03/04/09 – Alan Bock – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Alan Bach, he is Senior Editorialist at the Orange County Register and writes the column Eye on the Empire for Antiwar.com.
How's it going, Alan?
Doing real great, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us on the show.
My pleasure.
All right, so you've got this great article.
It's up at Antiwar.com slash Bach right now.
Drug War Tragedy in Mexico.
And I'm not sure how exactly to approach this.
It seems like the general belief among not just the American population, Alan, but especially among the people in media is that there's just something inherent in the substance being traded that is evil and causes all this violence.
And you seem to have a different theory about what causes the violence in the drug trade.
What could it possibly be?
Well, to start with, there may be some evidence that substances like methamphetamine and PCP are related to people going a little crazy and getting violent.
But if you're talking about marijuana, it makes people want to sit around and listen to music and eat brownies.
Heroin puts people into something of a stupor.
This is not essentially violent activity.
What causes the violence is the laws against drugs.
And the reason for that is that prohibition efforts are never successful at eliminating the scourge of drugs from a given society, so long as there's a demand.
Ask any high school student if it's easier to get drugs or marijuana or alcohol.
But what they do is to raise the price.
Some economists have done some calculations and suggested, for example, that the price of heroin is about 14 times what it would be in a competitive free market.
And now why is that?
Well, it's because the enforcement efforts do have some impact, and the impact is to make it more difficult to acquire certain substances and more difficult to produce it, more difficult to transport it.
It has to be done clandestinely, and it often is done accompanied by a certain amount of violence.
You know, guys that are transporting it either hide it or carry guns or you'll always find guns around a marijuana patch in a national forest.
And so what I'm saying is that it's the prohibition that creates most of the harmful social effects, the violence, the crime.
Crime associated with drugs is usually what economists call revenue-producing crime.
Mugging, robbery, burglary, because...
Well, and it's the extrajudicial settling of scores, too, right?
If somebody gets ripped off, they can't call 911.
They've got to handle it themselves.
That's right.
If your supplier has cheated you or shorted you, you don't go and file demand for a court order.
Yeah, occasionally in the News of the Weird they'll have one of those where the guy's house is robbed and he sends the cops out looking for his plants.
Every so often, yeah.
Every so often.
But no, these are the terminally stupid ones.
Right, right.
But the point is that the guys who run the giant cartels, the people who are dealing in mega quantities and incredible amounts of money, I mean, I don't know, I guess it depends on which market we're talking about.
If we're talking about, say, for example, the import market from Mexico into California or whatever, people dealing in those kinds of profits in a black market, they've got to have their own private armies.
They have to, or they can't do that business.
I mean, you have to have a very short time preference and a willingness to cut people's throats to run a major, and as you said, pot smokers just want to eat potato chips and chill out.
But people who are in the business of running the massive quantities and dealing with those quantities of money, they have to really have some of the most ruthless gangs on earth.
Absolutely.
So what drug prohibition does is, because there are enforcement efforts that increase the cost of doing business, to put it in MBA terms, the profit levels are just enormous.
If the street price is 10 times the price that it would be without prohibition, that means there's all kinds of profits for middlemen.
It's a much bigger profit than you'd find, say, running a grocery store where the profit margin is maybe two or three percent if you're lucky.
So there are people, and I submit that there always will be people, who are willing to take big risks in order to achieve those kinds of profits.
And unfortunately, what it does is to put a premium on various antisocial kinds of activities.
In order to be successful in the drug trafficking business, you have to be skilled at violence.
You have to be ruthless.
You have to be skilled at the art of concealment and of finding secret ways to get things across borders.
All of these activities, I think, are pretty much antisocial.
It's interesting to me, Alan, that I kind of learned all this stuff as a little kid.
I think we all learn about the history of prohibition in school, and they teach us that the real result of prohibition, it didn't get anybody to stop drinking.
It just created Al Capone.
It turned what was an open market into a black market and turned it, therefore, over to criminals.
We all learn that about prohibition of alcohol, but it seems like particularly conservatives can't seem to get it through their head when it comes to drugs that they personally would never use, I guess.
