Wow: It’s time to legalize drugs, says … Tom Tancredo?

The first federal anti-drug laws appeared after the initial work done to get the food and drug purity act passed. That required basic labeling and compliance with ingredients listings, those things that are now on every foodstuff sold in the US. That is a great boon to the citizenry and once people saw how much cocaine, heroine and other drugs were in their drugs, wine, and foods, they began to buy other goods without those adulterations. Just as America started with a hard liquor society with little in the way of beer and even less wine, the attitudes of Americans shifted and continues to do so, and the volume of alcohol is now in low density forms of beer: our hard drinking ancestors thought nothing of putting a pint of whisky to good use to soothe their aches and pains… which would get most modern Americans passed out in no time at all.

We never did let that great good of knowing what you ingest and imbibe teach us about ourselves and our health so we could make rational decisions, as the Shanghai Conference came back with signatories who agreed to stop the opium trade. Instead of letting adults understand what these drugs do, and have them analyzed and refined for proper measuring to understand their impacts, we demonized them and drove them underground. We did that to the survivors of the civil war who did not have anything else to go after their war wounds: they were addicts and the pain of such rough surgery would have meant an early death for many. What happened in that era that, by our modern standards, was inebriated and drug addled? They built the great industrial cities, spanned the Nation with railroads and spread like wildfire across the wilderness.

There were mothers that used laudunum on their children freely, yes. Never in the numbers that the demonization indicated. There were also drunks addicted to ‘demon rum’ and we still have those today! Except that its far more distilled stuff today than it ever was. The view of that era, outside of the hatchet wielders, was that such addiction was a flaw in moral character or a necessary way to address the sort of harsh life without anti-biotics, without anti-fungals, and without public sanitation that was the lot of Americans of that era.

If you do not like how the federal government can intrude on abortion, then the beginning of that is NOT abortion, but the intrusion of the federal government in deciding what is and is not legal for individuals to use as medications. In that era it was seen as a set of laws to enforce public morals… and that is not the role of government. To get to modern, highly intrusive government that feels a great and pressing need to take over car companies, you must start with the view that it is a great ‘good’ of the government to take the liberty of decision away from adults. That was not the role our Founders would condone, save on the State and local basis where the flexibility of local concerns would allow for vast differences in how societal ills were viewed.

As others mentioned, legalizing does not cure the ill of narco-syndicates or, increasingly, terrorism. Hezbollah demonstrates this fact perfectly, and they are one of the most business astute terrorist organizations on their external component that I have ever run across. They made over $1 million per month in the USA on one scheme alone. What was it? Avoiding cigarette taxes by shipping untaxed cigarettes between States. Total cell size was about 5. The $1 million/month was after taking out costs for food, fuel, original purchase, etc. It was in *profit*. So the idea of ‘legalize, regularize and tax hell out of it’ does not work because of the acument of terrorist organizations not to speak of gangs, like MS-13, doing the same.

That, to me, is a null argument for defunding terrorists and gangs in the narcotics trade. If it doesn’t work with cigarettes, it won’t work with narcotics.

Second up is ‘freeing the producers’ who are under the gun from narcotics syndicates, gangs and terrorists. So, just who has the money to buy the land, pay for crops and get them processed? Not the farmers… so we are left with the now very rich narcotics syndicates having a ‘front organization’ to legitimize their profits which can then be ploughed into other areas… say human trafficking, white slavery, or gun running. That has been a lesson looking at the Albanian diaspora and how the Families of Albania now have a whole swath of external, western crime under their control via immigrant communities. The Millenial Bomb plot goes right through that set of syndicates as they facilitated the movement of al Qaeda operatives and supplied the one to do the bombing… this does not point to an easy set of organizations to uproot just by legalizing narcotics, and depending on the Nations they are in, may actually make them harder to get rid of due to the money laundering and purchasing of corrupt politicians.

Third are the already legitimate fronts used by organizations like Hezbollah to launder goods, money and facilitate the movement of goods between Nations. Opening a grand piano from S. America in St. Petersburg, Russia, revealed a huge cache of cocaine shipped by Hezbollah to Russia. Hezbollah has gone so far as to buy into shopping malls in S. America… not the traditional venue of a terrorist organization, and yet the logistical supply chain allows for so much to be passed with little oversight that it isn’t funny. Just as the Mafia bought into casinos, so, too, do other organizations move into ‘white’ businesses for dark reasons.

Imagine Mexico where the drug gangs, suddenly having LEGAL goods north of the border demand that NAFTA be followed so they can properly export them… and then put their money not into guns but into purchasing politicians. They do this already, of course, but the overhead cost of protection and intimidation against other gangs shifts, as it did with the Mafia, to market segment purchase via political means. If even half the money spent on arms and equipment goes to that, the Mexican State would be under seige as the criminals buy the place out from under the people. An argument can be made that they might do a better job *running* Mexico, but the concept of human liberty and freedom would be tossed out the door with criminals in charge. It is already difficult to prosecute the criminal element in Mexico… who would stop them once they bought the means to remove that threat? And it would not change the nature of their organizations one bit.

I can and do make a stand for basic human liberty, and getting the federal government out of my life. To do that we need to help our friends and allies who will follow our lead to go after the criminal element that will have a dwindling input of ready cash, but have a large cash reserve to expend towards other means. And some organizations, Hezbollah as an example, but remaining elements of FARC and other terrorist groups, stand to have a steady profit by this unless they are confronted full-on and across-the-board. The high cost in lives and liberty of enforcing morality is steep: we either pay immediately by putting those selling impure drugs away and those wanting them into incarceration for long periods of time which is a societal ill to have so many incarcerated for crimes, at the end-user level, which is against themselves; or we pay the hard time, effort and lives to recognize that the cost of human liberty and trying to thwart it where the individual should have supreme control of themselves is one that has been misguided and we are willing to pay the piper to help counter the super-charged criminal elements and terrorists that are threatening societies on a global basis with the cash from this trade.

And as, in this twilight struggle of civilization, we find ourselves opposed by those living off our penchant for moralizing and use those funds to destroy not only our society but all societies, we must put the cost of the internal problems of drugs against the cost of having societies and Nations to protect us. Then ask if we can use our great gift of charity to find ways to help those addicted and thus lessen their burden, as is our responsibility as members of society, and NOT hand it over to government to do in an awful fashion for us. I am far more willing to pay, in charity that is run well, than to government that is run with great overburden and not so well, to address the ills of society: that is my responsibility as being a member of society and supporting liberty and freedom. But then, no one likes that view, these days… it means seeing yourself as a responsible member of society and not asking government to do for you what you should be doing for society.

ajacksonian on May 22, 2009 at 8:51 AM