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Oct. 8, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:34
2234 Law Enforcement against Prohibition, Hosted by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio

A gripping panel discussion recorded in Odessa Texas in February 2012.

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Well, I guess as many of you know, I'm Stephen Molyneux from Freedom and Radio.
This is Sean Dunnigan.
And this is a talk about law enforcement against prohibition.
And to be against prohibition seems like you're for something.
And that, of course, is a double negative, right?
I'm against all prohibitions, which means everyone should take drugs.
Basically, you're going to do most of the talking, but I think that the framework, we're all not going to make the case against the drug war here, because I think we're all libertarians, or a little further over, so we all understand that.
There are, of course, a lot of hidden problems with the drug war.
I mean, the first is the language, which is really annoying.
It is not a war on drugs.
That's like saying that they were prosecuting O.J.'s glove.
It is not a war on drugs.
It's a war on people.
There's no war on poverty.
There's only war on taxpayers.
There's no war on terror.
There's only war on people.
Living in this language land of government, most modern language that is used to describe government is just another government program designed to obfuscate and confuse people.
It is a war on drugs.
Of course, as I'm sure you're aware, America now has the distinction of having the highest Per capita incarceration rates in the Western world, greater than that of China, because remember, China is a dictatorship, and we don't want to do that.
And it is actually very close to approaching the Gulag Apikalago under Stalin in the 1950s in terms of proportion of the population.
Caged.
And, of course, the other issue which we all know about is that because there's no complainant, the government has to take the initiative in the drug war, right?
I mean, if someone doesn't ship you an iPad when you ship the money, you go and complain and, you know, you are then the aggrieved party.
But in a drug transaction, you know, there's somebody who's high and happy and somebody who's rich and happy.
And so there's no complainant, which means that the government has to start playing whack-a-mole.
It has to start playing cat and mouse with everyone, thus vastly expanding its powers.
Government should be something that, you know, it's like that test your doctor gives you on your knee.
There should be some impact and then something moves.
Government should be reactionary, but of course, in the drug war, because there isn't a complainant, the government has to be proactive.
There are, of course, massive amounts of financial bizarrity that goes on in the drug war.
I was hosting the Peter Schiff Show last week and had a guy on who was talking about a couple that have a motel that their grandfather set up in the 50s, and since 1993, or 1994, there have, according to the police, been 30 drug crimes that have taken place in the motel.
And so the government is seizing the motel and will sell off the assets, 80% of which goes to the police department.
They sell the hotel off a motel at $1.5 million.
The police department's budget was about $5 million.
So I imagine there's a fair amount of bonuses that go around.
This is not, I think, because there's anything innately nasty or ugly about police.
I'm sure a lot of them want to do the right thing, but...
It doesn't matter how good a swimmer you are, if you're swimming against the current, eventually you're going to get tired and slide.
And the incentives, the corruption that goes on, as violent crime has diminished within society, taxation not included, then we find that governments are turning more and more towards the drug war as a way of justifying what it is that they do.
Of course, if the problem you're trying to solve in the free market goes down, you tend to Deallocate the resources you put to it.
But what they're doing is they're, you know, as the crater of violent crime begins to diminish, I think it's down 20-23% over the past five or seven years.
And what they do is they simply backfill all of that with increased aggression against, you know, the scapegoats of society, the drug users.
So with that having been said, I'd like to turn over to get your thoughts on it.
You have a lot of experience.
You've worked, of course, for many years In the field, and in reading your bio, I was really struck about the turning point for you.
I'm sure there is more than one.
We all have many turning points, but there seemed to be one that was very powerful when you said that your son was, I think, five, and you saw a series of three murderers that were committed in the drug war in Guatemala in 95.
Actually, that was in Miami.
No, Miami, sorry.
Yes, that was in Miami, and there was nothing atypical about this event.
It's something that happens fairly frequently.
It was at the infamous Cullors Apartment Complex in Miami, and there was a turf battle, of course, because one of the problems with the drug war is, you know, you talked about drug transactions, but one of the problems with the drug war is Because there's a black market, because prohibition creates a black market, parties to transactions don't have any lawful redress.
There are no arbiters, there are no courts, there are no contracts.
So necessarily, all disputes get settled by violence.
And the profits are such, because of its illegality, that it's worth this kind of violence.
Exactly.
Average corporate profit is like three, four, five percent.
Nobody's going to go on a killing spree over that.
But drug profits are so huge that it's worth it.
Right.
Yeah, it's about a $400 billion a year industry.
Of course, those are very soft numbers.
But worldwide, that's about the best estimate, probably.
It's the U.N. estimate.
So in this case, and it was while my son was about the same age, there was a mother with a five-year-old son on her lap and the drug dealer, who was her boyfriend, We drove into the apartment complex, and their competitors jumped out with AK-47s, shot up the car, and killed the boy, killed the mother, and of course the target as well.
That was kind of the first time it kind of dawned on me.
You know, really the negative impacts of the drug war.
I mean, there are very good reasons to do away with prohibition that have to do with individual liberty, and I think that's something that libertarians should really emphasize.
Because ultimately, it's the government telling you what you can and can't do with your body.
So that's kind of, I think, inherently offensive to free people.
But also, you know, all of this collateral damage that you mentioned.
The violence, certainly the addiction rates are higher, overdose rates are higher because of prohibition.
We waste a phenomenal amount of money.
The annual federal drug control budget is about $26 billion a year.
And that's only at the federal level.
That excludes state spending, local spending, it excludes most incarceration spending, work by intelligence agencies, which is quite significant overseas.
So that was kind of the first case, the first time it dawned on me, and this was fairly early in my career, that I realized, yeah, there's a huge collateral impact of the drug war.
It's not just, well, drugs are bad, so we ought to go out and stop people from using drugs.
If that were the metric, we're failing miserably at it, particularly among our kids.
Sorry, I'm just making note, government program not delivering...
Yeah, it's hard to find examples of that.
Absolutely.
So we spend at the federal level about $26 billion a year fighting this war.
And, you know, we really have nothing to show for it.
Ten years ago, 8.3% of the population reported using an illegal drug.
Today it's 8.9%.
Since I graduated from high school in 1991, use among 8th and 12th graders has doubled.
But sorry, just to be clear on those statistics, I think 0.2% of that was Obama in his 20s.
Right.
So that's going to push the message.
Right, yeah.
Once the June gang disbanded, it was like...
Yeah, you know, and that's...
Sorry, I just wanted to point that out because that to me was...
I'm from Canada where we only keep drugs illegal because we're scared of the U.S. Because if drugs become legal in Canada, which is what the majority of people want, then, you know, they'll flood south and there'll be all these repercussions in trade and so on.
But it really is quite astounding that the president can go on and talk about significant marijuana use and cocaine use in his 20s.
I mean, if he said, I strangled three homeless guys in my 20s, that would be, oh my god, that's terrible, but he can go and make jokes and the audience claps and laughs and applauds.
Racist!
No, I didn't say what race the homeless guys were.
No, but it is really that you can make jokes about this in sitcoms, that the president can make jokes about it and openly admit to a crime that had he been convicted or had he even been arrested would have, you know, ended his public career options, ended his educational options because the stigma that goes along, the waste of human capital, not just in jail but after jail, That occurs with the stigma that goes on with having been convicted of a crime at that level.
It's just staggering.
It is.
It's kind of incredible to think about that the last three presidents should have been in jail.
Maybe they should have been in jail for lots of other reasons.
According to our policy, they should all have done time in jail.
I mean, it's kind of my entire career with DEA, right?
The president, my boss, should have been a target, right?
Because they've been involved in drug use.
And, you know, we see kind of the hubris, of course, of politicians in that, right?
It's, well, it's okay, I did it in the 20s, but now I'm completely going to flip because I have this perception that most of the electorate doesn't want to hear that the drug should be legal, which is increasingly not the case, particularly with regard to marijuana.
Yeah, you know, because of that, because Obama was more honest during his election, during his campaign, about his past drug use, there was a lot of optimism.
He had a lot of support from kind of the drug policy reform movement because there was kind of the hope, one, of course, being a person of color, right, experiencing some of the disproportionate impact of law enforcement, drug law enforcement on those communities, that one in 11 African-American kids in this country has a parent who will spend time in jail.
I'm sorry, I started chatting with a fellow yesterday, I don't think he's still here, who was saying that between election cycles, up to a third of black men lose the capacity to vote, either through criminality or through moving without forwarding addresses or deregistration and so on.
So you'd hope that he would have some sympathy for that, particularly since those lasers were also on him in his 20s.
Exactly, exactly.
And he wrote pretty explicitly about that in Dreams of My Father, and he wrote very explicitly about his drug use.
So there was the hope, and I think in some circles the expectation, That the election of Obama would be kind of a watershed date.
You know, finally we have somebody who understands the problem and understands the collateral damage of the drug war.
And, you know, frankly understands that smoking marijuana doesn't turn you into a homestead maniac, right?
Which is another thing that they say.
I mean, look at the case in Miami, right?
There's a horrible case of the homeless man attacking the other homeless man, biting his face and all of that.
Well, as soon as that happened, The press started saying, and the police started saying, well, he was probably on these bath salts.
Well, that hasn't been proven.
But to read the media coverage, right?
Well, it's a given.
He must have been.
And maybe he was.
Except, of course, all the kids who do the American shootings are on perfectly legal side.
Perfect.
Right.
Let's look at that.
He was also on Xanax.
So Obama, you know, kind of ran not explicitly on the promise of changing drug laws, but ran coming from a background and speaking about the issue with regard to his own personal use with a level of honesty that gave people a lot of hope.
And what we've seen is absolutely no change in drug policy.
The federal drug control budget is going up again this year.
There's, I think, significantly in the federal drug control budget an increase of $147 million for incarceration purposes.
And as you said, that's at a time that violent crime was going down.
So where's this money being spent?
One of the first things that the drug war, I'm sorry, the drug czar, Gilker Likowsky did when he came in, he said, you know, we're not going to use the phrase war on drugs anymore.
It's not a war on drugs.
But it's still a war.
I mean, they haven't changed the tactics.
They haven't changed what they're doing.
They've just changed what they're calling it.
And it's really very, very disappointing.
And now we see, in some ways, Even the current administration being even more aggressive in enforcing our drug laws.
We see raids on dispensaries and caregivers and cultivators who are operating in complete compliance with state law, which is in Colorado and California specifically.
But he lets the DEA and the U.S. attorneys in those districts really prosecute those individuals and take this on as a key issue to an extent greater than previous administrations have.
It's really hard to make the case that even chronic marijuana use is going to have just terrible effects on your life.
I mean, you might end up being president.
Right.
Okay, so maybe it does have terrible effects on your life.
It may make you believe that government power works.
No, but I mean, he became president.
Constitutional lawyer, scholar dude at Harvard and wherever he was teaching and, I mean, he had a successful career.
He's, you know, married, two kids, and, you know, high up in political office.
So what is the current rationale for the war on drugs?
Because it really can't be, I mean, the brain science that's coming out of, in particular, there's a writer named Gabor Matei who's a physician, highly recommend his books.
He's written one called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
He works with the Drug addicts in Vancouver's drug addict district and he's I mean the brain science is very clear that a lot of people become addicted to drugs because they've had you know significant traumas in their childhood they have brain chemistry problems and it fixes that in a temporary way which of course just makes their problems worse in the long run you know the experience in Portugal which has decriminalized its drugs and seen no massive drug increase there's been a slight decrease in hard drugs People are getting off them.
They're getting the therapy and the help that they need.
Drug use, obviously, is some kind of cry for help.
And I'm not talking about sort of recreation or whatever, but so much information has come forward since the panic of the 60s when this stuff has really hit.
And anybody who knows anything about American history knows that there were no drug wars in the 19th century when you could, as a five-year-old kid, go and buy carbonated cocaine in the form of pop.
When it was legal and cheap, there were no drug wars.
So how has the rationale, or has it changed since the 60s?
Well, I think the rationale of the government in fighting the drug war, I think really doesn't have anything to do with drugs.
I think it has to do with this concept, this political philosophy that government knows best.
I really do think it's that simple.
And I think that's why it's such an important issue for libertarians.
In terms of how it's fought, You know, there's really kind of a narrow-mindedness, right?
There's a tremendous resistance on the part of drug warriors, for lack of a better phrase.
There's a tremendous resistance to kind of look at alternatives, and it becomes this kind of white hat or black hat kind of thing.
It's the dichotomy that they see, where everybody who uses drugs, everybody who sells drugs is a bad guy, and everybody fighting them is a good guy.
And of course, that's not true.
The lines are much, much blurrier.
But I think, in a way, the drug war perpetuates that, because what we've done is create this tremendously profitable criminal market, again, where parties to transactions have no redress to resolve grievances.
So, in large part, the people who are involved in shipping drugs are bad guys.
They are criminals.
They do kill people.
So I think for, at the individual level, the agents with whom I worked and police with whom I worked, they see, you know, they see, yes, right, that person is dealing drugs, and that person is a murderer, and that person is a kidnapper, and it's a bad person, so we should go after them.
And maybe we should, but, you know, that's a very typo-level thinking, and if you look a little bit beyond that and realize that it's our policies that created that, That created the entire dynamic, the economic dynamic, the social dynamics that make drug trafficking a violent industry.
And it really is very analogous to alcohol prohibition.
I mean, this is what we saw in our 13 years or so of alcohol prohibition in this country.
The Gulf Cartel, the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the most viewed cartels south of the border, started off as rum runners.
Started off smuggling alcohol into Texas.
And when Prohibition ended, they kept the same business model, and they kept the same people, and they kept the same infrastructure.
They just changed product.
So I think, in a way, in terms of what the rationale is, macroscopically, the government rationale is, we can't admit that we were wrong, and this is a great way to control huge spots of the population.
It's a great way to scare people into believing that they should accept this really burgeoning police state.
And at the individual level, the individual law enforcer, the individual jailer, I think they see that many of the people involved in drug business are people that are legitimate targets and do bad things and should be in jail.
So it's a problem that in order to do away with all of that violence, I think we really need to look at the policies and change drug policy completely.
And one of the things that I would say, and one of the things that makes LEAP a little bit different for most of the legalization and drug reform organizations out there, is that I would extend that to all drugs.
Legalizing marijuana, there are some great reasons to legalize marijuana.
We arrest about a million people a year on marijuana charges.
That's ridiculous.
The vast majority of those are for simple possession.
We spend a lot of money enforcing our marijuana laws, and the reality is that marijuana is safer than alcohol and tobacco.
I'm not endorsing marijuana use, but the reality is the law enforcement that exists is...
Do you have something funny you'd like to say?
I said I was endorsing.
Do you need a snack of any kind?
The law enforcement infrastructure that exists to combat marijuana is completely disproportionate to the problem, to the extent that it is a problem.
But just legalizing marijuana would not do away with all of the problems that exist because of the drug trade.
And they would tax it so much that there would still be a role for organized crime.
Right, exactly.
You know, in the same way that you can get a handyman, I hear, to do work if you pay in cash without taxes.
I mean, you would simply, because it's, oh, we're going to tax it at 50% and blah, blah, blah.
It's okay, well, then it's still too expensive for a lot of people and they'll just go, so...
Right.
