Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Would you trust these morons for business advice? Allan catches this outrageous editorial at a sleazy rag called Investor's Business Daily. They start by buying into the most rosy cherry picked statistics they can find direct from the DEA and the drug czar and decide: The news is nearly all bad for global drug traffickers these days. From the jungles of southern Colombia to the dusty border towns of northern Mexico, it's bleak for drug lords. And, of course, that's nonsense. As Ted Galen Carpenter notes in The National Interest, "We've heard it all before. Many, many times before." The reality is that street prices for illegal drugs act like the famous observation about prices in the stock market: they will vary. Over the past fifteen years, the retail price of cocaine has moved in a range between roughly $90 and $200 per gram. The latest spike is nothing abnormal, just as the plunge in prices from November 2005 to January 2007 was not unusual. [...] Not only is the U.S. market for cocaine and other illicit drugs still healthy, the market elsewhere in the world is even more robust. [...] With such vast consumer demand, and with the black-market premium creating profit margins of 90 percent or more, there is little chance of shutting off the supply. The economic incentives to engage in drug trafficking are simply too powerful. But the morons at Investor's Business Daily actually think that the government can shut off the supply of drugs and then magically... There's no need to help addicts if there's nothing to get addicted to -- and nobody's life is diminished by a lack of exposure to drugs. And these guys give investment advice. Then they really go off the deep end... The three lessons of this are, one, a drug war can be won. Really? Oh, I give up. Don't even tell me the other two. What makes this even funnier is that these idiots actually want me to pay to comment on their article. For the 69 words I excerpted for web use, they suggest I should pay $.25 per word. Right. I'll give them this -- their copyright is safe. Fiction writing that imaginative is unlikely to be claimed as un-copyrightable fact. But who would pay for this dreck? John Walters? Certainly not me (and my use of it is exempt under fair use anyway). ---- Speaking of idiots... Lou Dobbs complaining about Obama: Well, you know, he's certainly not alone in his -- well, in his lack of expression on the issue, because most liberals in the country simply do not want to discuss the reality that Mexico remains the source of the drugs serving this nation's extraordinary drug habit. The United States, with about just under 5 percent of the world's population, consuming about two-thirds of the world's illegal drugs, and this government and the American people, apparently without the political will to stop it, and -- continue to permit the devastation of millions of lives in this country. Police in Australia: POLICE WINNING WAR ON DRUGS POLICE hope a massive drug bust last week will end the growing number of burglaries and violent assaults in Albany [...] "Part of yesterday's process was to eliminate those people, which we have done," he said. "This whole operation will be ongoing." The Dallas Morning News thinks it knows how to stop the violence in Mexico. By addressing the fact that cartels often kill or kidnap journalists and other "storytellers" to silence them. Either way, the locals are less likely to protect those trying to tell the rest of us the truth. That's why it's so critical that Mexican legislators pass a law before them now to make it a federal crime to curtail an individual's right to self-expression. The proposal also would strengthen the federal office of special prosecutor and give it more clout in investigating cases like Mr. Ortiz's. Giving the feds more power to protect journalists wouldn't end the violence, but at least the cartels would know that Mexico City values the storytellers. And that must frighten them. The more the truth gets out, the more likely the free world will be to stand up to the merchants of death. Really? Passing a federal law against curtailing the right to self-expression is going to frighten cartels so they won't kill or kidnap journalists? 11:37:18 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

If wishes were horses CBS news has been pushing this Mexico Drug War story: Brutal Drug War Fueled By U.S. Appetite. From the headline, you can see where it's headed, and, sure enough... Bill Gore has witnessed the carnage, first as the FBI Special Agent in Charge in San Diego, now as the county's undersheriff. He says American drug users should realize they have blood on their hands. "This is not a victimless crime," Gore said. "That people are dying, literally hundreds of them, on the streets of Tijuana, so they can have their recreational drugs on this side of the border." Do drug users have blood on their hands? Um, no. It is American lawmakers who have blood on their hands. They are the ones who have fueled this violence. They are the ones committing the victimfull crimes. Drug users could have all the drugs they want on this side of the border without a single person in Mexico needing to die, if it wasn't for the lawmakers. Just suppose that water was made illegal. The violence involved in the distribution of water would be unbelievable. Would those who use water have blood on their hands? Of course not -- it would be the morons who outlawed water. (Although the users of water would probably be in their rights to get lawmakers' blood on their hands.) Not that water and marijuana or cocaine are the same -- of course not -- but the principles of what happens when you outlaw an easily produced commodity in high demand are the same. It is true that there are two ways to get rid of black market violence. Convince all drug users everywhere to stop using drugs forever. Legalize and regulate drugs However, #1 is just a fantasy. People have always used drugs. They always will. #2 requires political will and smart solutions. #1 requires... magic. So it's easy for Bill Gore to complain about drug users, but it's meaningless and unproductive. It's like him complaining: "If it wasn't for gravity, my men wouldn't keep falling off this cliff to their death." Well, like it or not, gravity exists, so maybe people like Gore should look to other solutions, like not marching them off the cliff. 9:13:42 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []