Why, Exactly?

I appreciate your observation that there is a lot of ridiculous hyperventilating on this issue. We desparately need to decriminalize the use of all currently illegal narcotics and move to a treatment based regime (most likely one that establishes the state as the sole provider of highly addictive drugs like heroine to addicts) for users. And we need to have realistic definitions for users, not counting people with preposterously small quantities as dealers. The hyperventilating and completely unrealistic public commentary on drug usage makes it more difficult to have mature and informed conversation on public policy. Though I will say that if America has a drinking problem it pales in comparison to those of a number of other developed countries.

The combination of a big job and limited resources always leads to this sort of justice-by-example. New York cops have been asked to stem the drug trade, but haven’t been provided with anything resembling the resources necessary to do so (for very good reasons).

To say this is a PR move on the part of the cops is accurate, but excessively cynical. By making a show of busting Hoffman’s dealers, the cops are trying to create the impression that the drug trade is riskier than it actually is – which is a legitimate goal of law enforcement (if we accept the premise that drugs ought to be illegal, which we don’t).

The SEC can’t come close to enforcing insider trading laws – even in the case of obvious violations – but they can bust Martha Stewart for some borderline behavior and send a message pour encourager les autres.

Prediction: Some prominent folks will get in trouble with the IRS in the first half of April this year. You heard it here first.

People who fight the drug war—they want a clear enemy and a victory, and these things don’t exist. But for a while, they can pretend.

an ouroboros of death-wish imagery

! (Speechless compliment)
–
It’s catharsis mm? Bad thing happened. Bad persons puneeshed. Bad thing all done.
Also maybe Hoffman is perceived as being an “us”. Cause of on the screen of “us”.
Bad persons from outside the screen made him dead. Enemies of “us” are not going to get away with that.
Also maybe the perception that heroin is coming from street dealers with maybe some ethnical kingpins in there at the top. Need to keep that illusion happening.
As opposed to the illegal drug industry and its multi-many-billions being the fully-owned purview of the same parasitic scum that are doing so much damage in other majorly important areas of the human endeavor.
That perceived otherness attacking us from outside and underneath, but now our defenders have defended us.
At the same time fulfilling their mandate to leave the big money alone.
Which is why drugs are illegal.
Because it makes them expensive.
Afghanistan world #1 source of opium.
Biggest crop ever last year.
After a decade of US military presence.
Pure coincidence.

an ouroboros: do you mean like Queens or Staten Island?

Also, the “feverish underground market” thing is ridonk, NYC has always had this.

I’d think it’s a pretty general phenomenon, no? Drug branding hardly seems shocking! (Though I guess it depends on the drug? I guess of the two drugs I’m familiar with, one generally had branding—at least in its better quality versions—and the other didn’t, or if it did, I wasn’t noticing.)

Anyway, “Government Shutdown” is really great. It doesn’t quite fit, but you could always listen to Clampdown?

“an ouroboros: do you mean like Queens or Staten Island?”

And with that, my quota for today is filled. I can rest easy — not slacking off — hearing and laughing at bad puns is dirty work, but somebody’s got to do it.

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist[1] drug developed by Sankyo in the 1960s.[2][3] Naloxone is a drug used to counter the effects of opiate overdose, for example heroin or morphine overdose.

Should be available over the counter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naloxone

I will now return to cursing the darkness.

Maine’s governor opposes making Naloxone available for the usual crazy reasons: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/12/tea_party_governor_paul_lepage_to_reject_bill_increasing_access_to_lifesaving_drug/

Hoffmann possibly fell victim to a fairly common problem; overestimating his tolerance for the drug after a long period of abstinence.

Thanks, Belle!

madness

@Parse #7 posts for me. The motivation here is not hard to discern, and is only confusing if you believe that police activity is generally proportioned to criminal acts at random, weighted by severity.

To reverse-engineer Stalin’s logic, a million heroin deaths is a statistic, but one is a tragedy. The only other time such deaths get in the paper are when there is a sudden spate of them because the dealer decided rat poison would be a good thing to cut his smack with, and the NYC cops, to their credit, do seem to be getting better about various sorts of “Don’t eat the brown acid” messaging.