And I think, you know, frankly, I think that that's one of the reasons that there's been some resistance to decriminalizing or really legalizing marijuana because it's a very hard commodity for the government to tax because it's relatively easy to grow.
Yeah, right.
So, you know, it's not like alcohol.
It's not like tobacco.
You know, people generally, I mean, I know I'm in Texas, so there are probably some moonshiners in the room, but generally people don't make their own alcohol anymore.
Probably this guy.
- Yeah, right, might have picked one.
- Thank you.
- Brewers.
Well, yeah, it does happen, but by and large, people go to the liquor store and they pay their 20 some percent in taxes Well, it's very hard to transfer that model to marijuana because it is so easily cultivated.
And I think, you know, at the policy level, I think that's one of the reasons that there's been so much resistance to legalization.
Well, I think, you know, I mean, personally, I have a kind of ambivalent relationship to drugs.
I've never taken any, you know, caffeine accepted, but I'm really happy that other people have, because Dark Side of the Moon is a great album.
You know, that's what I was saying.
No, it's true.
Look, I mean, you go to some guy who's like, oh, drug war is good.
It's like, do you own a copy of Sgt.
Pepper's?
Are you kidding me?
Do you think they came up with that by having a pop?
I mean, come on, you know?
So, you know, do you like Bohemian Rhapsody?
Do you know what he did about eight minutes before?
You know?
And Ron and the Ancient Mariner and the Raven.
So much of Western artistic traditions can trace themselves back to, you know, some pretty conspicuous drug consumption.
It's sort of like, have you ever seen that, it's a pretty old movie by now, Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee?
There was a really racist, I think a pizza store owner, Who's really into Michael Jackson and Prince, and he's like, do you not see Bruce?
No, but do you not see the contradiction here?
I mean, a lot of our culture is founded on drug consumption, and a lot of popular music comes out of that.
You know, if you dance at the disco, it's kind of tough to throw the people in jail.
But I also wanted to talk about, I think that there's...
I think among the general population, it seems that, you know, I've been talking about this sort of stuff for about 25 years, and it seems that a lot more people are like, you know, I mean, you couldn't imagine drug jokes in the I Love Lucy show, like in the 50s.
But now they're everywhere, and it's, you know, it's progressed to the point where Bill Clinton couldn't say that he inhaled, and now Obama says he barely exhaled.
And so...
That's called progress in a state of society, but I think that there's a money trail that is pretty sinister, you know, frankly.
I mean, the money trail from the taxpayers to the drug enforcement agencies, the money trail of lots of people who are kind of scary in the drug enforcement agencies who want to keep their jobs and their benefits and their high pay and their overtime.
A lot of people who like pointing guns at people, whether they started out that way or they're there now, But I think also there's a lot of money, of course, that flows into the police departments, not just through acid forfeiture and bonuses and, you know, funding for the drug war, but directly from the criminals in the form of some bribes.
And I think there's a whole money whirlpool that circulates around this that, to me, the rhetoric doesn't really address.
Is that your experience as well?
Not direct experience.
Yeah, not directly, but I... Metaphorically, in general.
If you see the Porsche out there, be careful.
Do not open the trunk!
Yeah, absolutely, and I think another component of that is international banking, in that the vast majority of drug proceeds that are generated by sales in the United States are laundered through international banks.
International banking cartels, ironically enough, we call them, right?
And part of that is because of border security after 9-11.
It was harder to ship bulk cash shipments down south.
So more kind of went into the banking system.
So I think that's another part of it.
But it is.
I mean, it's a trillion dollars we've spent in the last 40 years on fighting the drug war.
And that's just enforcement expenditures, right?
And then, right, of course, there's private prison corporations, asset forfeiture, you know, there's all sorts of ways that money is generated and that power is generated for government agencies.
And we've seen, you know, one of the things that really bothers me is we've seen, in large part because of the drug war, we've seen a huge shift in law enforcement culture in this country.
Right.
I remember my father was a police officer.
He was a cop, he was a detective, and then he was the police chief in our town.
You know, I remember when I was young, you know, his uniform was like a light blue shirt and a tie, right, and kind of this silly hat with a Miranda warning inside, and a six-shooter.38 that he would carry.
And now, you know, when he went to meet the community, he'd wear a suit.
And now we see police officers, and they look like soldiers.
I mean, they're indistinguishable from soldiers.
They're carrying M4s, you know, SMGs.
Yeah, you used to have to go to South America to the airport to see that kind of stuff.
Right.
And it's like, you know, not only the drugs coming off, but also the gun culture.
Right.
And, you know, and it's inevitable, right?
So, you know, we dress police up as soldiers.
We tell them they're fighting a war.
We give them all the SWAT training, right, paramilitary training.
And there were 50,000 paramilitary raids in this country last year serving warrants.
You know, and these are things, you know, flashbang grenades, no knock warns.
You know, when you set up that dynamic, and you have a situation where 13 million people or so use drugs in this country regularly, and you tell law enforcement, okay, you're now a soldier, and 13 million people of the citizens are the target.
Well, what happens?
It completely changes how law enforcement sees the populace, and it completely changes, I think, how citizens see law enforcement.
One of the things that bears that out is murder clearance rates, which is the percentage of murders that are solved, where there's an arrest and a conviction made.
In the 60s, it was over 90%.
Even after Miranda was instituted, you know, it stayed, it dropped a little bit, but it was still, you know, high 80s percent shortly after that.
Today it's under 65 percent.
Well, why is that?
It's because, you know, do you ever see, I live in Washington, D.C., but in D.C., in Baltimore, sometimes you'll see the no-snitch shirts and hats, right, warning people not to talk to the police.
Well, who doesn't want to snitch on a rapist or a thief or a child molester?
Yeah, get them out of the community.
Exactly.
That's all a result of drug law enforcement, and it's a result of how drug law enforcement targets certain communities disproportionately, certainly.
But I think more broadly, the drug wars really changed the whole concept of policing in this country, and I think that's something that Something that makes the drug issue more important than just the drug issue.
It's really changed what the government means to us.
It's changed whether or not we can trust the police.
It's changed whether the police are a resource for help or somebody that perceives us as the enemy.
And certainly that's not all cops.
I want to be clear, that's not the case.
The vast majority of cops are good public servants, certainly.
But just kind of the mindset that they bring to the job, I think, has been dramatically changed as a result of drug law enforcement.
Well, and, you know, whenever you talk about alternatives to a state court system, people always say, well, you know, how are you going to get justice without the government having all these laws?
As if there's any kind of justice in the government legal system at the moment, particularly in these areas, I'm sure we're all aware.
Did you guys know what the percentage is?
Of actual courtroom convictions there are relative to the number of charges.
How many people?
97% something.
97%, yeah, between 95 and 97% of people never get to court.
And then they don't have a trial.
Yeah, they never have a trial.
They never get a chance to plead their case.
They never get a legal defense.
But that's...
And it's because of plea bargaining.
And I know that because I'm a criminal defense lawyer.
And it's very hard to say, well, a cop lied.
You go in front of a jury.
Who are you going to believe?
You, the defendant, the accused, or are you going to believe the cop?
Right.
Well, and there's also, tell me if this has been your experience as well, but I've heard that one of the reasons that plea bargaining is so effective, of course, you're not allowed to bribe people in the legal department except with years of their own freedom, which apparently counts for something.
Oh, there is a form of bribe.
I take, and especially in Form of campaign contributions to judges.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but I mean, just in terms of the people caught up in the machinery, but there's also this kind of double jeopardy thing where if you go to court and you're convicted, then you're more likely to get a harsher sentence because the judge is like, damn you for wasting my time.
That's correct.
And so the other thing, too, is that there's no conceivable way to know the actual proportion of the people who are even breaking the law because, of course, you get...
We're caught up in this machinery and they're threatening you with 20 years but we can clean it down to a couple if you turn in some other people you're like, who did I see at the store yesterday?
Who's the guy who walks my dog?
And you just throw names at these people to take years off your sentence and then they go and grab these people and they name other people and so it really is just a domino where you have Absolutely no idea, although I imagine the proportion is very small, of the number of people who are actually even breaking the law in any objective fashion because these threats and plea bargains and so on just scoop people in.
It's like there's just massive tuna now.
Sorry, you hit that?
Not that it's very encouraging, but just recently in Harris County, the incumbent Republican Harris County attorney was a woman who had declared that And is that because,
and this is what I'd like to get to, because the big issue that we face, you know, a lot of people don't remember that famous saying from Voltaire, 18th century, I disagree with absolutely everything you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.
Because when you are against prohibition, People think that you're pro-drug.
You know, and that's a kind of weird thing.
It's like saying, well, I'm against the welfare state, therefore I want there to be more poor people.
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
And, of course, I genuinely believe that there's nothing that spreads drugs more than prohibition, right?
Because there's no way, if it was legal, people would try and sell the kids.
Also, because it's so profitable for a drug dealer to hook people on these drugs, They'll give them for free.
They'll try and get them hooked as quickly as possible.
They'll give them the most potent drugs, humanly possible, to get them as addicted as possible.
They'll extend to them free credit, which, you know, comes back in the form of, well, now you have to do me favors to help spread the drugs and so on.
You've got to watch out for me.
And this, so to me, the spread of drugs is driven by the very illegality of the system.
But what do you think is the best response to the issue of, well, if you're against prohibition, you're somehow pro-drug?
What's your good stand-by for that?
Right.
Well, you know, I get asked that frequently when I'm doing interviews and that sort of thing.
Well, you do have a goatee.
I do have a goatee.
You know, and my response is always, well, if you had somebody here from the National Organization for Women, would you ask them if they had an abortion?
So just because you're advocating for policy change doesn't mean you're necessarily advocating for a particular set of behaviors.
The issue of the drug war is really much broader even than the idea of drug use.
There are arguments.
The government shouldn't have the right to tell you what you do with your body.
I don't care if somebody uses drugs any more than I care if they drink more than 16 ounces of soda or drink raw milk.
It's not the place of government to enforce that.
But it is hard, and certainly the government does everything they can to kind of frame the debate as anybody advocating for changes to our drug laws, you know, just a reconstituted hippie and all they really care about is getting high.
Well, no, what I care about is our government wasting money, the erosion of our civil liberties, and the perversion of law enforcement in this country.
So those are really the issues.
It's not a question of using marijuana or not using marijuana.
I have four kids.
My oldest is in high school.
At his school this year, somebody found a spoon with heroin residue on it, which is unfortunate.
Of course, nobody wants kids to use heroin, but of course they have very easy access to it because of prohibition.
So, the school promptly called in the County Drug Task Force, locked down all the kids in their classrooms, beyond school hours, locked them in their classrooms, went through the whole school with drug-sniffing dogs in the parking lot, searched some lockers, nothing else was found.
But, you know, that's the kind of acclimation to a police state that we're seeing, and a lot of that is targeted at kids.
There are thousands of these kinds of rates every year in the country.
And now the school's response is that you're not allowed to carry a backpack around in the school because the courts have found that, you know, on school property, right, the locker belongs to the school.
If your car is in the parking lot, it's subject to search without cause.
But your person and any bag that you're carrying is not subject to search without cause.
So what do we do?
Well, now you can't carry backpacks.
You have to leave it in your locker so that we can search it when we want to.
And that's all drug enforcement, and that really is, I think, changing how kids perceive the police and, again, how police perceive young people.
And it really is acclimating, I think, this generation to the extent that they can.
It's acclimating this generation to accept the level of government interference in their lives.
That's just anathema to the principles It could be.
I mean, part of me says, though, that it is giving kids a more obvious taste of the state than most of them would have gotten in the past.
You know, when I was a kid growing up, the only cop I ever saw was, you know, there was some kid's show where there was this officer-friendly Bob who would teach you origami or something like that, and it was all pretty banal and friendly.
And now, if you've got drug-sniffing dogs and guys with guns and, you know, Darth Vader masks, I mean, that's something that's going to be kind of alarming for kids.
it gives them, I think, more of a taste of what's to come.
Sorry?
It programs them too.
Yeah, mind offering substances.
Let's talk about government education.
Social engineering is what I call it, going on through TV and all those visual things, visual cues to create a negative image, especially used in mind and stuff.
Yeah.
Systems are working.
I would like to talk a little bit about something that I think is under-discussed, even within the libertarian community, about the drug war, which is the degree to which the drug for affects foreign policy.
Because, you know, we see it within the borders, you know, and it's scary and all of that, but it's hard for us to see the overseas view of what happens because the world as a whole is pretty shocked and appalled at the effects of American drug prohibition on foreign policy.
Is that something you'd like to talk about?
We can also get comments from you guys.
But I think that's a really, really important thing.
It is.
Yeah, particularly in Latin America, of course.
Our drug policy really perverts our relationship with countries south of the border.
And I was in Guatemala for three years with DEA and in Mexico for two years with DEA. Because they see that this is a U.S. problem.
We create this entire problem.
And the problem for them is, well, in Mexico, 14,000 people killed last year and bodies hanging from bridges and a dysfunctional judiciary and a dysfunctional police force and all of that.
And the destruction of cropland, of farmers.
One of the reasons they're coming north is because they're getting bombed down south.
Right.
So we set up the system.
We're the drug market.
We set in place the prohibitionist scheme, and then it's foreign countries that by and large bear the brunt of that burden.
So there's tremendous dissatisfaction, but I think certainly This year and last year, there's starting to be a revolt against that in some Latin American countries and among some Latin American leaders.
Most notably, the new president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, who is no libertarian.
He was the head of military intelligence during part of the Guatemala Civil War.
He's a graduate of the School of the Americas.
I mean, he's not home listening to Sergeant Pepper.
But he said, this is a problem that the U.S. is causing.
Guatemala has a higher murder rate than Mexico.
All of the destruction in our country is because of what the U.S. is doing to us.
And he's called for drug legalization to address that.
Other countries, leaders are kind of starting slowly to follow that lead, including President Calderón of Mexico.
But I do think, you know, it really has affected American foreign policy and how those countries view us tremendously and completely negatively.
But I think it's changing.
I mean, I think that, you know, internationally, it's starting to change.
We're starting to see that awareness, and we're starting to see the Latin American leaders challenge that, right, challenge this drug war orthodoxy.
And of course, at the state level as well, we're starting to see a revolt of states against federal drug policies.
Right.
Yeah, because, I mean, that goes back to the Obama thing, that he's enforcing or allowing the enforcement of these federal policies directly against the state mandates, particularly with medical marijuana.
Right.
And I read some justification for his, but, you know, trying to pluck sense out of Obama's rhetoric is, you know, it's like trying to go fishing in your toilet bowl after you've used it.
That's a pretty good metaphor, isn't it?
Anyway.
You just enjoy them no matter how ugly they are in your mind.
But yeah, so what is his justification?
Because he put something out there that didn't even seem to make any legal sense.
Right.
Well, the legal justification for all of federal drug policy is, I mean, we don't think about this, but it's the Commerce Clause, which is that the federal government has the right to regulate commerce between the states.
Which was originally meant to reduce tariffs.
Exactly.
Right.
To make sure that there were no tariff walls in the states.
Right.
Between Oklahoma and Texas, right?
That they wouldn't have a trade war.
And that you could cross from one state to another without a passport.
So that's the purpose of the Commerce Clause, but of course it's been perverted.
And if you think about it, right, when we We decided that we were going to prohibit alcohol in this country.
