Lawyers, Guns and Money
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jan 19, 2010 in Commentary • 1 commentH. L. Mencken used to say that governments provoked moral panics and kept people in fear of “imaginary hobgoblins” so they wouldn’t notice the hand picking their pockets. The main purpose of the Drug War is to keep us in a state of fear as a way of empowering the state and its corporate partners in crime. The Drug War is one of the best expedients ever hit on for that purpose: it has resulted in unprecedented militarization of local police forces, turned the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments into toilet paper, and generally done more to promote authoritarianism in American society than anything but the two world wars and the so-called “War on Terror.”
If you consider the validity of the fear campaign itself even a serious issue, by the way, you might peruse the violent crime and addiction statistics from Amsterdam. We’ve handed our society over to the police state and to criminal gangs (there’s a difference?), and didn’t even get a crime reduction. The shade of Benjamin Franklin must be gratified: we traded liberty for security and got neither.
I previously argued in this column that the Drug War empowers organized crime, and that crooked cops are the biggest drug gang of all. The main constituency behind the Drug War is the criminals who control the drug trade and benefit from black market prices. It’s the same principle that governed alcohol Prohibition. It’s unlikely Prohibition had a greater friend in America than Al Capone. And whenever a dry county law comes up for a vote in the Bible Belt, you can bet the biggest supporter of staying dry is the local bootlegger—and that he’s the biggest source of campaign funds for the teetotaling Baptist politicians.
Likewise, the biggest supporters of the Drug War are the drug cartels. And the CIA is among the biggest drug cartels of all, using the international drug trade to finance everybody from the Khmer Rouge to the Mujaheddin to the Contras. The government, despite the public verbal diarrhea of dimwits like William Bennett, doesn’t want to defeat the drug trade any more than Oceania wanted to defeat Eurasia.
Blogger Larry Gambone has long believed, he writes, that the “most shrill” drug warriors “have some financial reason to be in favour of the black market in drugs.” Mike Ruppert, usually dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist,” implicated the banking system, which he accused of laundering drug money by in massive quantities and then putting it in the stock market.
Thank God Ruppert has managed to evade Cass Sunstein’s clutches, crazy conspiracy theorist that he is, long enough for the latest news from the nonconspiratorial professional journalists at the Guardian. The left-leaning UK newspaper quotes Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, to the effect that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis…” Organized crime proceeds like drug money, he says, were “’the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year.” Most of the $352 billion in drug profits were absorbed into the above-ground economy by that means.
America will always be fighting drugs, the same way Oceania was always fighting Eurasia. Drugs are too profitable an enemy to ever defeat.
Speaking of moral panics, I recently came across this somewhat-publicized line of research suggesting that music causes kids to smoke pot:
http://www.livescience.com/health/091222-music-marijuana.html
The research is total crap, as far as I can tell. The authors constantly present “exposure to pot music” as the predictor for pot use, even though all he saw was a simple correlation (and I don’t trust his statistical tests for association, but that’s another matter), and there is no reason to give one variable precedence over another (both are derived from interview questions in a cross-sectional study).
Even worse, his measure of “exposure to pot music” is really nothing more than the kids identifying their favorite musician and the researchers counting how often than musician references pot in his hit songs. The actual findings could be summed up as “teenage pot smokers like songs with pot references”. He tries to confuse the issue by combining the “favorite artist” variable with a “level of music consumption” variable, but this doesn’t actually correlate with pot use any better than “favorite artist” by itself.
It’s a classic case of a researcher wanting to reach certain conclusions, and twisting his data in a way that supports his theory. I saw no indication that he seriously considered any simpler explanations for the correlations that he saw, and he immediately jumped to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between his variables (one of which is BS) rather than them both reflecting an outside factor.
Unfortunately, this BS will probably form the basis for a campaign to increase censorship in music. (BTW, the “40 pot references per day” statistic was wrong — it has since been corrected in the publication to ~15, IIRC)
The author puts many of his publications on his website (http://www.primack.net/professional/pub.php), and while the current publication is not freely available, his previous publication on the link between music and pot shows the authors poor critical thinking skills and tendency to jump to conclusions.
As for the title of this post: “Lawyers guns and money”
I just heard that song (by Warren Zevon?) for the first time a few days ago. What a coincidence.