But in Hoffman’s case, his deaths is not just the end point of some crime having committed, it is unusually salient bit of evidence about How The War On Drugs Is Going. If, as would otherwise be likely, the dealer doesn’t get caught, it would be far more compelling bit of conversational fodder than all the statistics in the world. So any institution committed to said WoD has to go especially hard after the salient cases, because in addition to the usual dictates of putting perps in the pokey, in cases like this one they are trying to keep the Overton Window nailed shut.

Belle Waring,

Apologies if you’ve already done this. But could you write a bit about the differences regarding drug policies in your new home versus America?

I’m with you on decriminalizing all of it. But it’s probably going to require international decriminalization in order to be really effective, though it will still be a massive improvement regardless.

If it’s done piecemeal, I’m guessing the site of tragedy will just move. Whack a mole, I think they sometimes call it. Which also ties into things like labor and environmental reforms, regs, etc. etc. Needs to be geoholistic, etc.

(Did I just invent a word?)

One big advantage of doing big, positive reforms in America is that they tend to positively influence the rest of the world. Our curse is that our negatives do as well. And we seem to produce more negatives.

Matt,

Basically, and obviously, the world is really small these days. In order to have effective reform, it really needs an internationalist approach. Otherwise, you just move the scene of tragedy, exploitation and oppression. For instance, America made some small advances in workplace protections — which seem to be slipping away — and American capitalists just shipped jobs, exploitation and oppression to new sites. Instead of paying obscenely rotten wages here, in dangerous working conditions, they moved that to places like China and Foxconn.

Which tells me in no uncertain terms they’d do it here if they could get away with it.

So, anyway, we need to decriminalize all drugs and, as you mention, legalize most, but we also have to work on broadening that to include the rest of the world. We don’t really want to create new opportunities for organize crime in different locations. We want to kill those opportunities worldwide, to the degree possible.

A living wage here and one all across the globe. That would prevent that exportation of misery elsewhere. I think the same thing applies to drug laws. We need to get on the same humanitarian page, etc.

First, I’m sorry for Hoffman and especially for his kids, and I think Belle’s post is spot-on about the police reaction (and her usual lovely writing).

Second – background – I have spent 30 years dealing with heroin in the family, including the death of a child. But I also spent a decade working in drug law enforcement and drug policy, including several years where I was a member of a drug policy group which brought together treatment providers, drug experts, health and law enforcement.

Drug policy discussions that do not first ask “what drug?” and then go on to ask a lot of questions about how it is used and supplied, and what its effects are are simply confused. Cannabis is not heroin, and heroin is not meth. “Legalise” cannabis? Probably no more problem that you already have, and much less effort/aggro. Just remember that because something is legal does not mean there is no need for law enforcement (think of tobacco or alcohol). This seems – after a few wasted decades – to be getting through to politicians in some US states. Here in Australia most police forces largely gave up on street-level cannabis years ago – arrests for cannabis possession are still quite common, but they are mostly adjuncts to other behaviour the cops don’t like.

Ecstasy? Probably much the same.

Heroin. One sobering piece of research showed that, pretty much regardless of treatment regime and policy approach, one in four people who try heroin will become heavy users and, after 15 years, 40% of heavy users will be dead, 40% in some long-term maintenance arrangement (usually methadone) and 20% recovered. We have treatments for overdoses (like Naloxone), but no effective treatment for the addiction itself.

So supply control makes sense – IF it can be done. Here in Australia supply control measures worked to reduce heroin use/deaths by two-thirds in ten years (how they worked is a complicated story, and not the usual police pap). But Australia is not the US. If supply control is not feasible, then some version of palliative care until the current wave burns out/dies off may be the best you can do. In short, there is no easy answer, and no sensible debate at any high level of generality.

http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/committee/371/ille/presentation/alexender-e.htm

My hope is that this quick survey of the illusory scientific support for the conventional belief that heroin and cocaine cause addiction can help to show why society should turn away from this unsupported belief. Understanding that there may not be any inherent addictive power in drugs could help to turn us toward a broader, more efficacious formulation of the causes of addiction in our time, and of the huge, dismal saga of tragedy that it produces.