Well, what did that take?
It took an amendment to the Constitution.
And to do away with that policy, what did it take?
It took another amendment to the Constitution.
But the drug war, there's no amendment to the Constitution.
It's just this really I think a very weak argument that the Commerce Clause essentially gives the government the power to regulate anything that any state wants to do.
And we see that certainly with regard to medical marijuana.
This idea that even if you're growing four plants in your closet and smoking it in your own room and not selling it to anyone, that that's subject to federal control under the Commerce Clause.
Because you might change your mind.
You might change your mind.
Just you doing that, you cultivating that, That impacts the trade writ large, right?
The interstate trade in marijuana is impacted by the fact that you're growing four plants of marijuana in your closet and smoking it in your bedroom, right?
That the government now, the federal government now, has some say in that.
So it is a weak argument.
And I think it's a strong argument for libertarians to make because it is such a clear Tenth Amendment issue.
Right.
How do you think it's, this is for everyone here too, how do you think it's going to play out?
My prognostication is that as the government really begins to run out of money, they're just going to start slashing and burning stuff.
I mean, welfare is going to get reduced and all of these payouts are going to get reduced.
And, of course, one of the big ways that governments can begin to save money is to no longer enforce this stuff.
The amount of money that Portugal has saved is huge.
Now, there's a problem, right, which is it's really hard to cut government spending because if you lay off a bunch of government workers, you've got to pay a huge payout.
They go on unemployment insurance.
It's really hard to actually save money with the government.
But there are ways in which they could really save a lot of money through this.
And I think as the Fiscal noose begins to tighten around the state's neck, which as I think this year and next year in particular, you can see it escalating.
I mean, one more European crisis and, I mean, trade is going to collapse and China's economy slowing.
It's a whole mess all around the world.
I mean, I don't think it's going to be driven by much of ideology, but I do think that there is going to be a practical, you know, old mother hub at the cupboard is bare kind of thing that I think is going to maybe drive some of this stuff.
Does that make sense to anyone?
Because you guys know the U.S. a lot better than I do, but that's the way I can sort of see it playing out.
Yeah, I think so.
Particularly because public opinion about drug policy is changing.
There was a poll last October that found 50% of respondents favored legalizing marijuana for use by adults.
So I think as public opinion, and just 10 years ago, a few years ago it was 34%, so public opinion is shifting pretty rapidly.
And as it does, I think what you'll see is people realize that, yeah, this is a place where the government can cut without hurting anybody.
So I do think that any real substantive change at the federal level will be driven by economic reality and not by ideology.
And we're starting to see that.
I mean, there are some successes here in Texas, right?
Beto O'Rourke beat Sylvester Reyes.
Well, Reyes is the one who proposed drones, right, to go after drug traffickers just south of the border and along the border.
Droners for stoners.
Right, drones for stoners.
And he lost, right?
And he lost his race.
And, of course, there are others, Jared Polis in Colorado.
So, you know, this idea that That you can't be elected to office while talking honestly about drug policy reform is starting to change.
It really is starting to change.
And there are some other kind of smaller changes at the federal level.
There was an amendment, Hinchley and Farr, another congressman's name escapes me, Rohrabacher, Dana Rohrabacher from California, an amendment to the Justice Appropriations Bill that would have prohibited the use of federal funds to go after medical marijuana facilities in states Where it's legal and where those facilities are complying with state law.
So it is changing, and it's changing.
I do think there's an ideological shift in how the public views the issue.
But certainly, eventually, we're going to have to cut a lot out of government.
I mean, that's just the economic reality.
And I think that's a strong argument to make.
This is probably one of the easiest places to cut, particularly with regard to incarceration.
I mean, why on earth are we increasing what we're spending on drug incarceration by $147 million one year alone?
Why are we still building prisons in this country?
We have enough prisons.
So I think...
That's a lot.
There's profit in it, right?
Because some of this stuff is farmed out of there.
Capitalism may not be exactly right when you're talking about people getting government money for obeying government laws.
But that's the fascistic model where you've got public money and private profit.
Was there a case, I can't remember where, where the...
Yeah, where the judge was found to have kickbacks from the prison from the people who were sent to the kids.
What was that?
Pennsylvania?
Two judges.
Two judges, yeah.
That were found, right.
One judge shut down the public prison and the other one sent them to the facility.
Right.
And they got direct kickbacks from the people.
So yeah, the increased privatization of this kind of stuff I think is...
It's pretty brutal.
It is.
It is.
So I do think, you know, eventually that that economic reality is going to set in, probably sooner rather than later.
And I think, you know, people realize that, you know, cutting what we spend, locking up nonviolent offenders, is a reasonable way to save money.
Do you guys have any comments or questions?
Anybody?
You mentioned there wasn't a war, but in the 19th century, we were involved in a drug war.
Opium war?
Yes.
Were you the guy who put the comment on my YouTube video?
Opium war!
No, but I mean, there was no massive...
We and the British fought the Chinese for the right to sell drugs.
Yes, that's true.
That's true.
I mean, because the big mafia was in charge now.
Now it's the big and little mafia that are in charge now.
But no, you're right.
There were wars, but domestically there was no organized crime within the United States when drugs were legal.
Harry Brown, I've never been able to find these statistics again.
Harry Brown had a fantastic series of statistics he gave on his radio show some years ago.
Where he was basically saying that in England, before heroin was illegal, there were only a few hundred or maybe less than a thousand heroin addicts, because you could get three hits for 25 pence.
Reason Magazine had an article a couple of decades ago about that.
Yeah, and then when they made it illegal, it swelled by tens of thousands, and then it was like, I think, 25 pounds per hit.
So you could track, as the price went up, the addiction went up.
But sorry, you had a question as well?
I was going to add, you talked about the changing of drug policy.
Are we going to see that because you have states like Rhode Island who's considering decriminalization of marijuana?
Is it the number of states that are defying the federal government that's going to stop that?
Or will we continue to see the printing of money to fund the drug war to continue to oppress the states?
Which one is going to win out?
Is it going to be when we stop the printing presses, or is it going to be the states Yeah, well, I don't see the government as inclined to turn off the printing press anytime soon.
So I really think that probably the most immediate change is going to be at the state level.
It's going to be more and more states changing their drug policies.
And, you know, of course, that's self-perpetuating, right?
Because states decriminalize.
Everybody realizes that, well, you know, the streets aren't flooded with zombies just because we decriminalize marijuana.
And so once there are more of those experiments at the state level and people come to realize that a lot of what they've been told in the drug war propaganda just isn't true, that there aren't terrible societal consequences for decriminalizing marijuana and use doesn't go up, I think there will be more and more reforms at the state level.
Changing federal law is much more difficult.
So I don't think, I think it'll be a while before we see any significant federal reforms.
But at the state level, I think while there are currently initiatives in place, and I think we'll see more and more of that.
You know, and you see in states that have decriminalized, don't have higher use rates, don't have higher use rates either among kids or among adults, than states that haven't decriminalized.
Mississippi, Ohio.
These all have relatively low rates of drug use, but being arrested for simple marijuana possession is like getting a traffic ticket.
It's a civil infraction in those states.
So I think most of the immediate change in the next few years will probably be at the state level.
And that's where most lobbying efforts on the part of drug reform organizations are.
Well, yeah, the states can't print money, of course, right?
So they have much stricter...
Well, they have less crazy financial restrictions.
So, I mean, conservatism in the state budget...
It's going to hit the state budgets before it hits the federal budget, and my guess would be.
So I'm curious about...
Being from law enforcement, the type of attitude you see in other law enforcement, you know, at all levels.
Are you seeing that there is, you know, like, what's the attitude towards the war on drugs?
Is it something that, you know, they believe in from a moral basis?
