The Power of the State

Ta-Nehisi Coates contemplates the human toll of our Drug War:

When people talk about ending the War on Drugs, or decriminalizing marijuana, or reining in stop and frisk, they are not simply talking about the right of private citizens to get high, they are talking about the right of private citizens to not be subject to lethal violence at the hands of the state.

I would like to start this by stating that I am somewhat sympathetic to the plight the individual of police officer. They are charged with protecting the public and servicing their employers (the taxpayers) with a judicious enforcement of the law. Individual officers do not have the luxury of contemplating the justice or barbarism of their job requirements while in the pursuit of a suspect who may or may not be armed.

Society at large, however, must deliberate exactly such questions, usually in the legislative process of a law's creation. Which I why I am so exasperated how self-proclaimed advocates of "limited government" continue to advocate an unlimited expansion of the state's ability to intrude on a person's private narcotic choices through the most onerous and violent apparatus of the state - the police force.

The problem is, and will continue to be, that the politics of the War on Drugs remains a winner among the Republican party's disproportionately older, rural, married and Caucasian constituency. The calls for "smaller" government are not really premised in any deep philosophic distaste for government power. It is premised in a deep seated philosophic distaste for government power in areas where government is objected for whatever personal or rent-seeking reason; like environmental regulations or minimum wages. The proclamations of support for a "small government" ideology should not be read as actual calls for "less" government, but simply "less" of government that "we dislike".

Conservative constituencies support the War on Drugs, and continue to make such polices politically popular, because for whatever reason they're allergic to certain to use of certain narcotics. I would argue, but can't empirically substantiate right now, that this relates to how an individual's culture and partisanship mediates their political ideology; as opposed to some deep-seated deliberation on the appropriate level of state power.

I conclude this to be the heart of the matter. Our Drug War's socially and economically ruinous tactics of incarceration and interdiction persist (and will continue to) because there exists a strong conservative constituency for such polices. My major complaint is that there is nothing "conservative" about this.

To avoid misunderstanding: I think the logic behind empowering the state to interfere with the incidence of externalized costs and benefits is well understood, especially when the incidence of such costs are unjust, inefficient, or non-welfare maximizing. Also, the scale and seriousness of a individual's, or a society's, drug dependency is certainly a legitimate point of discussion.

But the immediate conclusion that the modern state's most awesome power - the monopoly of violence through the power of a taxpayer provided police force - is the first and most appropriate tool to "force citizens to be sober" from a predetermined set of narcotics has to be the least "conservative" thing I can imagine.

Portugal's Decriminalization Success

Over at Forbes, E.D. Kain checks in on Portugal's now decade-old drug legalization experiment. The numbers are pretty impressive:

The number of addicts considered "problematic" -- those who repeatedly use "hard" drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, [Joao] Goulao [President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction] said.

I think it is clear that the United States still has quite a ways to go in catching up to Portugal in understanding that drug addiction is a public health problem, not a law enforcement problem. As the AP article explains:

A law that became active on July 1, 2001 did not legalise drug use, but forced users caught with banned substances to appear in front of special addiction panels rather than in a criminal court.

The panels composed of psychologists, judges and social workers recommended action based on the specifics of each case.

Since then, government panels have recommended a response based largely on whether the individual is an occasional drug user or an addict.

Of the nearly 40,000 people currently being treated, "the vast majority of problematic users are today supported by a system that does not treat them as delinquents but as sick people," Goulao said.

A legal regime where some recreational drugs are culturally encouraged, and others are classified as serious felonies, strikes me as a really nonsensical arrangement. News like Protugal's continues the case against supporting our expensive, wasteful and socially ruinous regime of interdiction and incarceration.

Supply, meet Demand.

Ventura County authorities recently "eradicated the largest plantation of marijuana in the history of the county, pulling up more than 68,000 plants in Los Padres National Forest, north of the city of Ojai," according to an LA Times report. This is being touted as a major victory in the War on Drugs.

Conor Friedsodorf seems to understand supply and demand basics, where our the California law enforcement does not.

But let's imagine that it has the intended effect: that after this raid, it is harder to grow marijuana in the United States, that the overall supply of domestically grown pot is smaller, and that the price of the drug is higher.

If that is the best case scenario, is it really a victory?

Theoretically, if we raided every single marijuana plant, there would be no supply left to sell. But raiding every single plant strikes me as an unlikely proposition, as it would require near constant surveillance of every private backyard, closet and windowsill. Now the adjective can get particularly hyperbolic, but such a monitoring program strikes me as textbook Orwellian.

So, as long as there is a demand for marijuana, there's going to be a supply. That's how the free market works. This is something War on Drugs advocates either don't seem to understand, or simply choose to ignore.

"It is not God who kills the children..

Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It is us. Only us"



The tragic death of Iraq Veteran Jose Guerena was brutal, pointless and absurd.

First, the basics of who Mr. Guerena was; a 23-year-old former Marine with two tours of duty in Iraq, husband of seven years, father of two boys (six and four), currently working night shifts at an Asarco copper mine.

According to Ellen Tumposky's reporting, Guerena had returned from the mine, and was resting "when his wife, Vanessa, saw the armed SWAT team outside her youngest son's bedroom window."

Vanessa Guerena thought the gunman might be part of a home invasion -- especially because two members of her sister-in-law's family, Cynthia and Manny Orozco, were killed last year in their Tucson home, her lawyer, Chris Scileppi, said. She shouted for her husband in the next room, and he woke up and told his wife to hide in the closet with the child, Joel, 4.

The confrontation resulted with 5 SWAT officers firing, according to KGUN9's initial report, 71 rounds over the course of approximately 7 seconds.

This tragedy would be grimly hilarious if it weren't so cruel. The man was employed, paid and trained by the state to travel thousands of miles to fight against terrorists. He survives and returns to his family; only to be gunned down in his own home, with his wife and child present, by state authorities waging a separate terror campaign.

While this story would be galling enough on it's own, the Pima County Sheriffs office has treated this disaster with an appalling nonchalance. The sheriff himself is bristling at how reporters is characterizing the story, specifically "scold[ing] the media for 'questioning the legality' of the shooting."

Hannah Arendt wrote a report on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker, and eventually adapted it into a book in 1963, titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The central thesis of the book, per Edward S. Herman

was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats. (emphasis mine - JG)

While there can be no comparison between the monstrosities of Germany's Holocaust and America's War on Drugs, Arendt's framework provides an excellent tool to help us deconstruct how the two polices produce similar effects on official's charged with executing them. Why Pima county's sheriff; who's responsibility is to the citizens of his county and is charged with protecting and serving them - expresses more concern over the media's 'questioning' than the fact that his officers have violently killed a (currently) innocent father, husband and veteran - is best understood in light of the idea that they were just following their orders and training. And unlike the Holocaust, these orders and trainings ultimatly emanate from our choices as an electorate.

The War on Drugs, and specifically the violent raid tactics that in this instance resulted with the death of Jose Guerena, are products of very conscious decisions made by every politically active (that is, voting) American. As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." The politics of our Drug War is skewed so heavily for our representatives to support more violence, harsher sentences and greater brutality because we make it so. The violence and brutality of our Drug War continues because, like Eichmann, we choose not to fully engage the ramifications and consequences of our political choices. Instead we hide behind a notion that this kind of engagement isn't our responsibility. It may have been the Tuscon District Court that signed a warrant for Jose Guerena's address, and it may have been Pima County's SWAT team that served it. But government polices - polices that we all have a say in - that created this tragedy. We cheaply extol on the virtues of our democratic system and how our government serves the people. But the good must come with the bad, and the failures of our polices must be confronted by every citizen, we are all complicit; either through our support, our opposition or our negligence.

It wasn't God that killed Jose Guerna, or fate that fed him to the dogs. It is us. It is only us.