03/16/09 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Anthony Gregory.
He's a research analyst at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
He also writes for the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org, BlueRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, and probably a lot of other places besides that.
Welcome back to the show.
Anthony, how's it going?
Thanks.
It's great to be here, Scott.
It's going good.
Now, I read this awesome article that you wrote.
I guess it's a speech that you gave at the Free State Project's Liberty Forum recently in New Hampshire.
It's really a great article, The Drug War vs.
American Civilization.
Now, it's an interesting title.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're getting at, but I think most people who support the drug war think that it's a war for civilization and that without it, our society would basically fall apart as everybody became reduced to a bunch of drug addicts and stopped producing anything of value.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
That's the perception.
I was doing this article based on my talk, and I wanted to make sure that I was sufficiently hardcore on this because I'm just kind of tired of mincing words on the issue.
I never have done something at this length on the issue, but it's an important issue.
And it's true, a lot of people who think of themselves as patriotic, who think of themselves as being very much pro-civilization and pro-the social order, they're drug warriors.
But in fact, the drug war is a destructive force that's a very fabric of our society.
Everything that's great about what it means to be America is undermined by the drug war, and everything on which civilization depends is undermined by the drug war.
So I figured that would kind of sum up my basic point, that there's a real conflict here between prohibition and civil society itself.
And you make the point in here that one of the things reduced by the drug war is the level of debate, and yet I have to stoop to it, and you know I do.
Anthony, you're just pro-drug use, and so that's why you picked this issue.
Well, see, there you go.
And it's true that we all have to keep in mind our audience when we're discussing controversial issues.
But I did want to point out, especially this audience and to anyone who reads me, where I'm less likely to try to whitewash issues or try to waffle much, that the whole debate is destructive.
You're not even allowed to talk about the drug war without making it very clear, oh my god, they're the worst thing on earth, I hate drugs, I think everyone who uses drugs is an evil person, and so forth.
And I suppose it's fine to believe all those things as long as you're still against the drug war, but it's just like with war.
I mean, you're used to this, Scott, where people say, well, if you're against the Iraq war, you're pro-Saddam Hussein.
And so you have to end up saying, no, no, no, I hate Saddam Hussein, and in fact, I hate Saddam Hussein more than you do.
Well, in the case of Saddam Hussein, I do hate Saddam Hussein, and I hate everything that he stood for.
But there's a lot of propaganda.
And so when you want to discuss the thing dispassionately, when you want to say, actually, this particular claim about Saddam Hussein doing this or intending to do that with these weapons he doesn't have, or any of that nonsense, it's tough, because when you question the official line on something, you're mistaken for being a total supporter of the other extreme, whatever it is.
And so drugs, they all have potential risks, they pretty much all have potential benefits, medical benefits, and so forth.
Paracelsus, the founder of modern pharmacology, said all drugs are poison, and so it really depends on the dosage and the context.
And yet, you know, we have this prescription drug culture, and we have all of these pharmaceuticals, and millions and millions of Americans use very powerful drugs, and then there's the recreational drugs Americans legally use, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, which is a very powerful stimulant, which people use, and millions of people are kind of hooked to this stuff.
And yet, with illegal drugs, we're supposed to have this binary opinion that anything that the federal government says is completely illegal must be made from hell itself, whereas everything that's legal, we don't have that kind of attitude toward.
So really, these are all chemical compounds, and a lot of the drugs that are illegal are very similar to a lot of the drugs that are just regulated.
And so I did want to touch on that a little in the talk and in the article.
Well, you know, people oftentimes really define whether a certain drug is immoral to use or not by whether it's illegal or not, and I think pretty much anyone against the drug war has been in the argument where the person says that drugs are bad because they're illegal, and they're illegal because they're bad, in a circle with no other justification.
Well, that's absolutely true, and we see it, you know, even heroin, which is one of those drugs that's like the granddaddy of all hard drugs.
But it's just an opiate, and I'm not saying many people don't abuse it, of course, but there are legal opiates, regulated opiates, they're very chemically similar, and there are very strong opiates that are similarly strong to heroin, like the one that Rush Limbaugh was addicted to.
And I don't think he should have been harassed about that either, necessarily.
He certainly should never have been treated like a criminal for that.
I mean, he was one example of many Americans who probably have some sort of drug problem but still functionally does his job.
I don't necessarily agree with much of what he says when he's doing his job, but it's true.
You know, heroin is an opiate, and there are other opiates that are legal, and all the other drugs, or many of the other drugs, are quite similar to ones that are legal, and so it's true.
It's like any other distinction.