And so they figure ought to be banned, and anybody else who does use them ought to be punished.
But I was thinking, and maybe a good way to get the point across to right-wingers would be to use example of, say, if Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi all got together to ban firearms in this country, what that would do is that would drive all the law-abiding gun dealer folk out of business, and the people who would deal guns would all be black market criminals.
The whole business of guns wouldn't go away, would they?
Americans wouldn't stop demanding guns, but they would only be able to buy them from cutthroat murderers.
Well, except as a thought exercise, I'm not sure I would really like to see Barack and Eric and Nancy try to do that.
Oh, no, believe me, I'm not advocating such a thing.
It seems to be every right-winger's worst nightmare right now.
So, hey, what about that?
Wouldn't that create the same problem that the war on pot and the war on heroin and cocaine has?
Well, it certainly would, and it might even create a worse situation because then you're dealing in things that actually are weapons that are designed to kill people, and people are going to use them, and we'd probably end up a much more violent society than we are now, not to say that we're exactly free of violence these days.
Yeah, well, now here's the problem, too, is I guess it's really unfair, but it does kind of go with the whole argument.
I didn't actually even have the patience to watch the clip, but I saw where someone had blogged a clip of a guy from the Marijuana Policy Project on the Glenn Beck show, and how Glenn Beck's first question for him was, oh, you're a stoner, and you're probably stoned right now, and blah, blah, and you have to be a drug consumer to want it to be legalized is basically the way most people see it, I think.
Well, that's certainly not true.
It's been the case that there have been conservatives.
William F. Buckley, somewhere in the early 1970s, became convinced that the war on drugs was hurting society rather than helping it, and became an advocate of legalization.
The people running his magazine even today are opposed to the drug war, so there are conservatives and people who are not consumers.
Buckley claims that he never did it illegally, although he went out beyond the international limit once or twice in his yacht in order to see what all the fuss was about.
Milton Friedman, the late Nobel economist, never used it, and yet he was an advocate for ending the drug war for years and years and years.
All right, well, so let's talk about a little bit of the history of what's been going on south of the border here in Mexico, and really, I mean, I don't know exactly how much of the history of this kind of thing you know or how well-versed you are in it, but I was sort of hoping that you could kind of take us back and talk about some of the cartels and maybe, you know, somewhat recent history and the evolution of this thing, how it is that we've had this DEA and this tens of billions of dollars a year drug war, and how it hasn't seemed to get rid of the supply, even though it's not just a war on drug users here, the demand here, it's been a war on drugs in other people's countries since, you know, at least the 1980s.
At least.
Since Nixon, maybe.
Mexico has always been a transit point for drugs coming into the United States, for obvious reasons.
There's a lot of unguarded border, and there's still plenty of border that doesn't have any walls, and marijuana is easy to grow in Mexico.
Coca grows in various places in South America, chiefly Colombia these days, and so there have always been these criminal gangs.
And, you know, one of the other aspects of the war on drugs that is another, what I think is a social harm, is that because there's so much money and because the traffickers want to protect their businesses, they find it fairly easy to bribe corrupt officials, police officers, police chiefs, and Mexico has never been totally free of corruption anyway, but the escalation of the drug war has increased that corruption pretty exponentially.
Now, what's happened recently is that shortly after, well, about two years ago, the Mexican government, sort of urged on by the United States government and subsidized by the United States government, decided, well, you know, this whole atmosphere of corruption and violence surrounding the war on drugs is something we want to get rid of, so we're going to get really serious and crack down.
Well, what has almost always happened when you have a crackdown like that is you have a tremendous increase in violence, but somehow or another, the drugs get through anyway.
And so what you've had since President Calderón in Mexico decided to get real serious, and I will stipulate that he probably was sincere in this effort and really hoped that the end result would be to cut off the heads of the cartels and, you know, end this kind of criminal violence that was afflicting Mexico.
But what's happened instead is that the violence has grown.
In 2005, more than 1,300 people were killed in drug-related violence, and by 2007, it was over 2,600, and the number is approaching about 5,000.
