R.P. Barr

Auditing the Drug Laws

As if we needed more proof of the decline of American journalism, AP presented an article this week entitled, “AP IMPACT: US drug war has met none of its goals” by Martha Mendoza in Mexico City. [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100514/ap_on_re_us/failed_drug_war_6#mwpphu-container] I can only hope that Ms Mendoza wrote it to please someone in blood-soaked Mexico. 

 The article itself lacks focus and lumps the cost of treating drug users in with the cost of enforcing drug laws as if legalization would eliminate the need for medical treatment by drug abusers.

 There is also the weird implication that criminal laws should have some sort of sunset provision.  If enforcement has not achieved total compliance within a given time frame, then the law should be scrapped as unworkable.  Have the laws against murder, rape, and drunk driving eliminated those practices?  No, then lets make them all legal and end this wasteful business with courts and prisons.

If tobacco and alcohol were developed today, they would be illegal because of the harm they do.  However, because those evil substances are ingrained into  society, they cannot be banned.  (No one is taking away my beer!) 

Marijuana is arguably on a par with tobacco and alcohol as far as what it does to the body.  Some see that as an argument for legalization, I see it as an argument against.  Some point to the Dutch experiment.  They haven’t looked closely enough.  The pot cafes are centers for illegal activity, selling hard drugs under the counter, for instance.  California’s legalization of  medical marijuana has also seen abuses from day one.

 Laws are not written in order to put people in jail.  They are written to regulate society and keep harmful activities to a manageable minimum.  There is always a cost.  My legal glass of wine at dinner is at the expense of alcoholics who have ruined their lives.  Is my relaxation worth the thousands who die in drunk driving accidents every year?  Is another man’s incarceration worth the lives that are preserved?  Do we need another class of intoxicants?

It's true the drug laws are not efficiently administered.  Treatment programs have never been adequate.  However, like child molestation by priests, poor official response does not mean that the rule should be abolished.  We just have to do a better job.

UK not OK

It was a bad week for the image of British tourists.

 On the Greek island of Crete, Stuart Feltham, 23, from Swindon had spent the evening drinking.  [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8189296.stm]

Then, in a nightclub, he thought that that the local women would be impressed by the sight of his penis.   He reportedly waved it about and pursued a 26-year-old student named Maria Fanoudaki, fondling her breasts among other unwanted activities.  Ms Fanoudaki repeatedly asked him to leave her alone.  When he didn’t, she poured her drink of Sambouka on his rude display.  At that point, she claims to have fled the encounter.  The police say that before leaving, she also set fire to the licorice-flavored beverage.  Sambuca is 42% alcohol and should ignite easily.  Whatever the immediate cause, Feltham suffered a variety of burns on his chest and below.  While the trial still progresses, Ms Fanoudaki has already become a folk hero to the tourist-weary Greeks.

 Well, you say, that’s just one case.  I refer you to news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8185159.stm which tells how the mayor of Riga, Latvia has said that UK tourists are no longer welcome in his city.  Low cost airfares and accomodations have apparently made the Latvian capitol a destination for stag parties, which according to British tradition involve raising attendees blood alcohol level as high as possible and then behaving as boorishly as imagination permits.  In Riga, this mean urinating on the Freedom Monument in the city center. Mayor Nils Usakovs cited this practice by UK tourists to Latvian magazine Rigas Laiks, "Let's not be politically correct - unfortunately, this is their speciality." 

I wish that I could add an anecdote from my own travels about British tourists, but the closest I can recall is a planeload of Irish football (soccer) fans who arrived in Tallinn when I was there.  A bunch of them stayed in my hotel, where they were loud and inconsiderate at all hours, and generally spoiled whatever good feelings I previously had toward the Irish.

 

What I do remember about the Brits that I met was that their jokes were often made at the expense of other nationalities to a degree that I did not hear from other groups.