I like to tell conservatives that there's designer drugs or club drugs, but these distinctions are kind of like assault weapons.
It's really just whatever is politically incorrect or whatever we're used to thinking of as illegal.
And yet in the last few years, I've seen new drugs that were not previously legal targeted and demonized, you know, GHB and et cetera, and it is bad how the law can shape the culture, and it's a mutually reinforcing cycle of ignorance that people face.
Okay, so still though, make the point, prove your point that this is a war against American civilization, that we're not just talking about heroin users that nobody cares about being deprived of their rights, but what about the rest of us?
Why should the average person, you know, think of a guy like Ron Paul, who I think is actually representative of a lot of people in this culture, who's never even seen weed in his whole life.
Why should he care about junkies going to jail, other than just a matter of principle?
What does it have to do with the average non-drug-using American?
Well, the thing is, once you let go of that principle, once you accept the principle that the government can tell people what they can put in their own bodies and trade with each other, you've really given up the case for freedom altogether.
And I quote Mises from Human Action, not exactly a 60s hippie, who in 1949 said, you know, this isn't a minor issue.
To believe in prohibition is basically to pave the way.
He says to abolish man's right consumption is to take all his freedoms away.
And so I went through in my talk and in the article to try to defend Mises point by point.
I looked at the Bill of Rights and how every single amendment in the Bill of Rights has been seriously undermined by the drug war.
There are so many precedents for the current war on terror in its stripping away of civil liberties that can be found in the drug war era.
And, you know, once you let the government go after possession, then you open the door to money laundering and spying and gun control.
Of course, the drug war causes massive violence, which has been the major justification for other attacks on civil liberties, including the right to bear arms.
And, you know, it's led to a militarization of law enforcement.
It's led to a total overturning of everything that was great and free and promising about the American republic and the American tradition as conceived of by the good guys, the liberal thinkers that we associate with.
So it is, in a sense, un-American.
And, of course, for the majority of the history of the United States, there were virtually no drug laws.
On the federal level, there weren't really drug laws until the Harrison Narcotic Act under Woodrow Wilson, and then it was FDR that banned marijuana, and then it was during the Great Society that the drug war really started to be kicked up a notch, and they went after more and more drugs.
So, really, we also see that the move away from drug freedom has accompanied the general move toward the nationalization of American culture, which I think is destructive to what it means to be American culture.
Well, see, and that really goes down to kind of basic opinions, because I think some people just think reflexively we need to have government schools so that everybody basically learns the same thing, so that we'll all be at least the same enough.
They don't trust that we'll be able to get along at all if we don't all have, you know, those kinds of things in common.
If it's not directed, especially from kind of a singular level.
I mean, people kind of ignore the existence of the states altogether, and just say, look, it's one country, we ought to have one education system, we ought to have one FDA, etc., like that.
Well, it's true.
If you define America as an inherently nationalist, socialist, fascist concept, then the drug war is plenty American.
But if you take any pride in the idea of America being a land of the free, you have to believe in the freedom of people to control their own bodies.
Once you allow the government that type of intimate control over individuals, you've let go of the American dream.
I mean, you've let go of all the civil liberties, you've let go of non-intervention in foreign policy, you've let go of free enterprise and free association.
It's a terribly destructive policy.
I mean, it's uprooted the entire social order, it's created gang warfare, it's undermined the family.
You know, we have the government telling children to report their parents for marijuana as if it was the Soviet Union or something.
It's an attack on the very fabric of society, and civilization especially.
And again, if you define civilization in a certain way, you can reconcile civilization and the drug war.
But civilization comes about when people are free, when insofar as people are free to produce and to pursue their dream, and to associate with one another freely, and to create everything from infrastructure and technology to the arts, and to pursue spiritual exploration, and everything that we really cherish about humanity relates directly to freedom and to peace and to human cooperation rather than the instigation of human conflict and scapegoating and violence.
And we see the drug war has always been very divisive.
You know, the first opium laws were motivated by anti-Chinese prejudice, and then the first laws about marijuana were targeted toward blacks and Hispanics, and it's divisive.
It does nothing good in bringing about social harmony, and of course it doesn't achieve its supposed results either.
I mean, drug use is about the same as it's always been.
Drug abuse of marijuana, you know, the people who probably use it in a very abusive way, it's no more than with alcohol or anything else.
And, you know, in prison there's obviously drugs.
You can't stop it.
So all you can do is tear up everything that we cherish about this supposedly free society while doing nothing to bring about a drug-free America.
And I think that, you know, you've had me on the show, and we've talked about all of the many terrible flaws in the Founding Fathers' generation, but it's hard to imagine many Founding Fathers putting up with a drug war.
