The Drug War: A Bonanza for the Enemies of Freedom
Posted by Kevin Carson on Apr 24, 2009 in Commentary • 3 commentsIf it had been dreamed up by Satan himself in the bowels of Hell, the War on Drugs couldn’t be more diabolically calculated to destroy our liberties and promote the cause of evil in the world.
In the Netherlands, where marijuana is (de facto) legal, and most hard drugs are virtually decriminalized and available to addicts by prescription, the rates of drug use are actually lower than in the United States.
That means we’ve militarized and corrupted our police forces, turned the Bill of Rights into toilet paper, and handed the country over to gangs (including gangs in police uniforms)—all for absolutely nothing.
Radley Balko regularly reports on the gross abuses—or standard practices, rather—of SWAT teams. Urban police forces, using military surplus equipment and given military training, increasingly see the local population as an occupied enemy to be terrified into docility.
The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments are so riddled with loopholes, after thirty-odd years of helpful “interpretation” by a compliant judiciary, as to be absolutely meaningless. Your “reasonable expectation of privacy” doesn’t extend to uniformed trespassers snooping in a woodlot or pasture, or any other acreage beyond your actual home and the yard immediately surrounding—even if you have “No Trespassing” signs posted. It doesn’t extend to helicopters over your home, or snooping your home itself with infrared heat sensors. It doesn’t extend to your car on the road—no need for a warrant or probable cause at a “random checkpoint.”
The prohibition against depriving you of your property without “due process of law” doesn’t count against “civil forfeiture.” The government can steal everything you own without ever formally pressing charges or convincing a jury, all on the bare allegation that you were engaged in drug crime. See, the Fifth Amendment doesn’t apply because the government’s not acting against you—in lawyerese, it’s an action “in rem” against the property itself, so there’s no need to give you any due process protections.
Criminalizing consensual behavior necessarily leads to a police state. In a non-consensual crime, involving aggression against person or property, there’s no need for the surveillance state because the injured party will complain to “the authorities.” But when a “crime” consists entirely of voluntary trade between two non-violent parties, there’s no injured party to complain. The only way to stop such “crime,” therefore, is for the state to keep the citizenry under total surveillance.
As for gangs, when you prohibit the sale of any commodity people want to buy, a lucrative black market in that commodity will inevitably spring up—followed by organized crime fighting to control the black market. That’s how Al Capone made his living back during Prohibition, and how organized crime got its start in this country.
Organized crime lords are by far the leading supporters of drug criminalization. It’s quite likely that the campaigns of the most hardcore drug warrior politicians are financed, to a large extent, by laundered drug cartel money. In the American Bible Belt, it’s known as the “Baptists and Bootleggers” phenomenon. In Mississippi, when a county’s “dry” status periodically came up for a vote, according to Willie Morris, the most prominent displayers of “Vote Dry” bumper stickers were bootleggers. “A handful of people would come right out and say that liquor should be made legal, so that the bootleggers and the sheriffs would not be able to make all the money….”
And as that last quote suggests, police forces are the biggest gangs of all. Paying protection money to local police for the right to operate on their turf is just another cost of doing business in the drug trade. But the police gang activity doesn’t stop with protection money and collusion. Even when drug traders are prosecuted, police motivation is frequently identical to that of their non-uniformed gangster cousins. Never mind outright, unambiguous illegality like planting evidence (even though it’s hardly uncommon). Just consider the legal gray areas, like coerced testimony from jailhouse snitches, the use of plea bargain blackmail, entrapment, etc., all of them frequently used in conjunction with civil forfeiture when the cops covet some particularly valuable item of yours for funding the civil forfeiture gravy train and buying themselves a new helicopter or other expensive cop toys.
But so far, we’ve only seen one side of the problem—the domestic side.
Outside the United States, the black market price of drugs is an enormously valuable tool for the organized criminals in the CIA and the rest of the “national security” community, for whom drug running is a primary source of funds for illegally funding death squads and other “black operations” around the world, independently of Congressional oversight or appropriations.
The main beneficiaries of drug prohibition are the criminal gangs that control the drug trade. And of the criminal gangs that benefit from drug prohibition, the criminal gangs in uniform are the biggest beneficiaries of all.
I agree with everything you say, however to get to the root of the problem, you must also address the question of institutionalized racism. The role of drug laws in incarcerating, disenfranchising and re-enslaving African American men cannot be underestimated. It’s not accident that we have mandatory minimum sentences because of Jesse Helmes. The fact that the Netherlands is fairly homogeneous racially and does not have a history of domestic racism (although they were colonialists) may be an explanatory variable here.
I am all for scrapping the drug war, however total permissiveness will never be seen as a solution – even in the African American community. For many families, the only hope they have for getting a child or loved one clean is the judicial system. Unless it is replaced by a mandatory treatment system – preferrably run by non-state providers – it will be hard, if not impossible, to simply dismantle the drug laws. Some drugs, like weed, should likely be always legal. I can’t say that about Meth. If someone is hooked on Meth, they need to be taken off. While they are on Meth, they are not in any way sane enough to get themselves off. They need help and society should make sure they get it (even if bureaucrats aren’t the ones providing it).
<< The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments are so riddled with loopholes, after thirty-odd years of helpful â??interpretationâ? by a compliant judiciary, as to be absolutely meaningless. <<
T he Constitution’s holes begin with the often quote very first line of the Preamble:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, **promote the general Welfare**, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” [Emphasis added]
This emphasized phrase is a major problem, but the failure to provide clear definitions for terms used here and throughout the document are another big flaw, as the decades of judicial interpretation make clear. (A more detailed critique of the Preamble and the Bill of Rights – http://selfsip.org/critiques/billofrights.html )
Self-responsibility is greatly lacking in the US (and other so-called developed countries) largely because of governments. A great number of parents do not possess it and/or do not encourage the development in their children. Why is that? I conclude that it is because governments promote just the opposite – dependence, on them, for their continued existence. I made a recent comment at CSM to the article, “Obama seeks to protect credit-card users”
Strange thing is that it showed (after about 30 mins, sometime about noon AZ time, after stated moderation I presumed) but was no longer there when I got to this point early in my comment preparation for your article, about 2:15pm AZ time.(..?!?) So I will repeat it here:
<< More than three-quarters of American families have credit cards and **almost half carry a balance**, according to the Federal Reserve. << [emphasis added]
I have not seen any media reference to President Obama also encouraging responsible *use* of credit cards. Some reference to doing so would have shown me that he has some understanding that self-responsibility is a characteristic of a fully adult human being. Government practices of “looking out for” citizens is very much like that of parents who discourage their chronologically adult children from making full social maturing changes (standing on their own 2 feet and taking the consequences). There is a big difference between upholding existing fraud laws (or amending them for clarification) and constantly attempting to create an environment where self-responsibility is thought of as old-fashioned.
One would best wonder what the government (those running and promoting it) gets from a citizenry that is largely low (?very low?) on the self-responsibility scale….
—————-end of submitted comment to CSM———————-
http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/04/23/obama-seeks-to-protect-credit-card-users/
All the violence that is occurring is no surprise to me (as it obviously isn’t for you either, Kevin). The only surprise is that so many ordinary people still do not see the connections, some of which you have clearly pointed out. Hopefully, though, with more people making use of the Internet to exchange information on events, some will also become knowledgeable about the principles underlying a truly optimal society – at that point, I think stepping-stone improvements will become noticeable.
“…—all for absolutely nothing.”
Prohibition hasn’t been for naught. It has maintained the utopian dream of a “drug free America” so that the upright citizens of America can sleep soundly believing that their children will never face the scourge of drug addiction.
Isn’t that worth something?