 When various people in Eastern Europe told me about good experiences they had had with U.S. tourists.  I kept thinking that it was because they hadn’t met enough of us yet.  However, with more thought, I have realized that in the U.S. we have had more than a generation of emphasis on respecting other ethnicities.  In addition, with our own large land mass and oceans on two sides, the jackasses in our society are less likely to travel abroad than those of the British Isles.  Our chauvinists compensate by giving immigrants and minorities a hard time.

 In any event, I see a disturbing trend.  Transportation technology makes the mixing of nationalities easier than at any previous time. This should lead to more respect as groups previously kept apart can now get to know each other.  However, increasing population puts us all in competition with other groups for diminishing resources.  Global rivalry may not in the forefront of hard drinking, stag-party thinking, but it underlies our current reality, and leads to envy by those with little or contempt by those with plenty. 

 Most people can manage to be obnoxious without publicly exposing their private parts.  However it is expressed, I anticipate more low level and high level conflicts in the future.

Legalize pot? What are you smoking?

Tax revenues are down. Nobody wants to see their taxes raised. Let’s tax the potheads and junkies. They can’t sustain a thought, much less a political campaign. Or so the thinking goes. 

There are several arguments that the legalization crowd puts forward: 

1. The war on drugs is a failure. 

What war on drugs? The only serious thing about this multi-generational “war” is the body count. A war is not run by local and state agencies, or piecemeal by national agencies. A war requires a coordinated national strategy with clear objectives, but most of all, a war demands resources. Critics complain that a lot of money has been wasted on ineffective enforcement. It’s like trying to protect a town from a rising river with Lego bricks. You can work very hard and spend a lot, but not much will happen. On the other hand, if you bring in bulldozers and truckloads of sandbags, you might save the town. The United States has not brought out the bulldozers and sandbags. If we spent on the drug campaign a fraction of what we’ve spent in Iraq, and did it through a single, unified command, we would have crushed drug trafficking long ago. 

2. If drugs are legalized, the criminals will go away. 

Did you see the Godfather movies? Especially Godfather II about the early days? Do you remember the scene when Prohibition ended and the family sat around the table with college catalogues to find new careers? No? It didn’t happen. 

Neither did criminals walk away from alcohol. Moonshine is still being made and sold. Legally made alcohol is still being stolen and sold to evade taxation. When I went to college in South Carolina, alcohol could not be sold after sundown. There was at least one person I knew of in my little hamlet who sold liquor and beer out of his garage every night.  

And for whom will the drugs be legal? In my state, alcohol cannot be purchased by people under 21 or tobacco by anyone under 18. Will marijuana be allowed for ten year-olds? No? Then the criminals are still in business. 

Also, druggies have a core belief that the stuff sold legally is not as potent as the stuff on the streets. As soon as it becomes legal, there will be moves to take out the carcinogens, and curb abuse, etc. If the user has to buy from a state store, he knows that his name will go into a database somewhere—it doesn’t matter what officials say. They’re going to get your picture from hidden cameras in the stores and know who you are. 

A few years ago, someone in New York City began selling fentanyl, a synthetic heroin-like drug, to junkies. The problem is that fenanyl is 100 times more powerful than heroin, and overdosing is 100 times more likely. People died. The city launched a campaign to warn addicts about this poison in their midst. What happened? The result was an increased demand for fentanyl. Junkies believed that the victims who died were careless and didn’t know how to handle the stuff, but “that wouldn’t happen to me.” Besides, “a hundred times more potent?” Man, what a high that must be! 

3. Let the states regulate it. 

Right now we only have national borders to worry about. If one state legalizes a drug and another doesn’t, the trucks are going to start rolling. The mafia already makes money transporting cigarettes from North Carolina, where taxes are low, to New York—and they’re not the only ones. Al-Qaeda has supported their activities with U.S. tobacco smuggling as well.  State borders are too porous for the states to regulate drugs independently.

4. The prisons are overcrowded with drug criminals. 

Prison is an occupational hazard for people who engage in criminal activities. I have little sympathy for people who roll the dice and lose. There do need to be alternatives to the current system that offers such incredible rewards for risky enterprise. 