It's really hard to imagine them thinking that on this, you know, that we can have a national government dictating people what they can consume.
It's very alien to the American tradition of freedom, even as flawed as it was from the beginning.
Well, we bring up a lot of things there to go back over.
I guess I want to focus right now on the prison system, and you talk about a lot of the racist motivation for the creation of these laws in the first place, and certainly, however politically correct the intentions of modern-day drug warriors, if we can assume at all that their intentions are within the bounds of political correctness, in effect, this is basically a war on brown people.
Brown and black Americans are arrested at far higher rates for their drug use than white Americans, who use drugs at far higher rates.
Yeah, higher, well, or maybe about the same.
I'm not sure, certainly not that much less.
And, you know, we see that from the beginning the drug war was about racism, same with alcohol prohibition, a lot of it was anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bias, but we see an anti-immigrant bias, but we see the racial tensions at the root, and in practice the drug war might be the most racist institution in America that still remains.
It's really the prison system in general, which grew out in many ways out of the institution of slavery and grew to this incredibly unspeakably disgusting size that we have in America now, the largest prison system in the world by far.
This prison system is deeply wrapped up in the drug war, and so is the entire police state, and surely drug laws in particular are probably the most racist policy we have in the way that it's carried out.
Well, and it's also, as you said, a seed, kind of a camel's nose under the tent flap kind of a situation, too, for things like the war on terrorism to follow up on later, because, you know, your bank records are private, but hey, this is the drug war we're talking about here.
Or you can't just go and use the National Guard against American civilians, but hey, this is the drug war we're talking about here.
And hey, this is the drug war we're talking about here, ends up being the excuse for no-knock entries in multi-jurisdictional task forces with machine guns and black masks over their faces, and all kinds of things come from the exception of the drug war.
And then now, of course, the anti-terrorism forces have as their baseline all those exceptions that were built in for the drug war.
That's absolutely right, and right after 9-11 they said, we just want the police to have the powers that they have to go after drugs, and since even most drug warrior Americans would probably agree terrorism is even worse than drugs, they were willing to let the government take all these powers.
But the government shouldn't have a lot of these powers for anything, no matter what the excuse.
And so, yeah, the Americans are willing to be pulled over randomly and deal with checkpoints and have their privacy undermined and have the government have the right to just confiscate property without charging anyone with a crime, and all of the erosion of posse comitatus.
I remember a few years ago, when they were creating more loopholes for posse comitatus, there was a lot of, and properly so, there was a lot of concern.
But you know, Scott, that this all started with the drug war in the 80s, and it's why the military was involved with Waco and was supplying weapons, and maybe why the Delta Force was there to the end.
The first excuse was, well, there's a meth lab.
I mean, they wouldn't have been able to get the military involved, or it would have been harder at least if it were an issue like child abuse or guns, which were the next excuses.
The first way that that raid became planned in a militaristic fashion was because of the drug war.
And we see this, we see so many...
Which, by the way, in parentheses here, there was not a drug lab there, and they knew good and well there was not a drug lab there, because when the previous people in charge had left, and David Koresh and his guys had taken over the place, they called the local sheriff's department to send out the hazmat unit to come and take the meth lab away.
And that had been years before.
And they knew good and well that there was no meth lab, but it was a handy excuse to attack the place with Huey helicopters like it was the Vietnam War or something.
Yeah, that's right.
And so we see...
It's really difficult for me to imagine a society without a drug war and without much of the other...many of the other faults on our liberties that have come directly or indirectly because of the drug war being that sheepish after 9-11 in sacrificing their civil liberties.
I mean, without the drug war, the Patriot Act would have been a little harder.
I'm not saying that it would have been impossible.
I mean, of course, actual war with foreign enemies has always been a great...probably the greatest excuse to violate civil liberties, but certainly in the modern era, before 9-11, and since the Cold War was kind of cooling down, the drug war was the major excuse.
Now we have a lot of the features of war, of demonizing the other, of saying we're protecting you from something that you can't even see exactly and certainly something that we're not actually capable of protecting you from.
It has a lot of similarities to the war mentality, but it's great because it's great for the government because here it is in America.
It's a war within America and without America, but the domestic angle allows them to have kind of a permanent occupation of the country beyond what they would have been capable of.
Now one of the things you brought up there, too, is civil forfeiture, and I don't know if too many people know about this.
I was very happy to be reminded by your article of the study from the early 90s that said that...
I forget exactly what the number was, but it was better than a super majority of people who are the victims of civil forfeiture are never even charged with a crime.
I used to tell people that all the time, and I completely spaced it out.
