury clearly rejected his claim that he was acting in self-defense from an unknown intruder– self-defense is an absolute defense, if believed, to the offense they convicted him of manslaughter. By the same token, the jury apparently was hesitant to condone the way the police investigated this case and chose to execute the search warrant.

I think the jury also clearly rejected the claim that Frederick was intentionally trying to kill someone he knew to be a cop. He did something reckless that got a cop killed, but it’s not like he was trying to do that. It’s kind of like he drove too fast through an intersection and accidentally struck a cop directing traffic. He probably wouldn’t get a murder conviction for that either.

A modest suggestion: if the police work in the case was less than optimal, it can hardly excuse the Tidewater Toker, who had no justification to fire a shotgun at a Chesapeake police officer.

Yes, but one of the things both Tom and the blogging cop are both glossing over is that Ryan Frederick did not get a walk on the shooting. He’s been sentenced to 10 years in prison on the manslaughter conviction. He’s going to pay for the death of officer Shivers. He’s just not going to pay with his life.

That neither “side” is entirely happy probably means the jury got it just about right.

Could be. Press accounts of the details of shootings are always sketchy, but it sounds like Frederick shot at someone without identifying his target properly as a threat. If so, the resulting verdict sounds reasonable.

By the way, the fascist Nazi drug cop who “got his ass killed” was Jerrod Shivers, a Navy vet and a decorated police officer with a wife and three children.

Hey Tom, I think calling Officer Shivers a “fascist Nazi” is uncalled for, and you should apologize. At least, I assume that you think he’s a “fascist Nazi” since I sure as hell didn’t call him that.

Officer Shivers is yet another casualty of our stupid war on drugs, and although he was part of the police operation that initiated this violent mess, it’s unfair to hold him responsible. He was just doing his job. If the Chesapeake police department hadn’t gotten it into their head to conduct an armed home invasion to nab a guy growing a few pot plants, none of this would have happened. Ryan Frederick wouldn’t be in jail, and officer Jerrod Shivers would still be alive and taking care of his family.

May he rest in peace.

On this we agree.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Responding to Tom McKenna on the Frederick Verdict

COLUMBIA, S.C. – A South Carolina sheriff said Monday he was not going to charge swimmer Michael Phelps after a photo of the 14-time gold medalist showed him smoking from a marijuana pipe.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said he couldn’t ignore the photo but defended his investigation.

I have to say, I didn’t see that coming. I gave this outcome only a 2% to 6% chance, depending on whether the local DA was interested in filing charges.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Sanity In the Phelps Fiasco?

“He’s sitting there on Saturday, and 12 cops kick in the door with guns drawn, search the house, and find 5, maybe 6 grams of pot,” Harpootlian said about his client, who was arrested in the first raid at the Wells Point Drive home near Ballentine.

“They never asked him, ‘Who sold you the pot?'” Harpootlian continued. “They were asking, ‘Were you at the party with Michael Phelps? Did you see him using marijuana?’ It was all about Michael Phelps.”

Clearly, Sheriff Lott has visions of fame—he’s probably an envious admirer of self-proclaimed “worlds toughtest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio—so he’s hunting for a nice Olympic-quality pelt for his trophy room.

We’ve seen variations on this theme before—e.g. the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial—so I think we all have a pretty good idea of what could happen next. That’s why, in the style of Adam Savage on Mythbusters before the experiment, I’m now going to try to estimate the odds on various possible results:

• 1%: Sheriff Lott can’t put together a case against Phelps.
• 0.9%: Someone with political power at the state or county level makes Sheriff Lott back off because he’s an embarassment.
• 0.1%: Sheriff Lott has a moment of clarity and stops on his own.
• 6%: Sheriff Lott puts together a case, but the DA isn’t interested, so it goes nowhere.
• The DA is as publicity crazed as Sheriff Lott,

• but simple possession is only a misdemeanor in South Carolina, meaning there’s no extradition, so Phelps

• 13%: simply stays away from South Carolina.
• 44%: voluntarily returns to face “justice” because it’s better for his career.