I say that we should go after the users. They don’t have the enormous profit incentives to blind them. And, take courts out of the mix. Drug addiction and use is a medical problem. It is also contagious in the sense that if there is one user in the community, he will convert others. We set up quarantine camps. The studies I’ve read say that it takes 24 months to properly cleanse a body of narcotics. Using that as a baseline, anyone who tests positive for an illegal substance will be immediately shipped to a quarantine camp for 24 months of weekly tests that show no drugs in the system. Any positive test results will start the clock over. The camps will provide counseling, academic and vocational education, and gainful employment. If the camps can take 20 – 30% of users off the street at all times, drug use and trafficking will drop and keep dropping because many (maybe most) of the camp alumni will not become users when they are released. The program will not be cheap, but the reduction in losses to crime and in crime prevention should offset it. 

5. Marijuana is safer than alcohol. 

If alcohol and tobacco were new products, they would never get approval. We are stuck with them due to centuries of practice. That said, I support the use of marijuana for medical purposes. And for people dying and in chronic pain, whatever helps, let them do it. 

But, I have known people whose long term use of recreational drugs, pot and who knows what else, have left them barely coherent. And, the carninogens in marijuana rival those in tobacco. Why would we want to expand those effects through legalization?  Aren't medical costs in this country high enough?

5. What about other drugs? 

I do not believe that anything that intoxicates a person should automatically be banned—or approved. There is debate now about salvia divinorum, a plant that has hallucinogenic properties. Other than making users behave stupidly, I have not seen any studies that show adverse long term effects or links to disease. Leave it alone until the science is in. 

Meanwhile, sex is risky on so many different levels. Fried foods, and salty foods, and corn syrup, and caffeine, and on and on-- There are already lots of legal products that make a body feel better, but may wind up killing it. We’ve got enough of these already.

Peanut butter on the brain

Listening to tonight on NPR’s All Thing Considered, I heard a report about the growing salmonella/peanut butter problem, and Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT) suggested that food regulation should be taken out of the Food and Drug Administration and put into a new agency.  Why do the news people always go to politicians for thoughts on government?  Politicians know squat about governance.

To understand why things go wrong, simply look at the growth--or lack thereof—of regulatory agencies over the past two (or four) decades and compare that to the growth of the businesses they regulate.

Consultants and geeks like to think automation solves all problems. Computers are wonderful tools, but no computer ever opened a can of peanut butter, or put the cuffs on a bad guy.

If an agency does not have a sufficient number of trained, motivated people, it’s work will be inadequate.  Period.

There is also the matter of better trained managers.  I’m not talking about those temporary workers who arrive at the top, and leave before they know what it is that their agencies actually do.  Professional government managers are promoted primarily for their navigation skills in the halls of bureaucracy.  A surprising number of them are also good managers, but that’s mostly serendipitous.  The system is not geared to training people how to manage people.

We don’t need new agencies, although we could reduce some of the duplication that already exists.  We need agencies that are mission directed and properly funded.

When money is spent, it will go to sexy new programs and not to the old workhorses that have been keeping us safe for generations.  And as the economy gets worse, more things are going to go wrong.  Bet on it.

Fuel for war

Back in the 1970’s someone figured out that World War II could not be fought again because the world did not have enough oil to fuel it. Those convoys of ships, the skyfuls of aircraft, the massed tank battles, the endless lines of trucks—we just couldn’t produce enough oil to do all of that again.

Shell Oil strategist Jeremy Bentham projects that global oil demand will double by 2050 as the population increases by 50%, but “readily accessible” supplies will plateau between 2015 and 2020 [http://www.shell.com/home/content/envirosoc-en/energy_challenge/the_challenge_000407.html]. Bentham present two possible scenarios. I’m going to propose another.
We have already seen one war over control of oil supplies and how well that worked. Russia is using oil to bludgeon the other former Soviet states and to blackmail Europe. Venezuela is using oil and oil revenues to realign loyalties among South American states. Nigeria has had mini-revolutions over distribution of oil income. As they say, desperate times call for stupid policies and there will be more blood shed over oil.

The high price of oil, however, will raise the ante for U.S. intervention—assuming we extricate ouselves from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2050. A civilian Hummer without heavy armor or weapons systems gets about 15 miles to the gallon. The military version may well be in the single digits. The military is experimenting with composite bodies and hybrid engines for their 120,000 humvees, but don’t expect any revolutionary savings. Tanks and other heavily armored vehicles get below 5 mpg—the Abrams tank gets 1 mpg. Helicopters and jet aircraft are much bigger gas guzzlers. The B-52 bomber burns 3,334 gallons per hour, and you don’t want to know about aircraft carriers. The military estimates that the fuel cost for each service member in Iraq is $88 a day.

In those old, energy-inefficient times of the 1940’s, in that war we couldn’t afford to fight today, the average fuel consumption per soldier or marine was 1.67 gallons per day as we leap-frogged up the islands of the Pacific, and rolled across North Africa and Europe. Today, according to the Pentagon, within the confines of Iraq with all of our smart technology, the average is 27.3 gallons. As energy becomes more scarce, our future ability to launch and sustain a war will be curtailed.

The price of oil, meanwhile has contributed to a global food shortage. There’s the cost of transportation, of course. By allowing family farms to fail and developers to gobble up farmland, we have created a situation in the U.S. in which nearly everything we eat travels hundreds--and more likely--thousands of miles to reach out tables. The use of corn for ethanol has pushed up the price of corn and everything that uses corn products, like animal feed and the ubiquitous corn syrup. Of course, other plants could be used to produce ethanol, but big business has moved into farming and lobbies very effectively to suppress the development of alternatives.

But,while we wrestle with the costs of food, much of the world is doing without. Wars in places like Darfur are already being fought over food and water. Our ability to provide food aid has been reduced by costs that have risen 40% in the past year. There will be no peace agreements without food. Look for conflicts to expand rather than contract. Corrupt regimes and organized crime are going to see that oil and food trafficking will be more lucrative than drugs or weapons. Shortages are going to be exacerbated for profit.

Shell Oil foresees difficult times. I see Armageddon. I hope they’re right.

Baby, it’s warm outside

As proponents of doing nothing are quick to point out, global warming has happened before and we’re all here, right? So, let’s argue about taxes and immigrants and leave the climate alone.

Except, the climate is not going to leave us alone. Brian Fagan has written a fascinating book called, The Great Warming that explores the effects of the last warm cycle (check out www.brianfagan.com). Fagan is an archaeologist with no political ax to grind. He simply looked at what happened to the world during the period 800 AD to 1200 AD. Northern climates did pretty well over all with record harvests and extended growing seasons. Southern areas, however, from Angkor Wat to the Mayans suffered great multi-generational droughts that brought down previously powerful civilizations.
In those days, of course, the populations were much smaller. Like the pueblo Indians in the American southwest, they could abandon their ancestral homes and move where the water was.

Overlay that climatic situation onto today’s world of massive populations and hard borders, and you don’t need a PhD to show you the problems. Any benefits that might appear in the northern regions will be more than offset by the clamor of tropical populations fleeing drought and famine and/or fomenting revolutions and wars.

And, this is not the problem for some vague future generation to worry about. We already have drought in the southwest and the southeastern United States. Georgia is trying to move its border to acquire more water. California is concerned about being able to irrigate its farm lands. Meanwhile, some of the richest farmland in the still wet northeast has been paved over or turned into housing developments. A generation ago, futurists talked about the harvesting the sea to feed the teeming millions. Between pollution and overfishing, that possibility has been pretty much shut off. The rising cost of oil and the conversion of corn to biofuel have already raised food prices. Extended drought should exacerbate the expense of eating and sharply increase the numbers of those suffering from malnutrition.

Solutions to big problems require expensive answers so we can’t expect to hear anything useful until after the election. Come next January, however, we need to address the issue of water resources in this country, in this hemisphere, and in the rest of the world. As much of the planet dries up, we in the United States will pay for it one way or another, and it will be more expensive later.