I have a fresco of the Falling Flowers in the corridor of my memory palace that leads to the Gymnasium of Exemplary Courageous Imperatives. Where I keep the brave things I’ve seen.
Korea, the whole one, the one without the US-rigged lobotomy division through its middle, has a really to me wonderful color sense as part of the cultural aesthetic.
The women were wearing best robes of aristocratic fineness. People saw them falling, and remembered.
–
One gets that hesitation. You know, the kids. Let em find out for themselves. One balks. But hey I’ve been in this for decades.
I did relatively serious jail time for weed*, been shoved around a little for other things too. Spent a lot of thought hours on it.
It is childish and nearly has to be intentionally naive to keep insisting the blockage to legality is puritanical resistance and lack of moral common sense.
It’s like the feel-good stories around the WBush presidency. What a mistake!
It was all them dummies in the hinterlands, so essentially a mistake of stupid. As opposed to an intentional shuck and jive media-driven scam to get a major sock puppet in the forefront of planned skulduggery. To take the blame.
If it’s necessary for your comfort levels to believe it so, please continue.
But if you want the truth you’re going to have to confront some pretty counter-consensus discomfiting facts.
The illegal drug industry’s gross in the US is around 40 billion annually, worldwide ten times that.
The oil bidness is around 170 (taxed, traceable) billion. Or about half of the illegal drug industry’s (untaxed, untraced) annual take.
Now just let’s think about how easy it is to push them petro-cowboys around shall we?

Boston.com:
Annual worldwide illegal drug sales are greater than the gross domestic product of 88 percent of the countries in the world, the UN said yesterday.
”This is not a small enemy against which we struggle. It is a monster,” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an annual report.

That power is what is in the way of legalization. Not the danger-fearing brainwashed simpletons of Anytown USA.
Legalize and the profits disappear. Unless like in the weed campaign you can rig it so the price stays up as it moves into quasi-legal acceptance. But you won’t slip powder drugs in through the transition zones of “medical” dispensaries.
Legalization would get rid of almost all the problems associated with hard drug use except the actual medical dangers, so it makes huge sense from a humane standpoint.
But the guys running the business aren’t humanitarians, they’re ruthless gangsters with enormous financial and political weight. The fantasy includes a topography of control that has the corruption stopping at the southern borders of the US. Ridiculous.
Talking about drugs and drug laws as a problem of education and common sense, while leaving out the controlling strength of the (tax free, untraceable) money and where it goes, and who it’s going to, is a little, not to be rude, wankerish.

*cultivation and possession for sale, also possession for sale of schedule 1 mushrooms – 5 years state pen. suspended, 9 months county jail time, with 4 1/2 mos. served, parole release, 3 yrs probation.

@30:

If the point is to try to tie a particular dealer to a particular person’s overdose death for purposes of criminal prosecution — beyond a reasonable doubt, etc. — a really high level of detail about that person’s activity leading up to the overdose is required. If you can’t account for the person’s activity for a couple of days, you can’t say who else they might have been dealing with, and the case melts down.

That homeless dude always went to the same shelter when it got too cold, lived outside the same bodega otherwise, and always bought Get Paid brand heroin from his favorite dealer, whom he trusted.

It is true that people living on the street with substance abuse problems have regular habits and patterns. The difficulty is establishing what they are. If you want to know where I was this morning, you can ask my spouse (who can verify where I was until about 8) and the people at my office (likewise after 8:30), and it’s very easy to find those witnesses. There may be a coffee cart vendor who frequently notices the same homeless dude every day at about the same time, but is that person (if he/she can be found) really going to be able to testify to particular dates and times? And even if so, that would account for only a short period of time.

Also, homeless people do too have phones! Who all buy those prepaid phones at the bodega?

True, some homeless people have mobile phones. (That’s more common with people living in hotel rooms or their car than with people living on the street with substance abuse problems, but even so.) But suppose you find a prepaid mobile phone with an overdose victim. It’s impossible to know how long the person had it, where it came from, who else may have used it, etc. My phone is tied to my credit card and I’ve got a bunch of pictures of my kids on it.

“[First of all, this lament is decidedly at odds with the immediately preceding claim that Latin American cartels would be unaffected by legalization.] ”

It’s not because the preceding claim is imagining a hypothetical where the cartels drug business dissapears, in those circumstances (from what I know) they have their fingers in enough pies that it’s not really going to make a *significant* difference. The next part is saying what I assume would happen if we simply legalised the drug trade, the cartels (in some form) would probably still be heavily involved. (And the problems associated with normalising drugs at the international level *might* cut back on some of the problems associated with the cartels but it’s still going to have dometic reprecussions in the countries producing drugs. Look at the impact drugs have had in Mexican border cities on smuggling routes. Im just saying I think there will be some consequences in drug producing countries, so not :

“There would literally be NO bad external problems that would arise as a result of decriminalization”

and the benefits might be less than hoped for.)

“The reason non-criminals can’t compete in the market now is no non-criminals exist in the market. And why are criminals so interested?”

Maybe. But you’re also talking about countries with significant corruption and weak institutions so if we legalise drugs at every level, who gets the right to produce and supply coke from, say, Colombia ? Those already heavily involved in the process, would be my guess. (In the short/medium term anyway) Perhaps there’s some way of designing an international drug trading regime that opens it up to legitimate competition, where those already involved in supplying drugs arent heavily involved, but Im sceptical.

” And I really have to say I think it would come as a big surprise to the Mexican government that legalization of all drugs in the US wouldn’t have any impact on corruption there, or journalists being gruesomely murdered, or entire federal agencies going systematically rogue. You should let them know.”

What impact it would have is an open question. I dont think it’s a panacea is all. I think Mexico’s problems go deeper. Again I’m not against rethinking large aspects of ‘the war on drugs’, I just dont think a blanket legalisation is the way to go. And my impression is that even among the political elites in Latin America, who want to rethink it, they arent pushing full legalisation (My preference would be to see how different programs work in different countries, and then come up with ideas from there)

“Also, many of the vulnerable African-American children you’re talking about already have fabulous, amazing access to hard drugs.”

Well maybe, but these things cluster in specific communities afaics. I dont think every working class urban community neccessarily live with the consequences of drug use in the same way. (At least in Ireland during the influx of Heroin in the 80s the social problems clustered in certain areas, specific estates in Dublin etc) So greater access to drugs means greater access to drugs, for all classes races etc Maybe it wouldnt have a significant impact in working class areas, but again we dont know.

“The difference would be not sending the people to jail in a way that systematically fucks up the rest of their entire lives. You can’t possibly sit here with a straight face and look at the percentage of young black men in jail or prison for non-violent drug offenses and tell me wouldn’t make any difference if the things for which they were being sent to jail were no longer crimes. You don’t even believe that a bit.”

Well (with the caveat Im not American so speaking from ignorance) I agree, ideally. But I also dont see the problem with attacking that issue specifically, rethink US drug laws on their own without legalising drugs. Would that not be a more realistic approach (is there any chance of full scale legalisation) ?
I do agree with you on this part, if this was a choice on the table (legalise drugs and by extension stop locking people up for drug offences) I dont know what my position would be. But you will still have all the problems associated with a punitive, dysfunctional justice system (ie will people not just be locked up for drug related offences – as they are for drink related – robbing for drugs , fighting when on Meth, driving when stoned etc If we accept that drug use is going to increase with legalistion then these crimes are also going to increase. So why not approach it though reforming the justic system?)

“Yes, I am. I assure you this is not because of my lack of experience with drug addicts, alcoholics, religious teetotallers, drug dealers, or crazy DEA agents. I have experience with all such manner of people.”

Sure, but it’s still a personal experience rather than a generalisable one. A lot of people experience these circumstances and come away with different conclusion.
I’m not against the idea in principal, I’m just a little sceptical of the benefits, and would worry about the consequences. If it evolved in that direction over time then I wouldnt mind.
I also dont know how it works in practice (you create large federal agencies involved in making sure drugs meet national standards, prices will fall significantly, you get increased use and increased addiction (potentially), and still have a lot of the other problems associated with the WOD(employers drug testing etc), you probably introduce specific drugs into communties where they arent prevelant and if you dont invest properly in treatment (ie have a system in place beforehand) you have an increase in societal and individual problems with no remedy. Yes you cut down on locking people up for non violent crimes, but a lot of countries do that short of legalisation)

I guess this as good a time as any to announce that I’m getting a bit weary of my old pseudonym, at least as far as this blog this blog is concerned. I think that henceforth, in keeping with the canine theme, I will use the name of a dog breed, followed by the name of a dog disease, which readers will be free to pronounce according to their preference. assuming there are no objections; otherwise speak now or forever hold your pies.

Belle – I agree with you here and am not disputing it. I know the stats re black males being overrepresented in jail for drugs crimes while statistically not doing drugs more often than whites, sentencing discrepencies between white and black etc
(Now Im going to speak from great ignorance, so forgive me.) I just think any legalisation policy would still hit the poorest/most marginalised most. I still think there would be reasons found to lock up black men, if that’s what was felt was needed to be done. I would be sceptical that investment would be made in treatment, or after prison help, or jobs programs in poor and poor black neighbourhoods. I still think employers would exclude people from work with random drug testing. And I still think systemic racism in the US would exist, just without the war on drugs.
If Obama came out tomorrow with an AMAZING plan to end the war on drugs that tied all of this together, breaking up the cartels, disbanding the drug enforcement agencies, reforming the justice system, investing in working class areas, creating some set in stone government monopoly to import and sell drugs (with no possibility of the market being captured by private business interests) then I’d (personally) certainly consider it. But Im guessing what would happen instead would be the equivalent of 90s economic shock therapy except with meth. I would guess it’d be awful.

I still think all the other things need to be done first, personally, but I agree completely that locking people up for drug offenses is stupid, and should be ended. (my impression reading around is that this is actually beginning to happen in the US ? that some police departments have accepted the WOD was a failure and so are concentrating less on mass drug arrests and going after ‘violent networks’? that prisons are proving unaffordable and so there’s a shift to other forms of punishment ?)
Anyway I’m speaking more generally here, as not being from the US I’m loath to speak to the specifics on it.

So I probably agree with you on most things (and I’d decriminalise pretty much everything at the street level, using or dealing) but just not full bore legalisation, and Id still going after those importing(not through military intervention or crop eradication) and/or dealing large quantities and try cut back on the supply of drugs coming into the country. I don’t think any of this is going to work to any great effect – these things appear to run cyclically beyond any meaningful human control – and I don’t think this is a great idea or particularly coherent, but that’s where I am. I just think the consequences of and political economy that would build up around full scale legalisation are too unknowable at the minute, and would probably be worse than other half measures.

Matt 43 at 5:15 am-
Bad research, should have gone straight to wikipedia but… I didn’t.
The real data was:
Annual worldwide illegal drug sales are greater than the gross domestic product of 88 percent of the countries in the world, the UN said yesterday.
”This is not a small enemy against which we struggle. It is a monster,” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an annual report.

So the estimates of int’l drug trade annual income are more in line (except for taxation and accountability!) with more like only one major oil company, say oh, BP frinstance.
With its little almost 400 billion piece of that pie.
Pretty easy pushing them around hmm? Specially after that nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, right?
Your secondary argument, from the actual scheduling lists of actual schedule 1 drugs, is pretty straight-up logical fallacy.
Because there are non-corruption-produced restrictions on drug legality, codified by moral ninnies and the scientifically uninformed, the major resistance to legalization can’t be coming from the corrupt assholes who are making major bank off illegalness.
This is fallacious logic.
No doubt there are large numbers of earnest and serious objections to legalization, or even drug use itself, from decent moral convinced and concerned people. Some of whom have legislative power.
No doubt as well there are lots of individuals in the DEA and ICE and other agencies who are convinced of their moral imperative, and act from conscience and a mandate to make things less bad. As opposed to being played as thug enforcement agents, or just trying to make some bank on their own.
So that means… what? As far as my point, which was pretty clearly I thought stated.
Maybe not.
We’re not talking about soldiers in the field or even the consensus will of the public, we’re talking about the same decision-making power that is so brilliantly at work in regulation of criminality in other areas of concern, like the financial industry for example.
If you’re not seeing corruption there then you’re not looking very hard.
Even Belle, even Ronan, appear to be working with the received media-impression that there’s a massive “monster” (UN guy’s term) operating in the drug biz, but it’s living South of the Border.
Up here in the US it’s all mom and pop dealers with actual nasty cartels having only franchise presence, while still having their HQ’s in el Sur.
Poor vulnerable American society just can’t protect itself from those greasy vile narcotraficantes.
It’s a racist p.o.v. and it’s garbage.
The logical extension is a cartoonish image where that massive corrupt thing is only down there, not up here, not in the US. Where the dollars are.
That is naive, in my opinion, no matter how out-moneyed Big Drugs are by Big Oil.

Just a note: the UN (and most other) estimates of drug profits are pure bs. Take the street prices of all the drugs, multiply by estimates of amounts used and – hey presto – huge sum. Never mind that reported street prices are an inaccurate measure of actual money changing hands, that most of the money goes around in small circles at the bottom level of dealing, that there is no Microsoft, Pfizer or Shell of drugs aggregating money at the top, that a large fraction of the total is marijuana which is often grown, traded for favours or given away (so no money involved at all) and so on.

Drug-selling is not some cold corporate process, it’s a crazy quilt of opportunists, criminals and scam artists, leavened with a fair number of entrepreneurs. It’s amazingly inefficient (leakage of 50% is not uncommon) The War on Drugs is like having a war on bread.

I just think any legalisation policy would still hit the poorest/most marginalised most. I still think there would be reasons found to lock up black men, if that’s what was felt was needed to be done.

This is a bit backwards, actually. It’s not as if there’s it’s a plan to incarcerate as many black youth as possible, and then the ‘war on drugs’ is marshaled in to meet this goal. So that if you got rid of the war on drugs, the cops would just rely on some other set of laws to incarcerate as many black youth as possible. This effectively is what you’re saying, I think.

But it’s rather that there’s a set of insane laws, collectively the ‘war on drugs’, which laws are partially motivated by racial and other kinds of paranoia, and then other preexisting racist tendencies feed into the implementation of these laws, so that the net effect of the laws is hugely racially disproportionate. Getting rid of the war on drugs obviously won’t solve the problems of racism or poverty, but it will take away the overriding reason so many black people end up in jail. So, a lot fewer black people will end up in jail.

As an analogy, consider the argument people advance against gun laws: if you take away guns, people will just use knives or baseball bats or cricket bats or voodoo dolls to kill people. But, it’s just way harder to kill if you don’t have a gun. Similar points apply here.

“Even Belle, even Ronan, appear to be working with the received media-impression that there’s a massive “monster” (UN guy’s term) operating in the drug biz, but it’s living South of the Border.”

I love you roy, I do. I think you have a lovely writing style and seem an all round decent guy. But there really is no Southern border for me, so yes and no to this.

My opposition to legalising drugs (which at one stage was an ambivalent support), is based around the small stories (probably apocryphal) that I heard and read about the heroin ‘epidemic’ that spread through certain Dublin estates in the late 70s/80s. About mothers getting up at 6 in the morning to mop up sick and blood in the hallways of the flats before stepping over junkies to bring their kids to school. About a State unwilling/or unable to cope with the situation, which led parents to organise into vigilante groups and kick dealers (and addicts, some in the process of dying, a lot in the early stages of AIDs) out of estates.
A lot of this has become myth, and a lot might be irrelevant to the current drug debate, but it still influences my thinking, and working class communities (whether in the projects in the US or council estates in Ireland) *do not* poll well on legalising hard drugs, and I know these stories exist in all of these communities.
So I think systems, programs and norms need to be in place before we do anything drastic. And I think communities which will potentially be decimated need to be protected first. And I think, without doubt, they’ll be hardest hit. (This is an academic blog so I’m open to dispute on this)
The international aspects, the transnational criminal gangs, are a different issue, and need to be tackled with different methods. *They do* have domestic attributes – whether cities on smuggling routes, or in growing areas, or areas controlled by criminal gangs partly/largely funded by drugs – but they need a solution that ties all of this together, and again the problems go deeper than simply the results of profits made from smuggling drugs.
So there is no looming monster for me, just a series of little monsters destroying people in different places simultaneously, which builds a bigger picture of something out there, defeatable. But it doesn’t exist, and it can’t be beaten. To my mind (Sorry about the melodrama at the end!)

I recall reading that pot growers in N Cal want pot kept illegal to keep prices up, although, it doesn’t look like they’re incredibly successful with that. And I know that there’s a notoriously powerful prison-industrial complex here. But I get the impression that Roy is extrapolating too much from these sorts of things, since as Belle says, most illegal drugs are produced elsewhere. American money is flowing to other countries to purchase drugs, and it looks like it’s in other countries that the big money is made. And American gangsters, big and small, do tend to end up in jail here. It really is so that a lot of stupid policies are driven by sincere puritanism here.

Dwight Trible wasn’t able to make it out of Ohio for the gig tonight, so I’m back home diddling on the internet.

Another example is all the cracking down on sellers of prescription opiates. Pain sufferers hate this, the pharmaceutical companies hate it, but it continues.

Peter T-
Far be it from me now to do any stat research and put it up here as fact.
But speaking of b.s. you could check into some of the journalism around money-laundering of drug profits? The amounts being moved? As aggregated singular mass belonging to specific particular owners? Just the amounts that have been discovered and reported on?
As opposed to a windblown handful of discarded lottery tickets.
–
Ronan-
What I was fingering there is the use of “cartels” as a concretizing image for the top-end of the problem.
I am in complete agreement with you about the immediate human difficulties of wide-open drug access in the amoral consumerist climate of contemporary Western Civ.
I’m not arguing for or against legalization. Just trying to articulate the outline of the enemy of sane attitude.
The DEA/CIA complicity in the 80’s crack epidemic as opposed to freedom-to-intoxicate for enlightened enthusiasts. With the feds there as servants of something even more heinous than themselves.
Turning a bunch of amoral hedonists loose on the feel-good pharmacopia is got to work out bad in the short run. And be massively neo-Darwinian in the long run.
Try this:
It’s a truth-carrying cliche now that alcohol prohibition in the US gave an economic foundation to organized crime syndicates.
So, lesson learned, by the public, that prohibition didn’t work.
By the gangsters that prohibition works real well.

Also John Sayles Brother From Another Planet.

Belle Waring,

Speaking of Burma. Its treatments of miners has to rate among the worst of any workers (or anyone) in the world. The word “evil” is sometimes overused, but I see no better description for the atrocities in that country:

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2001/nov/11/features.magazine37

Between hell and the Stone of Heaven

More than a million miners desperately excavate the bedrock of a remote valley hidden in the shadows of the Himalayas. They are in search of just one thing – jadeite, the most valuable gemstone in the world. But with wages paid in pure heroin and HIV rampant, the miners are paying an even higher price. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark travel to the death camps of Burma

An update, of sorts:

Workers, lured by the prospect of a fortune in mining, are exposed daily to harsh and unsafe conditions. Disappearances and deaths are common and serve as a warning to those thinking of stealing. For most, the work becomes sufficiently unbearable that they take solace in the heroin-shooting galleries that exists alongside the mining district.

For less than the price of a beer, an injectionist administers the drug directly into the vein of a miner, delivering as many as 800 separate injections from the same dirty needle. Large quantities of the drug are provided by the mine owners, who pay their addicted workers with a daily fix.

An estimated 500,000 miners are paid this way, some consuming as much as 10 grams of pure heroin every day. On top of the unsanitary injections, workers also routinely have unsafe sex with prostitutes, creating an HIV pandemic in the region and giving Myanmar the highest rate of HIV infection among drug users in the world — nine out of 10 addicted workers are HIV positive.

I MEANT ; )