I learned something new and pushed that little fact out my other ear or something.
So I was glad to be reminded of that.
But why don't you explain to people what civil forfeiture is and what those numbers were about people whose property gets stolen from them, but they never even are arrested and charged.
Well, civil asset forfeiture is a very terrible, despotic tool for the government where instead of charging you with a crime and actually using conventional due process, and this whole program, by the way, violates several amendments to the Bill of Rights, rights to proper civil procedure and rights to proper criminal procedure, and the right to not have your property taken without due process.
Instead of charging you with a crime, they kind of charge your property with a civil offense, and then you could fight it, and if you're a pilot or someone and you flew someone and the government says that person was a drug dealer and you didn't even know, they could take your plane or they could take your business, and then it's on you, basically, to show that you're innocent, and you could end up bankrupted by this.
It's about 80% of the cases, at least back then, were without anyone even charged with a crime, and to add insult to injury and to actually encourage abuses of this, in a lot of places police get a cut of what they see.
So from just some poor sap on the street that they'll say he's the wrong color, so let's look, oh, he has a few hundred dollars on him, what could someone possibly want with that, or why would someone have a few thousand dollars leaving the country, there's no excuse for that, so they just can take it, and then they confiscate cars from alleged drug dealers and they confiscate property from people who are innocent or guilty of the laws, and often the individuals or the departments get a cut, and so you have these drug war enforcers driving around in drug dealer cars, and really bolstering their coffers with seized assets, and much of which was seized without anything resembling what would be necessarily, what would be due process in a free country.
And this is another thing that's going to happen, because when you have a real crime, what we libertarians would call a real crime, there's a victim.
The government might even have an idea of what happened, it might know what it's looking for, a bloody knife, there's people to complain, there's all of these things working with the government to try to pursue the actual criminal with some semblance of due process.
And also there's only so many of these criminals, violent criminals.
But with the drug war, we're talking about tens of millions of Americans who violate these laws, and so for the government to even try to make a dent, it has to be draconian, it has to violate the standards of evidence, and spy on people because there's no victims complaining, it has to actively go out looking for trouble, and then it has to have very high disproportionate punishment to deter people.
Because they're never going to catch all of them.
They're never going to catch 10% of them.
They can't.
They wouldn't fit in the prison system.
And you know, if you ask the average American, would you ideally want to see all the murderers locked up, more or less the average American would be kind of for that.
But even the average American who's on some level for the drug war, if he actually were confronted, would you want all of these people in prison, he'd probably say no, because it just would be unworkable.
It would be beyond expensive, it would be inconceivable to put all those people in prison.
So the ones that they do catch, they have to persecute in a draconian manner, throw them in prison for 10 years or 50 years or the rest of their lives, for nothing really.
And in some cases, even if you believe in drug laws, it's just very disproportionate.
I mean, in federal prison, the drug offenders have longer sentences than rapists.
But that's inevitable, because when you try to go after something that's not in itself criminal, it just won't work, and so the government needs to keep upping the punishments and becoming more and more invasive.
I mean, the prison system is filled with drugs and drug dealing, and here we have a total state.
The prison is the totalitarian's dream.
There's constant surveillance, there's guards everywhere, people are controlled and limited to their space in every conceivable way, they're always watched, and yet the drug trade is flourishing there.
So, of course, even if they turn all of America into a prison, which thankfully they can't because of economic law, which limits the capacity of the state to grow to quite that point, but it'll try.
And even as it tries, but even if it succeeded, there'd still be drug abuse.
So it's really an insane policy, it's an evil policy, and it needs to be opposed from top to bottom.
Well, but I have hope for change, because Barack Obama's been elected, and he wants to expand the use of drug courts instead of more militaristic and prosecutorial means of locking people in prison, Anthony.
Well, you know, the drug court is one of those examples where the progressives, they trust the government too much, and so it sounds nicer, and maybe in some cases, for some people it's good, but there was an article by Morris Hoffman, who's this trial judge in Denver and a professor of law at the University of Colorado, and he says that not only in his experience do the drug courts not work, they actually make things much worse.
He says that they lead to net widening, which stimulates even more drug arrests, because they're just trying to catch more and more drug arrests, because these courts, you know, it's a cheaper, easier way for the state to do a drug court, and so their incentive is to catch more people.
He also says that at the end of the two years after Denver adopted the drug courts, drug arrests tripled, and there were twice as many drug offenders in prison, or they were spending twice as many, after the drug courts.
So it certainly doesn't seem like it's a very...
Wait a minute, so let me understand this right.
People go to drug court, then they go on probation, and then when they fail the probation, then they go off to real prison, and they ended up sending more people off to real prison because of how many more they had arrested because they were bringing them to drug court.
Is that what you're saying?
Yes.
Sorry to make that clear.
Yeah, so there's that, and the most promising thing is Obama might, because they still say they're going, they haven't yet, but the administration indicates that it wants to stop the raid on medical marijuana dispensaries, which would be great, but on the other hand, there's no sign that they want to get the feds out of marijuana in general, or the drug warrants.
I recently read that Obama's considering, though they haven't made any decision, but they're considering sending more of the military to the border because of the drug warrants, the terrible, very violent drug wars in Mexico that are spilling over, and they're killing many thousands of people.
Well, you know, the truth really rang out actually one time in a New York Times article, believe that or not, Anthony, but they were interviewing people from El Paso and from Juarez on the other side of the border about the drug wars in Juarez, and they were saying, yeah, you know, everybody says this, that, and the other thing, but this sheriff, and I forget which side of the border the sheriff was from, I think it was the sheriff on the Mexican side, the new sheriff on the Mexican side, and they were saying that, yeah, well, you know, the problem was that we really cracked down on the previous cartel and destroyed it, and now the reason that there's all this terrible violence is because there's multiple cartels fighting for that dominance in the black market and killing each other and bystanders and whatever else as a consequence, and that really it was the crackdown on the previous cartel that was the cause of the problem in the first place.
The government created a black market, and then now criminals fight over who gets to control the monopoly in the black market.
Well, yeah, and of course, you know...
In the New York Times, man, pretty impressive, huh?
Well, it's great, and you are seeing a lot of popular opinion starting to understand that the black market violence is a function of prohibition, and certainly in, you know, all the drug war stuff in Mexico, it would be impossible without the drug war.
I mean, this is so obvious, you know, the gangs don't fight like this over perfectly legal products.
It's an argument that actually it kind of pains me to have to make, because you'd think it would be so obvious, but surely if the Obama administration really understood the drug war or was willing to follow what the drug war means to its logical conclusion, it wouldn't be considering further militarist response to this.
It would be considering, you know, letting Mexico...
When the politicians in Mexico talk about liberalizing their drug laws, Washington says you better not.
I mean, Washington dictates to much of the international community drug policy.
Of course, we know what it's done to Latin America and with Plan Colombia and, you know, supporting mass murder in Thailand in the name of the drug war.
So the U.S. is really one of the most reactionary regimes, and given so much of its influence and so much of its, you know, kind of gunboat diplomacy, all of these problems that are associated with international drug violence, they'd go away if it weren't for the drug war, which is a government program.
So that's where the problem is.
Well, and of course now they're talking about the fact that, apparently it's a fact, I don't really know, but they're saying it's a fact that these Mexican cartels are using American-made Barrett .50 caliber machine guns, and see, this is another reason why we need to pass these gun control laws, because now these terrible criminals are getting a hold of American guns.
Well, that's right, and from the beginning this was, you know, it was the violence from alcohol prohibition and the days of Al Capone that brought us the first important federal gun act.
We had the National Firearms Act in 1934, and then in 1938 there was the Federal Firearms Act.
And the violence that leads so many people to accept gun control, among many other invasions of their lives, so much of it would just disappear.
It's actually quite aggravating how far from protecting us on balance, the government, through its drug war and all this other stuff, makes us far less safe.
It creates so many criminals, and so much of the violent devastation of our community, it's all the fault of the drug warriors and the other police state types.
And it's very frustrating that we've been stripped of our civil society and our social peace because of the war on drugs.
Everybody who cares about just having a safe place to live, or anyone who doesn't like violent crime has to oppose this thing.
So, you know, even if you don't want to be philosophical, or even if you don't believe in natural rights, and even if you like the government much more than I do, if you don't like violent crime, just private violent crime, you should oppose prohibition.
You know, the problem is here, is all the politicians have Prozac coursing through their veins, and no real attachment to the reality that you're perceiving.
Well, you know, that's true, and of course they're all like alcohol, and they probably like that and other Prozac and other prescription drugs, and maybe some other things.
I'd like to see the Inspector General's report on how many congressmen are on insane amounts of antidepressant stimulants and so forth.
Anyway, that's another show.
Hey, listen, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Anthony.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to be with you.
All right, everybody, that's Anthony Gregory.
He is a research analyst at the Independent Institute and also writes for the Future Freedom Foundation, lewrockwell.com, antiwar.com, and a bunch of other places.
You can find his article.
It's a really great article.
The Drug War vs.
American Civilization at lewrockwell.com.