Is it something that is simply a convenient way to get more funding?
I mean, is there any sort of hope for your type of attitude perhaps spread?
Yes, and I can tell you, you know, in the course of my career with DEA, I met and spoke with a number of my colleagues that agree with me, that our drug policies are bad and need to be changed.
Unfortunately, there have been a number of cases of active duty law enforcement who have done that, even in private conversations, and lost their job for it.
So, you know, there's a certain amount of unenlightened self-interest in keeping your job, both at the individual level and at the agency level, to maintain funding levels or increase funding levels.
But I do think it's changing.
I do think that, well, I mean, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, we have about 50,000 members.
I think about 1,500 of those are law enforcement folks.
So, you know, just kind of looking at it through the lens of that organization, of this organization, yeah, I think there is an increasing awareness that the drug wars failed.
It's something that I think everybody in this room knows.
And I think, you know, I think certainly more and more law enforcement folks are starting to see that.
But, as you mentioned, there's a certain ideological component as well.
Just as there's still an alcohol prohibition party in this country, there are people who think that there's such a strong moral argument to be made against drug use That almost any level of law enforcement is justified.
Of course, it's kind of productive.
If you're PODs, you're going to have a very passionate response to that issue.
Right.
The other thing too, I mean, have everyone seen The Wire?
Have you seen that TV show?
Didn't you?
I mean, I was watching that and I was like, are they going where they think I'm going?
I was literally pounding the arm of my chair saying, damn, they're really going there.
Where they made a very strong, not just moral, but economic case for the legalization, the drug use went down, crime went down, where they set up this little, if you haven't seen it, I'm not spoiling anything, they're safe zone, right?
It was an amazing, and of course it was a reporter and an ex-cop who wrote the script, if I remember right.
Yeah, and no popular outcry, so people see that kind of stuff, and there was some movie with Michael Douglas, I can't remember the name.
Where?
Traffic.
Traffic, yeah.
Again, making a very powerful and compassionate case for legalization.
It really is astounding.
Again, you know, think back to Reefer Madness.
Most of you who have seen it probably can't remember it.
The prosecutor of Charles Manson, I heard him on a radio show, and he is advocating getting rid of the drug laws.
And where he came at it logically was, in prisons, drugs are easy to get.
Yeah, even if you turn the whole world into a prison, you cannot...
You can't stop it, so why even try?
Anything that people will put up their butts cannot be controlled.
I think that's the first ethical rule.
If it goes up your butt, you can't control it.
That's a very, very real thing.
That's why gay marriage...
Anyway.
Too much, too far?
I want to know where the line is.
I think we found it.
High five.
It's about the hamsters.
Hamsters, that's right.
Hamsters can never be made illegal with Richard Gere around.
Anyway, sorry.
We had another comment in the back there?
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I always think about how people have a hard time distinguishing between fighting something culturally versus fighting it governmentally.
And it seems like our language, I can be against it culturally, but for allowing it not to be a court situation, do you find that Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's, you know, what the Libertarian Party is really all about.
This idea that, you know, however you feel about, oh, any host of issues, right, gay marriage is one, drug use, gambling, drinking alcohol, prostitution, I mean, all of these.
It's in our party platform that we oppose, the Libertarian Party opposes any Laws that make crimes out of things that don't entail a victim.
Sorry to interrupt, but I also wanted to say that if you view these things as problems, and I think we'd all like to live in a world where there weren't drug addicts and stuff like that, the real problem of the drug laws is it drives this underground completely.
It locks people in a life of crime where they cannot get the help that they need.
I mean, there's AA, right?
So people who have drinking problems, they can sort of, you know, on the surface, but it's because we want to help these people, it's because we don't want to just deal with a symptom, but rather with a cause, that we don't want to make it illegal.
It drives it right out of the side of society, puts people into the worst possible conditions, it strips them of their capacity to earn enough through honest labor to pay for the drugs so they have to turn to a life of crime.
It traps people in an underworld where you and I can't go and help them.
And organizations that want to go and help these people, whether it is gambling or, you know, whatever it is that is illegal, it's because we want to help them.
And I think it's that level of compassion that we really need to radiate.
You know, we want to help people get out of being addicted to drugs, and we can't do it because it's underground.
It's like the war creates the enemy.
The enemy, the war on drug exists, the enemy exists because the war on drug exists.
It's not...
Right.
Yeah, we can't help people.
You know, it's funny because, you know, a drug is a way of masking symptoms of, you know, personal pain or whatever if you're addicted.
And the drug war as well masks a symptom without dealing with the core problem.
And we can't extend our tentacles of compassion, if I can explain that for us horribly.
We can't extend our tentacles of compassion to the crayfish of the people who...
I'm sorry, I lost it.
It's important, I think, also to make that argument with regards to kids.
Because one of the things that I hear a lot when I talk about drug policy reform is, well, what about the children?
Do you want your kids to be smoking marijuana or using heroin or whatever?
And my answer is always, well, no, I don't.
But say I was in their room one day cleaning, snooping around the way parents clean, And I found a bag of marijuana.
Well, would I call the police?
Would you call the police?
Would anybody call the police on their kids?
Do they really think that the criminal justice system is the place where that problem should be handled?
No, it should be handled in the family.
Maybe handled with some addiction counseling, if that's appropriate, or other psychological help.
But it's not law enforcement's job.
Putting somebody in jail does not help them solve that problem.
Yeah, you find a human foot.
That's a different story, right?
That's different, right?
Coming from Canada, I guess you have experience with that.
To go on to your example is that if you found a bag of marijuana in their room, well, drugs are illegal.
How could you find marijuana in the room?
If drugs are illegal, we made it legal, how did they get there?
So, obviously, making drugs illegal didn't prevent it.
So you as a parent had to be that person that prevents it.
Oh, actually I had another question though.
If states were, and that's where they're going, legalized drugs, do you see a scenario, because we know how the federal government works, they'll double down most likely on their policy.
They won't...
Until they run out of money.
That's sort of the argument.
Well, states have to sue the federal government over this issue.
Take them to the Supreme Court and hopefully win on Congress.
Would that be the option?
Because I don't see them.
That would take some insane politician like Scott Walker.
That would take some insane politician who didn't care about re-election and was willing to stand on principle.
So it's going to take a libertarian?
Am I right about that?
No, but it's going to take somebody who's willing to take that stand, no matter how unpopular, who's willing to provoke that debate, who's willing to, you know, poke that...
And I think legally, I think legally that's a hard argument to make because of how the court has interpreted the Commerce Clause.
And it's really, you know, a question of preemption of, you know, whether federal law trumps state law.
You're an attorney.
You could probably answer this question a lot more articulately than I can.
But I think, yeah, I mean, there's a political side that it would be very hard.
It's hard to imagine a state doing that in the very, very near future.
But also I think it would be, with the current makeup of the court at least, I think it would be hard to accomplish that through the courts.
Yeah, the way they interpret the Commerce Clause, they interpret it very, very liberally, in my opinion.
The federal government has more control than the state governments could ever want to have.
I have a question for you regarding something that's a little bit legally related.
In your experience in Guatemala and Mexico, are some of these countries maybe afraid to legalize or decriminalize because they have seen what has happened to Cuba, that there has been no relations with one of the Latin American countries and they suffered for it?
A 45-year embargo.
Has there been some, in your experience, have you heard of that sort?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, right, we're the big dog on the block.
We do not have a humble foreign policy, and there's historically been a lot of resistance in Latin American countries, which are in large part dependent on U.S. foreign aid, and in large part dependent on drug-related, drug law enforcement-related foreign aid.
There's tremendous resistance to challenge U.S. policy.
Yeah, a follow-up to that.
My understanding is that the country that has the most drug foreign aid the United States gives to is Colombia, which has, I think, 9, 10, 15 billion dollars.
