Tom Russell on Juarez and El Paso

Safer from what?

We’re all hepped up about deaths in Kandahar because that’s part of a threat to our way of life. Deaths in Juarez are quintessential non-news. Just some folks trying to run a business, which is extremely, even ultimately, understandable to us, who, regrettably, perhaps, have to use some extreme methods in the pursuit of the profitability of their enterprises.

Michael Moore doesn’t have it quite right. We aren’t in love with capitalism, it’s more like free-market fundamentalism is our religion. “Fear not those who kill the body, but those who kill the soul.”, and so forth. Over in Kandahar, there are actually these folks who want to organize society along lines of submission to a god other than Mammon! In the face of that existential threat, how can you have time and attention left over to worry about a few lousy deaths caused by some of the more regrettable workings of the absolutely vital free market in Juarez?

We’re all hepped up about deaths in Kandahar because that’s part of a threat to our way of life. Deaths in Juarez are quintessential non-news

Certainly it’s very difficult to see how immense amounts of drug-related violence in Juarez could have any effect whatever on the way of life of any Americans.

The article seems to contradict my second friend, vlaiming that El Paso itself is all safe.

I doubt the thing about the alligators though, alligators don’t gnaw off limbs.

We aren’t in love with capitalism, it’s more like free-market fundamentalism is our religion.

This is true for maybe like twelve people.

[aeiou] Yeah, it’s shocking in that the article is only barely about the unprecedented recent violence in Mexico and more a long meditation on how Juarez has always been one of those places where white racists like Russell oggle the Other and thrill to what they are sure are their near-death experiences while slumming.

Case in point: he discusses his fear of visiting Juarez in 1997. Yet the murder rate in Juarez that year was about the same as Houston’s in 2008 and generally comparable to the higher rates in US cities. The murder rate in Juarez is astronomically higher today, of course, but Russell’s article was less about how things have changed than it is about how things have remained the same.

The article is an embarrassment.

ajay @8,

In order to believe that, you’d have to believe that religions are never hypocritical or, for that matter, never cynical fronts for controlling people on behalf of authoritarian states or criminal organizations.

Glen Tompkins, are you suggesting that trafficking in illegal drugs, which are, after all, illegal, is an example of a free market? Think about what effect a free market in marijuana and cocaine would have on the drug cartels fighting it out in Juarez and then get back to us.

“This is true for maybe like twelve people”

Sure, Milton Friedman, with whose ideas the phrase “free market fundamentalism” is associated, did not build a mass movement. And yes, even among people who have heard of him, the market in his ideas is rather bearish lately.

So how come the practical measures taken in repsonse to a crisis that you would think would have refuted free market fundamentalism, has been to give money to the market malefactors? How come even the “progressive” party in the US can’t bring itself to simply cutting out the industry middlemen and just extending Medicare to cover all ages? The most radical our side is willing to appear in raising its hand against the great god “market forces”, involves a public option that has to be sold in the only terms we think are doctrinally acceptable, as being pro-market competition.

parse and Tim Worstall,

The existence of capitalists who operate outside the law hardly threatens a world-view that believes that the ability to make money is the only proof of competence, and exercising that competence and making piles of cash is the only goal in life worth striving for. It reinforces that view, is a comforting proof of its universality. Even criminals follow our values. This is in stark contrast to al Qaeda, which also breaks our laws, but does so, not in the understandable, maybe even laudable, desire to make piles of cash, but to get the Muslim world to turn away from the taint of a belief in money and money-making that they identify as Western in origin. We can’t abide that sort of heresy, which we perceive as much more threatening, even if the comparative body counts would suggest that we should feel more threatened by the off-label capitalists than by the Islamists.

It’s hardly a knock on the narco-traficantes free market creds that they violate laws to conduct their business. Nor does the criminalization mean that these are not free markets. All markets are defined by what the law will allow and protect. Sure, their price structure would collapse if the laws against their merchandise were repealed. But criminalization was hardly of their making, and while this market may have been unintentionally fostered by these laws, the narco-traficantes lack the ability of their label-brand, malefactor of great wealth, cousins to actually control the rules governing markets in order to create the ideal growing conditions for their legal markets. The drug-dealers are left to scrap in one of the illegal niches left open by the more legit malefactors of great wealth, as they make their safer profits in markets made tame by their ownership of the regulators.

Decriminalize, and the predictable result will be that the big boys, the really effective merchants of death, will take over the drug business. Even drugs like marijuana, now relatively harmless while the business is in the hands of pathetic loser, literal criminal business people, will be made anew by malefactors of great wealth into highly efficient means of separating people from their money. Cigarrettes existed for hundreds of years in hand-made, mostly consumer-made, form, without causing lung cancer or chronic bronchitis. Mass-made and mass-marketed after 1900, they soon became the leading cause of death. Nobody got the medically critical mass of the stuff into their lungs until the industry got a hold of cigarettes and turned them into coffin nails so easy to use that millions would hammer 20-40 of them a day without thinking about it. Sure, the market for legalized drugs will be a very different market from the illegal market we have now, but hardly more free for being the legalized form, hardly less of a creature of the laws.

