Legalize It All - How to Win the War on Drugs

[MachineGhost]

The below quote from 1994 (!!!) is from John Ehrlichman, one of the Watergate conspirators and who was Tricky Dick's domestic policy advisor.

[quote=https://archive.is/Fr9kP]At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.[/quote]

[Pointedstick]

It worked, too. They couldn't destroy African-Americans with slavery or Jim Crow, but the war on drugs did the trick. Shameful.

[Ad Orientem]

The below quote from 1994 (!!!) is from John Ehrlichman, one of the Watergate conspirators and who was Tricky Dick's domestic policy advisor.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?”

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

That quote is just damning.

[jafs]

Many people have said that was the case, but it is surprising to see somebody directly involved with it say it so directly and unambiguously.

[Ad Orientem]

Judge James P. Gray lays out the War on Drugs

https://youtu.be/wRlqRo0DRng

Lieutenant Jack Cole tells you what you need to know about drug prohibition

https://youtu.be/wX0V7_eLeoc

[MWKXJ]

[...]

The lesson drawn by commentators is that it is fruitless to allow moralists to use criminal law to control intoxicating substances. Many now say it is equally unwise to rely on the law to solve the nation's drug problem.

But the conventional view of Prohibition is not supported by the facts.

First, the regime created in 1919 by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, which charged the Treasury Department with enforcement of the new restrictions, was far from all-embracing. The amendment prohibited the commercial manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages; it did not prohibit use, nor production for one's own consumption. Moreover, the provisions did not take effect until a year after passage -plenty of time for people to stockpile supplies.

Second, alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928.

Arrests for public drunkennness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.

Third, violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition. Homicide rates rose dramatically from 1900 to 1910 but remained roughly constant during Prohibition's 14 year rule. Organized crime may have become more visible and lurid during Prohibition, but it existed before and after.

Fourth, following the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption increased. Today, alcohol is estimated to be the cause of more than 23,000 motor vehicle deaths and is implicated in more than half of the nation's 20,000 homicides. In contrast, drugs have not yet been persuasively linked to highway fatalities and are believed to account for 10 percent to 20 percent of homicides.

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opini ... ccess.html

[Ad Orientem]

Rubbish...

Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 157:
Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure

Executive Summary
National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)--the "noble experiment"--was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure.

The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.[1] Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased. Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became "organized"; the court and prison systems were stretched to the breaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant. No measurable gains were made in productivity or reduced absenteeism. Prohibition ermoved a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition.

Those results are documented from a variety of sources, most of which, ironically, are the work of supporters of Prohibition--most economists and social scientists supported it. Their findings make the case against Prohibition that much stronger.[2]

Read the rest here...

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/f ... /pa157.pdf

[MachineGhost]

But the conventional view of Prohibition is not supported by the facts.

Sure, it's sort of disgusting we glorify the individual so much that we willingly allow them them to self-destruct, but its like private property.  What is the alternative?  Yet, these "facts" seems relatively minor compared to the alternative:

The analytical error here is  the failure to realize that prohi-bition  stimulates  crime  in  many  ways.  First,  prohibition  cre-ates  an  entire  class  of criminals  - drug users  and  sellers  -simply  by  making their activities  illegal.  The mere  illegality  of drug use has two main effects:  it forces  drug users into a crimi-nal subculture  to obtain  their drugs  and it provides  many drug users  with criminal  records  or worse - prison - which makes it  more  difficult  to  secure  legitimate  employment,  and  thus avoid  crime.  Second,  prohibition  raises  drug  prices,  forcing poorer  users  into  street  crime  to  support  their  habits.  Third, by  making  illegal  that  which  millions  of  people  believe  is acceptable  behavior,  prohibition  breeds  disrespect  for  law. Fourth, prohibition  encourages  people to become  drug dealers by creating  an extremely lucrative  black market  in drugs.  Fifth, prohibition  destroys,  through  drug crime,  the economic  viabil-ity of low-income  neighborhoods,  leaving young  people  fewer alternatives  to  working  in  the black  market.  Sixth,  prohibition removes  the  settling  of drug-related  disputes  from  the  legal process,  creating a context  of violence  for the buying and sell-ing  of  drugs.  Seventh,  prohibition  diverts  enforcement resources  away from the prevention  of coercive crimes  like rob-bery and rape, thereby increasing  the incidence of such  crimes. Eighth,  prohibition  supplies  enormous  profits  which  subsidize organized  criminal  enterprises  whose  activities  unfortunately extend beyond  the realm  of non-coercive  crimes.  Finally,  pro-hibition,  by  giving  the  police  power  over  desperate  criminals possessing  large  amounts  of cash,  corrupts  many law  enforce- ment officials,  thereby decreasing  their ability  to  fight coercive crimes.

BTW, so far marijuana legalization hasn't resulted in lower prices.  They're the same as the black market.  So the outlaw criminal gangs aren't being squeezed just yet.

[Libertarian666]

Rubbish...

Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 157:
Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure

Executive Summary
National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)--the "noble experiment"--was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure.

The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.[1] Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased. Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became "organized"; the court and prison systems were stretched to the breaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant. No measurable gains were made in productivity or reduced absenteeism. Prohibition ermoved a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition.

Those results are documented from a variety of sources, most of which, ironically, are the work of supporters of Prohibition--most economists and social scientists supported it. Their findings make the case against Prohibition that much stronger.[2]

Read the rest here...

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/f ... /pa157.pdf

Any switch from alcohol to marijuana would have been a benefit, not a drawback, of Prohibition.

Note that I'm not supporting Prohibition, just pointing out an error in that analysis.