12/18/14 – Mark Thornton – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org.
I got more than 3,500 interviews now, going back to 2003.
Next up is Mark Thornton.
He is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Ludwig, I'm supposed to say.
Ludwig von Mises Institute.
They're at mises.org in Auburn, Alabama.
He's got this great new article from yesterday.
The War on Drugs was Born 100 Years Ago.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing great, and it's wonderful to be back on your show.
And you know, we've kind of dropped the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and we're going with just the Mises Institute, just so we don't have to stumble over our own name.
There you go.
Well, I've said it wrong all along until Deist told me, no, it's Ludwig.
Ludwig.
Okay, well, what the hell do I know?
I'm a Texan, man.
I can't pronounce things right.
The Mises Institute, named for Ludwig von Mises, author of Human Action and a Theory of Money and Credit and Bureaucracy and Socialism and so many other great books that changed the history of the world.
So mises.org is where you find this.
This is Mises Daily.
It's the blog there.
The War on Drugs was born 100 years ago.
Now I'll shut up and let you tell the horrible story.
Well, Scott, you know, Ludwig von Mises, when you mentioned his book Human Action, he said in there that, you know, a state can try to prohibit the consumption of things like tobacco and alcohol.
But the problem is trying to get the whole thing done.
And then an even bigger problem is what is to prevent a state from banning bad books or bad pictures or anything else?
And, you know, he was right.
The War on Drugs started off sort of simple, nondescript.
Nobody really heard about it very much.
There was no real social concern, to a great extent, about things like narcotics and cocaine and heroin at the time.
It wasn't really a big deal.
But because of political pressure and because of racist attitudes and bigotry, they went ahead and passed the Harrison Narcotics Act 100 years ago.
And it wasn't even an outright prohibition.
It was simply a measure to tax and to register and to make sure that the government knew who was prescribing these drugs and who was taking these drugs.
And they wanted to discourage use by putting a tax on it.
But shortly thereafter, the bureaucrats who were in charge of this tax act decided that it was not proper medical practice for doctors to prescribe narcotics for addiction treatment.
There were, you know, doctors who specialized in addiction.
And usually, they would start by prescribing the drug in lower and lower doses.
Or you could go to a clinic, an addiction clinic, and they would do the same thing and sort of wean you off the drugs and to provide substitutes and counseling and so forth.
But the bureaucrats decided otherwise, and the courts went along with them.
So all of a sudden, you had this court system and the bureaucrats and the Treasury Department deciding what is and what is not proper medical practice.
Now, I'll hold it right there for just a moment.
Before we get on to the enforcement of this, I'd like to ask, go back a step to the passage of the act in the first place and the motivation for its creation.
Now, other than being signed by the noted white supremacist monster Woodrow Wilson to become a law, what did race have to do with it, really?
Oh, well, there was racist hysteria and yellow journalism that were fueling this.
Of course, the Chinese immigrants, they smoked opium.
And so that was, you know, that was considered evil.
And we didn't want the Chinese coming into this country.
And then if stories were being told about black men taking cocaine and being impervious to bullets, being extremely violent and raping white women.
So these were the types of stories that were circulating with respect to these drugs.
And then, of course, marijuana or cannabis was being smoked by Mexican migrant workers and black jazz musicians in New Orleans.
And so that was painted as, you know, totally foreboding.
And, you know, and very bad for society.
Certainly doesn't fit in with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mentality or mores.
And so there was a racist bigotry hysteria painted, you know, with respect to these particular drugs.
And so you had that side of it.
You also had the diplomatic side of it, where the U.S. politicians and diplomats wanted America to become a world power and world player in diplomatic affairs.
We had won the Spanish-American War.
So the U.S. was a world economic power, and they wanted to make it a world military and diplomatic power.
And so they organized the Opium Convention conference, excuse me, starting in 1909, when the whole idea was the U.S. was stepping forth and taking charge, and the issue was controlling the opium trade.
And when it was coming around for, you know, final passage and all that stuff, the U.S. hadn't done anything domestically to control the opium trade.
And so this Harrison Narcotic Act was quickly put together and passed in December of 1914.
So you had the diplomatics and warmongers on the one side and racists and bigots on the other hand.
Nobody was really truly concerned with addicts and the care of addicts and drug abuse and things of that nature.
It wasn't that at all.
It was racism, bigotry and warmongering.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting that, you know, we're all raised, I think, I mean, I learned in government school about how prohibition just didn't work.
It could have never worked.
And they realized that it was the wrong thing to try to do.
And so corrected their terrible mistake when it came to prohibition of alcohol.
But I guess when it comes to so-called illicit drugs, the thing of it is, is it's such a small percentage of the population, whoever does cocaine.
Well, and especially the ones who can afford black market powder cocaine are always rich and white enough to not have to go to jail anyway.
It's not there, you know, doesn't become a problem for them.
But but, you know, otherwise, society wide, nobody really has a positive connection to anyone who's a recreational heroin user or whatever.
You know what I mean?
It's a very marginalized part of society.
And so everyone else just doesn't care what happens to them, no matter if the economics of prohibition are just as stupid as the economics of alcohol prohibition.
When it comes to heroin, they're not the ones being affected.
They're not the ones having to sneak out to a speakeasy and be afraid of having to go to jail to go get a drink.
And so they don't really care.
Yeah.
And, you know, the fact that the population that is consumed in illegal drugs is relatively small and it hasn't really changed much over time.
It has gotten bigger during the war on drugs, but it's not like the majority of the people have actually experienced these drugs.
And so they're very susceptible to propaganda.
And basically, if you go back through the last 100 years, what you're going to hear and see is a lot of propaganda.
And, you know, they had the reefer madness campaign, which put out posters and movies and fed journalists stories that were patently untrue regarding the impact of marijuana on the consumers.
And it was said that marijuana could kill you, that marijuana would cause you to be violent.
And that, you know, all sorts of things that marijuana would make people want to rape other people, you know, just horrific stories about what marijuana does.
And and they use that to pass the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
Now, we'll pick up on the other side of this break with that, because I want to ask you about that.
But shades of this just in the recent crisis, Mike Brown was high on marijuana and it bulked up to run through the bullets with its demonic powers, said Darren Wilson in front of the grand jury and got away with murder.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
Goddang breaks interrupting my interviews.
I'm talking with Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute, Mises dot org, where they understand economics for real, not a bunch of nonsense.
To get back to the the thing about the domestic police state here, the war on drugs in the United States.
And of course, if you're a member of a minority group in America, it sure as hell looks like a race war to you or the white majority and their cops and their state against black and brown minorities.
Look at the prison statistics, as you say in your your article here.
There's just no way around around the fact of it.
But here's what I'm not seeing in the midst of this giant crisis over Mike Brown and Eric Garner and these massive country nationwide protests against police abuse.
I don't see black ministers and black civil rights leaders saying we have to legalize drugs.
And I know why.
It's because their ministers for crying out loud and ministers don't want to legalize drugs.
That's like saying drugs are OK.
And so my question for you, really, if I can finally put this rant in the form of a question mark, is is what can the Mises Institute do?
What can you guys do to get the what can libertarians do if you can advise the rest of us to to make it OK for people to go ahead, drop the moralizing and make the economic argument that you know what crack is devastating to a neighborhood crack plus a local police force war on the crack trade is worse by 10.
And we have to just stop it.
And there's some progress on pot.
But the idea of just polite people in polite society saying legalize heroin, empty the prisons, legalize cocaine, let them do cocaine if they want to.
No one's brave enough to say that in polite society yet.
It's the only answer to the problem of the militarization and the victimization of the people by the militarized police in this country is the the war on drugs and slowly beginning to legalize a little bit of weed, you know, is is not cutting is what I'm trying to get at.
But so what can be done to get this message across to the leaders who need to put it at the top of their list of demands?
You know what I mean?
I know exactly what you mean, Scott.
But let's be clear in the audience.
Marijuana does not make people violent.
It makes them nonviolent.
And this war on drugs has been about racism and bigotry and controlling minorities from the very beginning.
And it's the same way today.
You know, if you look at the black, white and Hispanic populations, they all smoke marijuana at about the same rates.
And they also use hard drugs at about the same rates.
And yet there's about I think it's nine times the number of the relative number of African Americans in prison for drugs, six or seven times the relative number of Hispanics in prison for drugs compared to white people.
So this war on drugs was at least partially about racism and bigotry from the very beginning.
And it shows up precisely in the prison population statistics today.
And so that's a major factor that this is a racist and bigoted war that's unwinnable.
Now, as far as getting rid of the war on drugs, I'm very optimistic.
And when I say the war on drugs, I don't mean just medical marijuana and recreational marijuana.
I think we've made a lot of progress in that direction.
But when I ask people, you know, do you think it's an effective way to treat or deal with addiction and drug abuse by using police officers and prison guards?
Or do you think it'd be better if you used doctors, counselors and social pressure, economic pressure to deal with the problems of addiction?
And now all the polite people of white society, if I put that question to them, they all agree now that even with the hard drugs that, you know, doctors, counselors, social pressure, economic pressure, job pressure, those are much more effective uses.
And the use of police and prison guards is completely unaffected.
It doesn't work at all.
It's like burning, you know, it's effectively one professor said early on when he looked at the early drug war, which wasn't that big, he said, this is the same sort of treatment that people did when they burned witches at the stake.
You know, that's about the same type of treatment they're getting.
And I would also add that, you know, at the Institute, we, of course, have been fighting this battle since the very beginning.
There's now a lot of other groups that have joined in, including law enforcement against prohibition.
And even Pat Robertson, the Reverend Pat Robertson, the white Reverend Evangelical Pat Robertson says that we need to end this war on drugs and that we have to specifically legalize marijuana.
So I think we're at the point now where the vast majority of Americans certainly want medical marijuana legalized.
They want marijuana legalized for recreational purposes, and they want some other way of dealing with the harder drugs, such as the medical approach or the commercialization approach.
So I'm optimistic.
Yeah, well, that's good.
I sure like to hear optimistic words along those lines.
I used to think that back in 2008 and 2012, when Ron Paul was running, that he should have, you know, got his people to somehow call together as big a meeting of black Protestant ministers as he could possibly get together in one place and preach to them the Austrian economics case against prohibition.
And, of course, work in a lot of argument about how legalizing it is not the same as saying it's OK.
It's the furthest thing from that.
It's just a recognition of reality here.
And this needs to become at the top of y'all's priorities.
The more conservative you are, the more against drugs you are, the more against the drug war you need to be.
We need a real change.
Like you said, hey, if Pat Robertson can get this straight, which he took it back because someone said, yeah, but I knew a guy who had a problem with drugs one time.
And he said, oh, a problem with drugs.
Oh, whoops.
I didn't mean to make sense for a minute there and took it back.
But anyway, if he could do it for a minute, then, you know, rational people, especially people representing the quite unfairly, as you mentioned, burdened black community ought to be able to put this front and center.
And that's the only thing that's really going to make the changes for people who, like Ron Paul, are so square that you know that this guy has never even I think he even said he's not even sure if he's ever smelled marijuana before.
He's the perfect guy to make that kind of case.
Same thing for all the black Protestant ministers.
They're the perfect guys to make the case that the war on drugs is destroying our communities worse than the drugs.
So stop it now.
Yeah.
And the economic case, Scott, that I've been making for a long time is that it's the war on drugs itself, law enforcement, putting people in jail, putting smugglers and dealers at risk of going to jail and having all sorts of penalties on them.
That's what makes them want to smuggle and sell highly potent marijuana.
And that's what makes them want to switch from dealing in marijuana to dealing with things like cocaine, crack, heroin, methamphetamines, and ecstasy and other drugs that are smaller and more compact.
And when people hear that, I mean, if I can get to talk to 300 billion people, eventually everybody's going to get the idea that the worst excesses in drug abuse in our society, the overdoses, the emergency room visits, the deterioration of your health and mental status, all of that is primarily driven by the war on drugs itself.
If we had companies, firms, Walmart, Bayer, the drug pharmaceutical companies making and selling these products, they couldn't put out deadly products.
Otherwise, they'd be sued and lose the billions of dollars.
And so I'm working on right now trying to show people what the free market would look like if we legalized all the drugs, including the hard drugs.
Well, just think about the life of a drug addict, too, where, you know, take the best case scenario.
Somebody had a terrible injury, an auto accident or something, and they're in terrible pain and they were on good painkillers in the hospital.
Then they got kicked right out of the hospital and then they ended up hooked on heroin, something like that.
Well, so now you're talking about somebody who's just a normal person who's being forced to participate in a drug underworld and all this criminality when, in fact, he could just go to Walgreens and get some heroin or get some, you know, whatever opiate in a brown paper bag, and it could have stapled to it a flyer for like, hey, man, if you're really addicted to this stuff and you're hitting rock bottom, call this number and we can help you.
I mean, why in the world should somebody, just because they have a drug problem doesn't mean they're a bad person, doesn't mean that they should force to have to deal with bad people.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And so-called regular people now are finding themselves in that position where they get cut off from the Oxycontin and the Vicodin and then they realize they can't possibly afford $30 a pill in the black market.
And so they said, well, give me some heroin.
It's only $5 and it'll get me through.
And then they end up getting on heroin.
Yeah.
And that is, that is- Hey, true story, man.
That happens a lot.
That happens a lot.
I remember seeing this, the one episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I ever saw.
Oh, we're going to hunt this bastard down.
Oh, we're going to hunt this dog down.
Rah, rah, rah.
And then they get him and it's just some poor Joe who got hooked on heroin because of his chronic pain.
That's all.
It's just some guy, you know?
And then even Dog the Bounty Hunter is like, well, sorry, I'm still taking you to jail.
But I guess I realize now that, sorry, I roughed you up so bad there.
He seemed like a decent guy, blah, blah.
But it's, anyway, just a small, a small slice of, you know, I got one, one small anecdote for you here too.
I had a science teacher in high school who would go out and break the law every night providing clean needles to drug addicts in Austin, Texas.
And he could have gotten real trouble for it.
But he would go out there and he'd be like, look, guys, I'm a biologist, okay?
Let me tell you about HIV.
This is a serious thing.
Please use these clean needles.
And he would give them all needles as best as he could.
And he would tell us about it.
And it was like, you know, it's like the kind of thing that somebody talking about an underground magazine in Eastern Germany, in East Germany during communism or something, right?
The secret mission to go give clean needles to addicts to prevent the spread of AIDS in our society.
And, you know, Scott, there's a million sad stories out there just like that.
And most Americans don't know it.
And if they did, and if they thought about it hard enough, I think that they'd realize that what we, what we've done in this country, they're going to look back in a hundred years and they're going to look at us and say, these were some of the most bizarre creatures that have ever inhabited this planet.
And so full of themselves.
It's so full of the notion that they think that they could, you know, obliterate addiction by using police and prison guards.
And we're going to look pretty, pretty bad in historical retrospect, because the war on drugs is going to be lost.
And we are going to get our freedom back.
It's, in my opinion, only a matter of time that we'll realize that what a stupid thing we've done, what a harmful thing we've done, and something we can never, ever be forgiven for.
All right, y'all.
That's Mark Thornton.
He's at Mises.org, the Mises Institute for Austrian Economics.
The article is called The War on Drugs was born a hundred years ago.
And there's also text of a great interview here with the Mises Institute, an international view of drug prohibition about his debate at Oxford University at the Oxford Union Debates, which is also great.
So thanks very much, Mark, for coming back on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
I promise we'll get to Harry Anslinger and the rest of those guys the next time.
Thanks, Kyle.
I enjoyed it a great deal.
And yeah, do check out that.
Thanks for the plug of the article and of the interview of the Oxford Union Debates.
Yeah, absolutely.
By the way, is there video of the debate itself now?
No, we'll have to do a whole show on that.
The mystery of the debate.
Ah, the mystery of the debate.
All right.
Maybe next week.
Let's catch up.
Sounds great, Scott.
Take care.
Thanks, Mark.
Appreciate it.
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