Is there actual direct aid to Guatemala for drug war?
How is that?
There is, yeah.
Most of that is through the State Department.
So it's not that this is not direct foreign aid that goes directly to government officials in Guatemala?
No, it does.
Much of it does.
I don't recall how much we sent to Guatemala.
I know it's increased pretty significantly in recent years.
Can I say in Mexico, there's no foreign aid given to Mexico directly to Mexican officials or Mexican government?
Or fighting drugs?
Directly.
As assistance through agents, but not direct aid.
Right.
Direct cash payments?
Yes.
Well, no, but it's kind of like, right, I mean, if we're paying for courts and we're paying for police officers, and in the case of Guatemala, we're paying for helicopters, well, that's money that the host nation isn't spending, right?
So, in essence, right, that's...
It's a savings.
Right, it's a savings, and so, right, I mean, it's not direct aid in that sense, but it is, really, because it's money that the country isn't spending on this program or that program that they're saving, and so the money does stay in there.
It's Colombia.
And I think, well, there's Plan Merida, which is a U.S. government counter-drug initiative in Mexico.
I think it's about $1.3 billion, and most of that hasn't been spent yet.
You know, it's direct aid in the sense of training law enforcement, providing equipment and that sort of thing.
I don't know if there are any actual cash payments that are just kind of, you know, briefcases in the back of a car kind of transactions.
The U.S. military has had a program under operation for many, many years, the infamous P-Test.
Fail a P-Test and you can take a budding military career and bring it to an abrupt halt right away.
In recent years, they're having a following now with K-2 and a lot of these other things.
And our military is a reflection of the civilian community, where these kids come in with that stuff.
What do other country military, how do they What does Sweden do in Germany?
How do they deal with this?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I would be willing to guess that we are probably more aggressive than any of those countries in trying to root out people that use drugs in our military, but I don't know what programs they have in place.
It's interesting that you mentioned K2 and the spice and the synthetics that are now a problem in the military because they can kind of be avoided on bath salts.
People say that's terrible.
Look what using these substances does to people.
We need to double down on the drug war.
But the reason people use those substances is because marijuana is illegal.
They just do it to avoid marijuana use detection.
So it's really a problem, again, a problem that's created by prohibition, the use of those synthetics and things.
I mean, they are dangerous.
They're certainly more dangerous than the drugs that people would use if they were legally available.
Well, the other thing, too, I mean, if you want to talk about destructive effects of drugs on people's lives, I mean, the pharmaceutical industry, the legal drugs, I mean, the abuse of legal drugs vastly outstrips, vastly outstrips the illegal drug war, and it's much more negative effects on human health.
But, of course, that's something that people don't really, really talk about, because that's already being managed and controlled by the government, right?
I think it was only in the post-Second World War period that Congress granted doctors the right to prescribe and gave them that exclusive right.
Before that, you could, you know, make your own intelligent decisions with consultation with pharmacists and so on.
But that whole program is, I don't know if anyone knows the exact numbers, but I think it's like 10 times the amount of abuse in the legal prescription drug market than there is in the illegal drug market.
But it's a mess.
Death to legal drug for alcohol treatment, legal drug use, or far outstrip.
Far outstrip, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and that's really important as far.
Sorry, yeah.
Let me put my question another way.
In your judgment, because it's really got to be a very serious problem in the military.
Nearly every major military base in the country has a lot of drugs around the base.
The kid wants to get a drug, he can get a drug.
How do you think they should deal with this if it is a problem?
How do you think they should?
Do you want to send guys to the sea in the combat that are Can I take a swing at that one?
Sure.
Well, the first thing you want is fewer soldiers.
Because if you have to cast the net as wide as possible, and they're casting it now to the point where they'll accept people with 25% body fat and, I mean, like, criminal records, right?
Because they're running out of soldiers who want to go serve.
Because you've got 700 military bases, a whole bunch of wars, foreign policy invasions, I mean, it's crazy, right?
So you want a smaller number of soldiers so you get a higher amount of quality.
And so I think that would be the number one.
The number two thing is stop sending them over from term after term after term to the point where the only way they can get through the day is either taking handfuls of psychotropics or self-medicating in some other way.
So there's lots of ways that you can...
This went all long, long before I did that.
This depends on about 30 years.
Well, I mean, Vietnam was the big extension of the drug use in the military population, and that creates a whole culture, and that creates a whole accessibility, a whole supply chain, and so on.
So, I mean, I didn't hear about it much in the Korean War, not that I know a huge amount about the Korean War, but obviously...
Right, right.
So, you know, the legal drugs were the drug of choice, but certainly I think Vietnam and the horrors that that engendered in the population.
I mean, look, this is a very brief aside, but there was a big problem, of course, the military faced in the Second World War.
Does anybody know the percentage of people who actually fired their weapons in the Second World War, even if you were given one and put in front of an enemy?
Single digits.
Most people just hid because they're not stupid, right?
I mean, and they're not crazy.
And so most people, they just hid.
And so the number of people you had to deploy to actually get people to fire at the enemy was huge, many, many times the actual number.
And so what they did after the Second World War was they started to work on psychological conditioning and programming.
The whole boot camp thing came up where you dehumanize and you really traumatize people.
And they managed to raise the rates of participation in gunfire, in actual open-arm fire against the enemy.
To, I think, 40, 50, 60%, but that comes at huge psychological cost, right?
So you destroy people to the point where they're willing to go murder strangers that some guy in a uniform's pointing at for no reason that they can conceivably understand, where there's no invasion of your home country and all this kind of stuff.
And so I think that that whole dehumanization and increased psychological programming of soldiers also leads you, it's a vulnerability metric for drug abuse.
So, again, that's a big picture thing, but I think that would be an important factor as well.
I do think with regard to drug use by the military, certainly we don't want soldiers to be going onto the battlefield or on guard duty or whatever it may be while they're on marijuana.
But, as you mentioned, we don't want them to do that while they're drunk either, and I don't want them to do that after they've taken a fistful of Xanax Certainly, in situations like I don't want somebody to smoke marijuana and then start driving a school bus to school.
There are certain jobs, certain positions, certain circumstances where I think drug testing is appropriate.
I don't want to go to a surgeon who's used marijuana, used cocaine, or has just drank a bottle of whiskey before I go under the knife.
There are certainly those standards that can and should be in place.
We manage that with regard to alcohol.
We try to manage that with regard to legally prescribed psychotropic drugs.
And I think when marijuana is legal, there will be systems put in place to manage that with regard to marijuana as well.
Again, it's not advocating using any drug at any time.
It's a question of You know, the damage done by the policies that we currently have in place and what we could do better.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, drug testing is, I think, warranted in certain circumstances.
I think it's done excessively, right?
I don't think we need to drug test every kid in school that wants to play football or play in the band.
But I think in certain circumstances for certain people, I think it's perfectly legitimate.
I don't know what...
I don't know.
I can't imagine teaching without using drugs.
I would probably be against that.
Government schools are mind-altering substances anyway.
Anyway, right. - One thing we haven't talked about is some of the cottage industry that brings it up to the drug testing and the rehab facilities and things like that.
Not the rehab bed, but there are these uninvested interests like ancillary to the issue of prohibition that flourish in that.
And, you know, drug testing is one of them.
And I do think that there are places for that, like you mentioned specifically, but, you know, like with, you know, drug testing for teachers, it may not solve the problem because it may not be relevant because what they do at 8, 10 o'clock at their home, We'll show up in that test,
whereas alcohol is held to a different standard, and I'm sure everybody in the room has thought of that before, but I think that's a good point, because I don't know that the drug tests are really going to help, even in situations where we want them to.
And of course, now we see some states beginning to expand that to welfare recipients.