And a lot of these are really gruesome killings, not just rival gangs on a side street somewhere that shoot each other up, but police chiefs getting beheaded and the heads posted on a fence post right across the street from the police station to send a message to the police that you're going to pay a price if you want to shut us down.
Well, and this is something that goes back.
There was that movie Traffic about the Medellín and the Khalid cartel and how the DEA came upon all this great information.
They made a big bust against whichever of the cartels it was, and really all they were were suckers for the other cartel, and it really doesn't matter.
It's just like fighting the insurgency in Iraq and saying, oh yeah, we just have to, you know, do a couple decapitation strikes and get the leadership, and then they'll go away.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, George Bush Sr. had his war on drugs against all these cartels, and for some reason, the cocaine supply just never went away.
In fact, Alan, there was an article in the New York Times maybe just a couple of months ago about El Paso and the terrible problem right across the border there, and it's really interesting to read these people basically talking as though they have your understanding of, you know, economically how this works and, you know, the predictability of these kinds of consequences, but they don't at all, and they cannot come to the same conclusion as you at all.
For some reason, there's a giant, you know, brick in their head that they can't get past, but there it is in the New York Times as they explain, yeah, you know, what really precipitated all this recent violence is we really cracked down and destroyed the top leadership of the biggest syndicate around here, and so now all the other smaller syndicates are in open warfare trying to gain the new monopoly on drug distribution outside of town there, and it's just the same story over and over again.
And just as in any criminal gang, if you kill the guy that's in charge of it, there's half a dozen to a dozen, you know, subheads or lieutenants or whatever, all of whom think that they ought to be the capo di tutti capi and make the huge money and live in the big mansion, whereas before they may have only been living in a mini mansion.
And so then you have a struggle for power among all these people that aspire to be the new leader because the basic underlying economics of it doesn't go away.
You can get huge profits, and there will always be desperate people who are willing to take huge risks for huge profits.
Well, they're saying now that the warfare going on in Mexico is, I guess I read one thing in the New York Times where they were trying to back away from the phrase failed state and basically implying that there's some sort of American intervention that's going to be necessary in the future when the society there collapses because of this seemingly insurmountable challenge to the authority of the state there.
And I don't see how they're going to get away from that.
Almost every time it's been tried, the gangs end up being, if not stronger than ever, at least as strong as before because of the underlying incentives.
You put a huge pot of money out at the end of the rainbow, and what you have to do is kill a few people to get there.
You're going to find some people that are going to do that.
Of course, seems simple enough.
I don't know.
And here's the other thing, too, and this is what got me really interested in the subject when I was a kid, was how the crack epidemic was started because cocaine was so expensive because of the war on drugs that when poor people wanted to use cocaine, they had to figure out ways to stretch it out and make it last.
So you take a little bit of cocaine, mix it with some baking soda and however you do it, and make crack rocks out of it, smoke that.
It's much more powerful, much more bang for your buck.
Now poor people can afford to do cocaine.
All right.
And so that's how the crack market got started.
And then it was the CIA and their connections, Blandone and Meneses, who were funneling the majority, the vast majority of the supply for the 1980s crack epidemic to Freeway Ricky Ross and supplying the whole thing for their secret wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador at the same time that they're jailing everybody for using the stuff that makes it such a lucrative market for them to finance their secret wars with.
Now, if all that doesn't say that the whole war on drugs should all have been called off in 1986 or something, then I don't know what the hell to do.
Well, part of the problem is there's a huge, what I call a drug abuse industrial complex, and it consists of, I don't know the exact number they spend at the federal level, but it's at least $20 billion a year.
That's a lot of people who have kids in college and mortgages to pay.
And if they end the war on drugs, what are they going to do?
At least double that to account for the people who are assigned to drug war activities at the state and local levels.
Yeah.
Well, plus just the concrete and iron bar manufacturers for all the people that make all the money building the prisons.
The prison guard unions.
Oh, yeah.
Certainly have an interest in maintaining the war on drugs.
It keeps them occupied with an ever-growing prison population.
And there are drug therapists who understand that illegalizing something is not the best way to promote addiction relief.
But there are plenty of them who, well, basically they get fed by the courts.
A lot of these addiction therapy people, people go into court on some kind of a drug bust, and they're assigned to rehabilitation and recovery.
And so a lot of the specialists in addiction therapy are essentially fed all the time by the court.
So they have an interest in keeping the drug war going.
They're not sure exactly how much business they would get, although I'm pretty sure they'd get quite a bit.
Well, it's so important, I think, to emphasize this point, because most people, I think, they just think, well, you know, drugs ought to be illegal, and they never take the time to examine it.
But who all benefits?
Who all are the individuals involved?
Never mind the abstract policy of drugs are bad, okay?
Everybody knows drugs are bad, okay?
The question is, so, you know, can't we be adults and try to figure out what's the right way to handle this rather than just saying there ought to be a law?
You'd think we could, and you would think that the experience of alcohol prohibition in this country would have brought the lesson home.
Although, to a certain extent, the end of alcohol prohibition led to marijuana prohibition.
Harry Anslinger was a prohibition agent.
When prohibition ended, they didn't completely zero out the agencies that were charged with enforcing it, and some of the clever guys there sort of looked around and said, well, what's another substance that we can...
Oh, no.
Oh, sure.
Oh, no.
Yeah, well...
And so they teamed up with the Hearst newspapers to do a whole yellow journalism thing about, you know, the evils of marijuana, you know, it turns you into killers.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, and this is something that Bill Hicks used to say back in the day, is that it's not even a war on drugs.
Don't even let them fool you.
It's a war on freedom.
It's a war on the Bill of Rights, and it's for everybody.
It doesn't matter whether you're a drug dealer or not, just like the old lady in Florida who they kicked in her door and shot her to death and then planted pot in her house to try to pretend that it was okay.
You know, in fact, two of those cops went to federal prison for that.
Two of those cops have just been convicted on that.
Yeah.
You know, it's a war on privacy and a war on the Fourth Amendment.
Which supposedly guarantees us against search and seizure.
Yeah.
Hey, never forget that they used the drug war loophole and made up claim that the Branch Davidians had illegal drugs on their property in order to justify borrowing National Guard helicopters from Ann Richards for the initial assault on the Branch Davidians.
Mm hmm.
And they were literally firing on those people from their Huey helicopters like it was the Vietnam War or something, and it was all based on the false accusation that there was a meth lab inside the house.
The reason the drug war undermines the Fourth Amendment is that using drugs as a victimless crime in a very specific legal sense.
And that's in the sense that you don't have a complaining victim.
Years and years ago, when my house was burglarized, I went to the police and complained, you know, come out, investigate, catch this guy.
But if you've got somebody selling pot to somebody who wants to smoke it, neither one of them is going to complain to the police.
Oh, I've been victimized.
So in order to get evidence to convict people on these crimes, you have to move into hidden places.
You have to use the same kind of things that the that the criminals use concealment and deception.
So you have the idea that you have to have a warrant before you can break into somebody's house.
Those protections are progressively weakened the longer we keep the drug war going.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, there's so much more here to talk about in terms of the militarization of local police forces and also the federal control that comes with the multijurisdictional task forces for the drugs and all these things.
But we're all out of time, Alan.
So maybe we'll have to have you back on the show.
Let's do it again.
We can talk about how the drug war subsidizes terrorism next time.
Yeah, there you go.
Oh, well, and that's a very good point.
They try to blame the consumer, not the prohibitors.
But that is a very good point.
All right.
So thanks very much for your time on the show.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Let me plug my book, Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana, which is not specifically about this, but about one aspect of the drug war.
Right.
That's Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana.
Also, Ambush at Ruby Ridge.
Great book.
And you can find Alan Bach at the Orange County Register and at antiwar.com slash Bach.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Oh, and your blog.
I'm sorry, was it?
Blog is just at alanbach.com.
For the great blog there.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Alan.
Thank you.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.