[Mb-civic] All Tripped Up

Thu Oct 7 12:57:21 PDT 2004

All Tripped Up 

By Jeremy Lott, Reason
 Posted on October 6, 2004, Printed on October 7, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20098/

Joel Miller's first book, Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying
America (WND Books), is a devastating examination of government anti-drug
policies. Publishers Weekly calls the book a "well-researched, bitingly
written account," and "a formidable challenge to the reigning prohibitionist
orthodoxy."

Miller, a former aide for the California legislature, is a veteran of
several now-defunct online start-ups (including the libertarian e-zine Real
Mensch) and the former commentary editor at WorldNetDaily.com. He was senior
editor at WND Books, a collaboration between the website and publisher
Thomas Nelson, and is now senior editor at Nelson Current.

Though Miller's personal tastes run more to home-brewed beer and pipe
tobacco, he started writing regularly about the war against drugs while
working for WorldNetDaily. "Bad Trip" has been praised by ABC Radio host
Larry Elder and Fox News legal correspondent Judge Andrew P. Napolitano.
Miller spoke with former colleague Jeremy Lott on the ingenuity of drug
smugglers, on why anti-drug laws are the terrorist's best friend, and on
what this year's election means for the war against drugs.

Several members of the Bush administration have pushed the line that if you
buy illegal drugs, you're funding terrorism. Is that true?

The answer is yes  partly  but it's their fault. The laws against drugs
are what create the market in which drugs are so incredibly profitable.
There's no other reason a coca bush should be worth more than a privet
shrub. Without prohibition, terrorists could no more profit from drugs than
from growing bananas. They'd have to turn to other sorts of funding.

Such as?

Well, FARC in Colombia has made a fair bit by kidnapping people, and before
the Soviet Union fell, terrorist organizations were funding themselves
through subsidies from Communist governments. But today nothing is so
lucrative as drugs; kill prohibition and you hit their bottom line.

How much do these groups depend on drug money?

Well they're all in pretty deep. FARC in Columbia, ELN, and AUC  three
factions that are at war either with themselves or the central government 
rely on profits from either taxing the drug trade in the areas that they
patrol, or from protection money, or from growing the drugs themselves.
According to a confidential 2003 Columbia government report, it is
impossible to tell the difference between the AUC groups and the
traffickers. The same report claimed that AUC drew up to 80 percent of its
money from trafficking.

Before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban oversaw the production
of 70 percent of the world's opium poppies. Osama bin Laden administered
their profits, laundering them through the Russian mob. He pulled in about
10 or 15 percent of the total, which gave him an estimated annual income of
$1 billion, and that kind of money can buy a lot of flight lessons.

This has been going on for a while. In 1984, the U.S. Justice Department
estimated that Yasser Arafat's PLO procured about 40 percent of its light
weaponry by trading hash and heroin.

You come down hard on the police for drugs-inspired corruption. What has
modern prohibition done to law enforcement?

Modern prohibition provides an incredible incentive for cops to go bad, in
little ways and in big ways.

The big are embodied in cops like Joseph Miedzianowski. People around the
case referred to him as the most corrupt cop in the history of Chicago,
which is quite an achievement considering the kind of corruption that comes
out of Chicago. He was busted in 1998 after a long and fruitful career of
dope pedaling, extortion, lying to obtain search warrants, torturing
suspects, stealing money, stealing jewels, stealing guns, even ratting out
the identity of an undercover cop to a gang member.

Amazing amounts of corruption have come from the profits and the power that
police are able to pull from their involvement in the drug trade.

What if cops aren't so overtly corrupt? Are there other ways that drug
prohibition effect them?

There are subtle things. It's difficult to make drug arrests because people
keep their drug use secret and quiet. One thing that comes up time and again
are cops who basically lie about the facts regarding a search so that they
can make the search legal on paper even if it wasn't legal in fact.

Then there are cops who plant drugs on suspects because they want to make
busts, sometimes for reasons that go beyond drug enforcement. Sometimes they
are involved in the drug trade and they are busting a rival, or helping a
partner deal with a competitor. There is an awful lot of opportunity for
corruption, and police are in the difficult position of not only being very
close to lawbreaking but often the only ones who know about it. So they're
able to justify all kinds of ill behavior.

What were some of the more surprising cases that you uncovered for the
chapter on smuggling?

Smuggling reflects the most profound thing about human nature, and that is
that human beings will do anything if the payoff is big enough.

And when I say anything, I mean anything: dig under the southern border with
incredible tunnels, some of which have been open for years. I mention one in
"Bad Trip" that was discovered just south of San Diego. Authorities
estimated that it had been open for 10 or 20 years shuttling drugs through.
This thing had lights, ventilation ducts, the whole thing. They found a
quarter ton of pot in the tunnel when they got there, which means that the
people who were operating it were probably alerted to the fact that there
was a raid and all got out fine.

That points to problems with enforcement but it also shows the incredible
amount of ingenuity and craft that people will put into their smuggling. It
includes things like building submarines, training pigeons how to carry
packets of drugs across borders. It includes smuggling substances inside of
things, disguising them as other things, including taking opium and soaking
blankets with it and smuggling the blankets, taking cocaine and mixing it
with plastic and fiberglass resin and creating things out of it like dog
kennels and bathtubs, and then extracting the cocaine once it's across the
border. There's no way to test for it without testing every single item: you
can't smell it, can't see it. The only way cops can get it is if they're
actually taking chips out of these products and testing them.

What does the drug trade tell us about how markets work?

It tells us that markets work really well. Faustino Ballvé, the economist,
calls black markets the true market, because they're the only markets
actually dealing with reality instead of pawing vigorously against it. When
people have incentives, people are able to deliver, and there's really no
way around that. It's a fact of human nature, and there's no beating human
nature.

Are government efforts making a dent in the supply of drugs?

Not really. We've had drug prohibition in this country since 1914, and yet
every administration since Nixon has had to jack up its enforcement budgets,
and we're seeing very little in the way of results.

In the '90s, what happened to the price of drugs?

Consistently, they dropped. With cocaine, the downward slump was not huge,
but with heroin it was pretty strong. Prices in general for drugs seem to be
on the decline.

This occurred at the same time as crime rates fell. Does that mean more
drugs equal less crime?

Dropping prices can definitely mean increased supply. It could mean other
things too, but it's an interesting fact that the only type of crime that
began rising in the late '90s while every other type of crime was going
down, was gang crime  street crime. That's the crime most closely
associated with the drug trade. It was responsible for half of the murders
in Los Angeles.

So I don't know that more drugs equals less crime in any causal way, but you
could certainly make the argument that drug prohibition is increasing crime,
and if you were to lighten up the thumbscrews on enforcement, you'd see
crime drop.

"Bad Trip" has been marketed to a mostly conservative audience. How have
right-wingers received it?

The response has been mixed. Some traditional conservatives see the
overreach of government as a very ominous problem. They're ticked off about
a number of overreaches of the state  recently from Republicans  and they
fold this into their general disdain about the growth of government.

Others simply argue that drugs are bad and drugs need to be gotten rid of.
For some reason, they can argue that the government is a poor solution for
things like retirement and welfare but it's the perfect solution for dealing
with drugs, even though history and practical experience say otherwise.

Why has drug legalization been such a dead letter politically?

Nobody wants to go on record as being for drugs. There's just something
about, you know, "I am running for office and I support the legalization of
PCP" that does not register well with voters. Voters with little historical,
economic, or political insight into the drug problem are not likely to cast
ballots for someone who wants to change the status quo.

How would a Kerry administration drug policy differ from Bush's, if at all?

Well, last year, Kerry said that he would stop the federal drug raids on
medical marijuana patients. That would be nice. It's about time state
attorneys general got some stones anyway and threw down the gauntlet to the
feds on that. Some federal cooperation in stopping the harassment would be
helpful.

But I don't think it would be a major switch. If there's anything that's
been consistent among administrations  with the anomaly, maybe, of Carter 
it's that drug prohibition is popular and well received. Kerry has already
indicated support for administrative positions for people who are hardcore
drug warriors. And it's really not in his best interest politically to go on
the line and be against prohibition. The best we'd probably see is more of
the same.