Well, I think everyone in this room probably is of like mind with regard to the welfare state.
But does the fact that you receive government assistance really give the government license to extract something from your body to test what you're doing with your body?
I think that's an overreach, and as you mentioned, it's certainly an industry.
And I would be surprised if there weren't some connection between the money that's being made off of those testing systems and profit.
Well, the interesting thing, too, that brain scan studies have shown that political power is actually more addictive than cocaine.
Which is why addicts cannot solve the problems of addicts, right?
I mean, it's all the same bag of people.
And so, yeah, I mean, and exercising, you know, police brutality and control also releases dopamines within the system.
The whole political system is built up of people who are attempting to fill up personal deficiencies through addictive behavior.
Never going to solve the problem.
There's something that's not widely talked about, but I've had a...
A guy not too long ago at a church event and we sat around and talked.
I asked him what he did.
He said he was a former CIA agent.
So one of the first questions I asked him, he was aware of the CIA's involvement in dealing with drugs.
And he said, let me ask you this.
He said, is it a conspiracy theory?
If you see the drugs being unloaded yourself, which he did at the Houston International Airport, This is well documented with Gary Webb's book about the CIA's involvement.
My question is, or not in drugs, is the DEA really widely aware of this and do they have any interest in putting an end to it?
Well, the second question, no.
Certainly, I don't think that anybody in DEA is actively working on any complicity between CIA and the other intelligence agency and drug trafficking.
To the extent that they're aware of it, I think, as you mentioned, historically, I think that's my personal opinion.
I think historically that's pretty well documented and that's been done.
And certainly be consistent with what we've done in other countries, right?
Whether it's still going on, I don't know, and I really couldn't speculate on it.
But I think if it were, I certainly wouldn't trust one branch of the government to investigate another branch of the government that's doing something wrong.
Opium production is way up in Afghanistan since we've...
Oh, it's up.
Astronomy?
Yeah, which is of course funding the terrorists, right?
Well, and it's funding the Karzai administration.
To me, it's pretty clear what's happening.
Yeah, I mean, I think, right, so on the one hand, you have drug prohibitionists in the federal government saying, well, drugs are so bad that we need to spend $26 billion a year in this country and lock up a million people a year.
They're just that much of a threat to society.
But we certainly don't have a problem with the opium fields in Afghanistan being essentially guarded by our soldiers.
Because all that money, right?
Because for Karzai to stay in power, he needs the support of the warlords.
The warlords are the opium producers.
And, you know, if that money goes away, Karzai goes away.
And obviously, he's the horse on which we bet.
So I think, right, I mean, that kind of gives you a clear indication, you know, as you mentioned, our approach to drug policy globally is a lot more complex than just a moralistic crusade.
Well, I also wanted to mention too that, as we know in Mexico, what do they call this?
It's, you know, you get silver in the form of a bribe or you get silver in the form of a bullet.
One of the two.
Silver or lead.
Sorry, they're not werewolves who are currently in charge in Mexico.
More vampires, I think.
But...
Remember, of course, that the mafia has a huge, huge amount of economic and political power in the United States.
Any politician who would openly threaten the profits of the mafia would face, I think, some pretty significant risks.
And who wants to take that on?
For the sake of a fairly unpopular group, where only 50% of people maybe support the legalization and taxing of a minor substance.
But I don't think politicians want to take it on because they're afraid for their families.
And I would be, too.
I mean, that would be a sensible thing to be afraid of.
There's something I haven't heard in any of these discussions.
We were talking about legal drugs.
Well, one of the biggest killers is acetaminophenitonol.
And I was reading in my wife's pharmacology book that Acetaminophen is added with opiates, like with codeine and other things.
It doesn't add any beneficial effect because the pain relief is so much weaker than the codeine.
It's added to prevent people from abusing it.
So they are actually introducing a poison into a lot of drugs In order that addicts can't reuse them.
And then the side effect of that is that people are taking drug A, B, and C, all of them have acetaminophen, and they overdose.
And it destroys your liver.
You can't recover from it.
Yeah, another side effect.
But it's kind of interesting.
Our government has actually put poison into our legal drugs In the fear that we might have used them.
Right, right.
Sir?
One of my campaign platforms was dealing with this whole issue of drugs, and I've heard everything from legalizing it to the argument that some folks have made that doing what they do in Asia, they did a few years ago, the death penalty.
I think you've called to announce the marijuana in Singapore.
You had.
The last time they did it was a Dutch seaman about eight years ago.
I mean, honey, publicly honey.
Their argument is that, yeah, they have the death penalty, but they rarely ever use it.
In Singapore, their argument is, you know, we don't have a drug problem, and we rarely ever use the death penalty.
So what's your thoughts about that idea?
Well, how do they know if they actually have a drug problem if people are driven so far underground that it simply no longer shows up in society?
It's like saying, if you do carpentry for free, we're going to kill you.
Well, that just means that the carpentry goes so far underground that you can't track it anymore.
So if you make something that, if such outlandish murderous punishments go on, you lose the ability to track it.
And I wouldn't trust the government.
I don't even trust the government on GDP, let alone drug prevalence.
Singapore is an interesting place.
I live there.
It's an interesting place to go.
This is the same place where they give the kid...
For littering, right?
They do it on ashes, yeah.
21st century technology, medieval morality.
They do not tolerate prostitution.
They do not tolerate public drunkenness.
They don't tolerate littering.
I mean, it's a really, very, very clean place to go to.
Well look, but Singapore ranks incredibly high on economic freedom.
And I think that more economic opportunities and better education and so on means that fewer people are going to use drugs.
So I think that's fairly well statistically correlated.
So that may be another reason, probably more so than their punishments.
You know, we're going to shoot you on the tarmac.
Both those countries' drugs are very, very easy to obtain.
And so what they're doing is they're actually playing both sides.
They're saying, we'll take money from the U.S. to support our drug union drug policy, and then we'll use the occasional assassination on a tarmac to make sure that the general who's actually running the drug business doesn't have any competition.
And so we end up funding the general who's running the drug to take out his competition.
I think we've got time for one more question.
We've got to set up for lunch, but anyone has a last question or comment?
Yes, sir.
Internally, and just your opinion, the policy in Portugal Yeah, Portugal a number of years ago decriminalized, really legalized, essentially, the possession and use of small quantities of any drug, including heroin, cocaine, certainly marijuana.
And that experiment, the Portuguese experiment, is something that a lot of world leaders are starting to look at because what they saw was no increase in drug use.
No significant increase in drug use.
And a tremendous reduction in rates of HIV infection and hepatitis infection because of the use of needles, the use of dirty needles.
And also, there hasn't been any negative consequences because it's taken kind of the profit motive out of that.
So that's really, I think it's a good model.
There's no drug tourism.
They were fearing drug tourism.
Right, there's this argument that there's going to be drug tourism, and that hasn't occurred either.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a very important model internationally to look at.
Mexico did it last year as well.
Mexico did it as well.
And interesting, Mexico did it as an anti-corruption initiative, because what was happening was, right, local cops, municipal cops would pull a kid over if he had a small amount of marijuana.
Well, what does that mean?
That means you can shake him down, you can shake the family down, you can threaten him.
So Mexico, I think it's very telling that they implemented decriminalization of very small amounts, but again of any drug, as an anti-corruption measure because they realized that having the government have the power to enforce these drug laws is just an invitation to corruption.
Now, just for the people who may be listening or watching this later who want to find out more about your organization, how to join, how to support, where should they go on the web?
Great.
It's copssaylegalizedrugs.com is our main website, and all of our resources are there.
You can read the background of our founders, and there's a lot of good information on the site, so I would certainly encourage anyone to check it out and hopefully join us.
Well, thanks, John.
Thank you so much, everybody.
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