Glen Tomkins @19:
“Cigarrettes existed for hundreds of years in hand-made, mostly consumer-made, form, without causing lung cancer or chronic bronchitis. Mass-made and mass-marketed after 1900, they soon became the leading cause of death.”

Though I agree with your animating idea, that mass-marketing has increased the lure and thus lethality of cigarettes, I find it difficult to countenance you clear implication that tobacco would not be a massive health hazard if it were free of the mass marketing and industrial production.

Please consider the average lifespan and state of medical care in the 19th century. For reference, the stethoscope was invented in 1816, and there were cholera epidemics in the US in 1832, 1849, and 1866.

At the time, people were not living long enough to die of lung cancer.

Heroin kills people randomly?

Not according to whether they take a lethal dose (factoring in anything else they’ve taken), then?

The actual medical qualities of heroin are pretty much irrelevent – to eliminate the illegal drug trade, you would have to eliminate the market model, which is ‘sell an illegal drug’. It’s not like there were traditional communities of heroin/pcp/meth users that were driven underground by a wave of prohibition. The business model came before the market.

So all drugs would have to be illegal, whatever their properties.

Given the coming state of the art in biochemistry, this might even have to include ones that don’t exist yet, and were specifically designed to be illegal.

So all drugs would have to be illegal, whatever their properties.

Isn’t the standard empirical justification for laws against drug use/sale/possession predicated on the fact that some substances cause people to behave abominably with alarming consistency, endangering to others as well as themselves?

I get that there’s a gradient of acceptability here, and I am willing to entertain a largely theoretical discussion about whether or not heroin is such a substance, but to take a clear case, I would not want to live in a society that legalized PCP or meth.

“At the time, people were not living long enough to die of lung cancer.”

That simply isn’t true. Earlier eras had shorter average life spans, often dramatically shorter, say in the 40-45 year range, not because old people died earlier than they do today, but because of the horrendous infant and childhood death rates. The high mortality years had a bimodal distribution then, now replaced by one that sees almost all of the mortality in the old age years.

The first year of life is still more perilous than any other until old age, but it does not have death on anywhere near the scale it used to have. And after the first year, immunizations for the childhood diseases have made those years among the safest. In the bad old days, between the especially bad first year, and the next five or six of horrendous losses to childhood infectious diseases, estimates of mortality for the first six years of life range up to 50%. Once having made it to age seven, the life expectancy of the survivors was much as it is now. Infectious diseases that we can now cure readily may have imposed a higher burden throughout life, but that was quite sporadic outside of the first six years of life, and except for the occasional plague.

Plenty of people made it to their seventies in the pre-antibiotic era, and cancer, including the high prevalence cancers we associate with old age, such as breast and colon and prostate, was among the leading causes of death. Pathology was quite well-established by the beginning of the 20th Century when the mass-produced cigarrette was introduced, and while some cancers have waxed or waned somewhat in relative prevalence since that time (stomach cancer way down, colon somewhat up), the one major discrepency between that era and ours is the near absence of lung cancer then. One school of thought in that era proposed that the lung was one of those organs (like the spleen) that was incapable of giving rise to primary cancers, but could only host metastases spread from elsewhere in the body. This school explained the rare adenocarcinoma found in the lung without any obvious primary elsewhere, as having arisen from some occult primary, a primary tumor not found because too small to have been noticed on autopsy. Today, adenocarcinoma, the rarest of the four histological types of lung cancer, is the only one not associated with smoking, and even today, finding adenocarcinoma in the lung is taken as sufficiently likely to represent metastasis rather than primary lung cancer, that it prompts a search for an occult primary.

Squamous, small cell and large cell lung cancer, the histologic types that make lung cancer one of the leading causes of death, would most certainly have been noticed by pre-manufactured-cigarette era pathologists, people most definitely smoked hand-rolled cigarettes for centuries prior to mass production, and people most certainly grew old enough in great enough numbers to have developed them if some cause other than smoking vast quantities of cigarettes could have caused these types of lung cancer. The conclusion is inescapable — only smoking cigarettes on a level only practicable with manufactured cigarettes can cause the vast bulk of lung cancer, all lung cancer except adeno.

rigel #21:
to countenance you clear implication that tobacco would not be a massive health hazard if it were free of the mass marketing and industrial production.
Something that never gets talked about in this is the fact that tobacco is not regulated as a food crop, in the US, as far as pesticide use, and residual presence, goes. Heaven knows how little regulation there is elsewhere.
I don’t know of any quick links to research stats on residual pesticide levels on commercial tobacco products, but my gut guess is the arc of tobacco-product-specific cancers follows the arc of massive pesticide saturation on the plants in the ground.
Tobacco is generally a heavily treated crop because it’s very susceptible to insect predation.
It may well be that many, if not most, modern, tobacco-linked, lung cancer victims were smoking hot pesticide without ever knowing it.