That’s a 79% chance that Phelps is arrested. If that’s what happens, then that 79% breaks down further according to the result of the legal process:

• 1%: The publicity dies down, and the charges are quietly dropped.
• Phelps pleads to possesion and

• 13%: pays a fine and gets probation just like every other first offender.
• 6%: the DA’s deal requires Phelps to serve some time in jail, and then Sheriff Lott and the DA announce at the press conference that “celebrities are not entitled to special treatment,” despite the fact that every other first offender just pays a fine and gets probation.

• 3%: a star-struck jury acquits Phelps of all charges.
• 15%: a non-star-struck jury acquits Phelps of all charges.
• Phelps is found guilty of

• possession, and

• 27%: the judge gives him a fine and probation just like every other first offender.
• 8%: the judge gives him jail time to prove that celebrities don’t get special treatment, and then Sheriff Lott and the DA announce at the press conference that “celebrities are not entitled to special treatment,” despite the fact that every other first offender just gets a fine and probation.

• 0.5%: the judge gives him a slap on the wrist because he’s a celebrity.
• 5%: the judge gives him a little jail time, just like everybody else gets.
• 0.5%: the judge throws the book at him to prove that celebrities don’t get special treatment, and then Sheriff Lott and the DA announce at the press conference that “celebrities are not entitled to special treatment,” despite the fact that everybody else just gets a little jail time.

So, how’d I do? Any suggestions for adjustments? Possible results I missed?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Handicapping the Phelps Fiasco

On February 9, 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, barring the importation of opium for smoking as of April 1.  Thus began a hundred-year crusade that has unleashed unprecedented crime, violence and corruption around the world–a war with no victory in sight.

Long accustomed to federal drug control, most Americans are unaware that there was once a time when people were free to buy any drug, including opium, cocaine, and cannabis, at the pharmacy.  In that bygone era, drug-related crime and violence were largely unknown, and drug use was not a major public concern.

The Opium Exclusion Act applied only to the opium processed for smoking that was favored by Chinese immigrants–not the medicinal opium that white Americans commonly kept in their household medicine cabinets.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 100 Years of FAIL

Lott says the picture indicated a law was being broken in his jurisdiction. He said he couldn’t ignore the violation just because Phelps is rich and famous.

We’ve now learned that since investigators began trying to build a case, they’ve made eight arrests: seven for drug possession and one for distribution. These are arrests that resulted as the sheriff’s department served search warrants. 

Sheriff Lott is clearly a jerk. Surprisingly, however, he’s not the biggest jerk in this story:

We’ve also learned that the department has located and confiscated that bong.

Sources say the owner of the bong was trying to sell it on eBay for as much as $100,000.

The owner, who wasn’t even at the party, is one of the eight now charged.

Speaking up for sanity is the Police Department and the Governor:

That house is in the city, but the Columbia Police Department decided not to initiate or take an active role in the investigation.

Governor Mark Sanford is also weighing in on the sheriff’s actions.

On the FOX News Channel Sunday night, Geraldo Rivera asked Sanford whether Phelps should be prosecuted.

“I don’t see what it gets at this point,” said Sanford.

What it gets, of course, is Sheriff Lott’s name in the news. That’s what this is all about.

(Hat tip: Pete Guither)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Arrests in the Phelps Bong Caper

Olympic superstar Michael Phelps could face criminal charges as part of the fallout from a photo that surfaced showing the swimmer smoking from a marijuana pipe at a University of South Carolina house party.

A spokesman for Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who is known for his tough stance on drugs, said Tuesday the department was investigating.

As it turns out, Sheriff Lott has appeared here in Windypundit before. He’s the moron who thinks it’s a great idea to fight drugs using a military armored personnel carrier, complete with a full-size “Ma Deuce” .50 cal machine gun capable of shooting clear through walls and killing people for miles in every direction.

Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Chris Cowan explains:

“The bottom line is, if he broke the law, and he did it in Richland County, he’s going to be charged,” Cowan said. “And there’s no difference between Michael Phelps and several other people that we arrest for the same type of a charge everyday.”

There sure as hell is a difference: Arresting a famous athlete will make Sheriff Lott famous, and Sheriff Lott desperately wants to be famous:

The Richland County sheriff has long sought to fight drug crimes. He rose from patrol officer to captain of the narcotics division in the early 1990s, after the television series “Miami Vice” made its splash.

Lott played the part well. He wore stylish suits and had long hair then. He drove a Porsche seized from a drug dealer and even worked undercover with federal agents in Florida.

It doesn’t help Phelps that he apologized. The Sheriff’s office is calling it a “partial confession” and saying that they only have to prove the incident took place in Richland County. I’m not convinced it’s much of a confession since (a) the apology was released by his staff, not Phelps himself, and (b) none of the versions I’ve seen admit to any criminal act.

In any case, I’m hoping Phelps has learned his lesson. That lesson, of course, is Never Admit Nothing. Given the large amount of endorsement money at stake, it really is million-dollar legal advice.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Michael Phelps Learns His Lesson

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment. I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

Yeah, whatever.

Hey kids, you know what? All your sports heroes use drugs. So do all your movie stars, musical performers, and political leaders. Except the ones that don’t. Because, really, moderate drugs use doesn’t make a big difference either way.

Get over it. Pay attention to something that matters.

Update: What Phelps should have said.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Michael Phelps Smokes Up

I was visiting the DEA site to see if they had any information about their anniversary celebration (“35 Years Of Ruining Lives For Nothing“), when I discovered something that stopped me cold: Like many law enforcement agencies, the DEA has a Victim Assistance Program. Since using and selling drugs is a classic victimless crime, I’ve got to know how much money the DEA spends helping the “victims.”

They seem to realize there’s a problem, because on their web page, they call it the Victim Witness Assistance Program even though the text on the page talks only about victims and says nothing about witnesses. I suspect the DEA is funneling victim assistance money into any regular law enforcement activity that can be characterized as helping a witness.

Keep in mind, too, that many witnesses in drug crimes are criminals who have been flipped by the government.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What Victims?

Freddoso’s first argument is a relatively new one. He asserts that eliminating the War on Drugs won’t eliminate street violence the way drug legalizers claim because criminals will just move on to something else:

The cause of criminal violence is not drugs or alcohol but rather criminals. To believe otherwise is to expect every drug dealer in America to give up and apply for a job at McDonald’s or WalMart the day legalization occurs. Every society contains a sizable element whose members refuse to make an honest living under any circumstances. The legalization of drugs will not change this large-scale reality of human behavior.

I doubt that most of these people are refusing an honest living. They’re just looking for an easy way to earn an easy living, and unlike most of us, they aren’t worried if it’s illegal.

Also, don’t knock those jobs at McDonald’s and WalMart. Entry-level drug dealers—corner crews and such—usually earn less than minimum wage. This is one reason why corner kids are always kids: Once they get older, many of them can find decent jobs that are less hazardous.

For now, many societal malefactors have the option of selling or trafficking drugs. But their real trade is to profit from the unwillingness of others to take the risks involved in illegal activity. Think of drug legalization, then, as a new government regulation on the drug dealer. It removes the illegality, and therefore much of the profit, from his trade. Experience suggests that such changes in government policy motivate economic actors to find loopholes. For the drug dealer or supplier, that means finding some new illegal activity through which to cash in on one’s tolerance for the risks of crime.

Suppose every bit of this is true, that if the illegal drug trade goes away, the criminal underclass will just find something else to do that is equally violent and illegal. This may mean that legalizing drugs won’t make the violence go away, but by the same argument, winning the war on drugs won’t make the violence go away either. In that case, let’s take the path that’s cheaper and less destructive to civil liberties. Let’s legalize drugs.

Freddoso goes on to list a bunch of horrible crimes that drug dealers could turn to, from money laundering to trafficking in conflict diamonds(!). Of course, the crime of money laundering is another part of the war on drugs—if legalization takes the money out of drug dealing, what will there be to launder?

Criminals don’t have to wait for drug legalization to move into those other areas, they could do that now. They must be dealing drugs because it’s their preferred way to make money. If we eliminate the profits from illegal drugs, it will force some criminals to fall back to their second-best illegal option. Since this is by definition not as desirable, a few of them will get out of the game.

Freddoso’s second argument is more familar:

Despite the wishful thinking of its proponents, drug legalization would result in broader drug use, and for exactly the same reasons a legal narcotics market tends to reduce the size of an illegal one–lower prices, greater convenience, more reliable supply, and far more security in one’s transactions. A great number of weighty disincentives to drug use would disappear. Many people who do not currently know how or where to obtain drugs would continue to abstain, but many others would want to try them.

I agree with every bit of that. Legalizing drugs would lower their cost, and people buy more of something when it’s cheaper. But then Freddoso missteps:

As with alcohol, minors would find it much easier to obtain drugs if they were legal.

I’m not so sure of that. Alcohol is sold by licensed businesses, whereas illegal drugs are sold by criminals. Who do you think is more likely to sell to a child?

Freddoso continues:

Drug use itself–not just the drug trade–has enormous social costs in the form of crime, homelessness, and an increase in demand for taxpayer-funded social services. Wider drug use would inevitably exacerbate these costs.

That doesn’t necessarily follow. A lot of the social problems of illegal drugs are due to the environment created by drug prohibition. Eliminate the poor quality control, the variable purity, the adulterants, the non-sterile needles, and the high dosage characteristic of illegal drugs, and you greatly reduce the direct harm from drug use. Also, you don’t see users of legal drugs stealing from their families to finance their habit. It just isn’t that expensive.

That brings the argument to alcohol, where Freddoso’s argument careens completely out of control:

The worst arguments for drug legalization compare hard drugs to alcohol, as though alcohol were as addictive or as destructive as heroin, crack, or crystal meth, or as though hard drugs had the same social benefits that countless millions of responsible drinkers enjoy without incident.

Our history with alcohol shows that legalizing a drug encourages milder forms of the drug to enter (or re-enter) the market. Legalizing alcohol did not lead to liquor stores selling gallon jugs of moonshine and bathtub gin. Similarly, we can expect that, for example, legalized cocaine will not be sold in crack bottles. We’d probably see a return to a time when people could ask the bartender to punch up their drinks with a pinch of cocaine. Allowing Coca-Cola to be the real thing (again) is not a recipe for a social disaster.

To be sure, neither a health risk nor a possible ill effect is necessarily grounds for creating any prohibition in law. But some prohibitions are reasonable and should be kept in place. Even the staunchest libertarian expects government to protect him from precisely the sort of bodily harm that certain drugs–specially meth–have a long history of facilitating.

I think Freddoso doesn’t know many libertarians. The “staunchest libertarian” most certainly does not want the government to protect him from knowingly taking dangerous drugs. He doesn’t even want the government to use his tax money to stop other people from taking dangerous drugs.

Sigh. The anti-drug authorities have been telling us horror stories about every drug they’ve ever made illegal. But let’s just say that this time I’m willing to believe that they’re not telling lies. Maybe crystal meth really is as bad as they say.

Fair enough. So let’s keep crystal meth illegal. Hell, let’s keep crack cocaine illegal too. Now could we stop ruining people’s lives over all those other drugs that aren’t anywere near that bad?

Update: Kip takes issue with Freddoso’s argument that there will always be criminals, and he’s not as nice about it as I am.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Not Keep Drugs Illegal?

Radley Balko explains it for me quite nicely in his Culture 11 article, “War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage.” I highly recommend you read it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage