Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, man.
So on the line, I got the great Sheldon Richman.
How's it going, Sheldon?
Things are going pretty good, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Cool.
Every Friday morning we talk because every Friday morning you publish an article.
TGIF, the goal is freedom.
That's what it stands for.
Get it?
And this one, you got a great big picture of Thomas Sawes on there.
And the title is Who Owns You?
So here's some pretty serious libertarianism.
And as it pertains to what exactly?
Well, the title really gets at the essence of it.
The ultimate question is who owns you?
Do we believe in self-ownership?
Do we believe that each of us is sort of owned collectively by society, the nation, the government, whatever term you want to use, the state?
And we need to keep this in mind because the wrong answer, namely some kind of public ownership or state ownership of us, informs so much public policy that we take it for granted.
We don't really understand that that's the premise for lots of things that go on.
Tom Sass, by the way, whose dates are 1920 to 2012, I think is the most unappreciated, underestimated libertarian ever.
He was born in Hungary.
That's a Hungarian name, S-Z-A-S-Z, which he pronounced Sass.
He told me it was like Saskatchewan, so Sass.
Most people say Zas or something like that.
I used to say Zas until I got to know him and spent a lot of time talking to him.
He was born in Hungary, came to the United States at age 18, so quite a while ago, went to college, went to medical school, was a physician, was a psychiatrist, was a practicing psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a professor of psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, New York for many, many years before retiring there and then dying in 2012.
So he was the foremost critic of the medical state alliance or complex, we might call it, sort of a parallel to the military-industrial complex, the medical state alliance, which includes right at the center of it, psychiatry, because psychiatry has long had, institutional psychiatry has long had the government power, political power to confine people against their will, drug them against their will.
Lobotomize them, electroshock them, a whole list of things that would sound like torture in any other context.
And Tom was right there beginning in the late 50s through, I don't know, 50 books, hundreds of articles, including articles in popular forums like Reason and the old Inquiry magazine, and I published a column of his.
I started, I kind of midwifed a column of his in the Freeman for many years.
Through all these articles and interviews, whatnot, he was a critic of this complex, this medical psychiatry state complex, because on the grounds that it violates liberty, things that we would never, you know, incursions into our liberty that we would never put up with if they were presented as with religious justifications or with simply moral justifications, we readily put up with when they're given medical justifications.
And Tom objected to this.
You know, doctors may have their expertise in what's good for a body, what's bad for a body, et cetera, but that doesn't give them moral expertise on what ought to be legal or illegal, what behaviors ought to be legal or what substances ought to be legal or illegal.
That's not their field.
They can say, oh, if you use substance X, you know, you might damage your health, you might hurt your liver, you might hurt your heart or whatever.
Okay.
That that's within doctor's expertise, but it's not within their special expertise to say, therefore, the government ought to restrict its use, outlaw it, or, you know, whatnot, et cetera.
That's what I tried to restate in this piece, because the public health justification for violations of our liberty imply that we don't belong to ourselves, that we belong to, like I said, the collective society, the state, et cetera.
All right.
Now, so you go on for a bit to paraphrasing him or explaining his position about how, in a sense, the therapeutic state and I guess the medical government partnership of authority here really supplanted the church and its authority in many ways, including kind of in its rights and traditions and its more perverse sacraments, in a sense.
Right.
And he wrote lots of books and articles on this subject, the parallels between the theological state and the therapeutic state.
The therapeutic state is the term he came up with, I think, in 62 or 63 for this complex I'm talking about, where the state's goal now is not our spiritual well-being, which was sort of the theocratic mission, right, to look after our spiritual health, make sure we got into heaven and avoided sin.
The therapeutic state looks after our physical and mental health.
And that was put in scientific terms in light of the modern age, sort of the post-theocratic, post-religious age.
You couldn't talk that way politically.
So the same kind of people who wanted power over you now took off the clerical gown and put on the doctor's white coat.
And so very similar things now are defended on the grounds that it's for the public health, public mental health, public physical health.
And he's got a book, he had really excellent work showing the parallel between the old witch hunts and the confinement of people branded mentally ill who had violated no rights, never violated anybody's rights, but were disturbing to other people, the people around them.
And so were locked up, and he showed the similarity between that practice and the witch hunts, where there was, you know, an old woman would be accused of being a witch because she was a little odd, perhaps, or she liked to maybe mix her own kinds of tea at home, and they accused her of being involved in, you know, making poisons and stuff like that.
And she'd be—well, she'd actually be killed.
We got a little more enlightened.
We didn't kill people, although people were pretty badly treated in mental institutions for a very long time, until finally, with Tom's—some of it because of Tom's work, the laws were changed, and it has become harder over the years to lock people up in mental institutions.
However, that doesn't mean it's all over, because judges can still order people to do, you know, outpatient stuff and be drugged on the threat that if they don't agree to do it, they'll go to prison.
So, you know, how good is that agreement if the alternative is you'll go to prison?
And we've seen this in the area of drugs.
There was no more radical critic of the war on drugs than Thomas Sasse.
He wrote two books called—the second one, Our Right to Drugs, The Case for the Free Market, and the first one was called Ceremonial Chemistry, The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers.
Two very good books I recommend.
The Ritual Persecution of them.
That's interesting.
We kind of create rituals around the things we enjoy doing.
And so his point about the wars on drugs, the war on drugs, is it's not about the chemistry of the drug, the pharmacology of the drug, because there are plenty of dangerous things which are perfectly legal.
I mean, alcohol, except for prohibition, alcohol and prohibition, you know, really didn't work out too well because culturally people really didn't buy it.
So alcohol's allowed, but, you know, marijuana until recently wasn't allowed.
That's loosening up.
But other drugs are not being allowed.
And now with the turn against the—full turn against tobacco and nicotine, that's now retracing the steps perhaps of alcohol.
So what determines what drug is damned and what drug is blessed, Tom says, has nothing to do with the chemistry.
It has to do with the ceremony.
And involved in the ceremony is who uses it.
So, you know, the original prohibitions on drugs, opium was directed at the Chinese, marijuana directed at Latinos, and to some extent Blacks.
Heroin was racially motivated.
I mean, he goes through this.
He documents this in the book.
And that's not news.
I mean, other people have written about this.
Those laws have racist origins.
And so it's the ceremony, not the chemistry, that dictates what's legal, what's not legal, what's approved, what's not approved.
It's not about what's dangerous.
Are you a libertarian?
You run an IT business?
Well, then you have to read No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
No dev, no ops, no IT.
It's how to run your computer company like a libertarian should.
I mean, we think of America as a somewhat open society and that kind of thing.
But boy, this happens to you and you're living in North Korea, the totalitarian state.
I mean, it's been a while since I've heard a story like this, but I have no reason to believe that this kind of thing has stopped either.
Because there were plenty of horror stories of people getting their children taken away because the school wants to give their kids Ritalin.
And the parents say, no, we don't think that Johnny is mentally ill and needs to be prescribed psychoactive drugs just to sit in your English class.
And they say, oh, well, you're now neglectful because you're outside of the ruling of this cult of the expert.
It's sort of like, if I could just say one more thing about it, it's like in Radley Balko's work about the bite mark analysis, where somewhere along the line, a court ruled that, look, these guys know what they're talking about.
So in essence, from now on, they don't have to show you.
They just have to tell you that this is my expert opinion.
And you have to take that as a fact.
And they don't even have to even demonstrate that the teeth match.
Lady, let me show you how they do to the jury.
Right.
It's that same kind of thing where these people all of a sudden and none of them elected anything.
Right.
They're all appointed to boards of whatever the hell.
And they have essentially total overlord power over the citizenry.
Yeah.
Locking people up and committing them.
I mean, that's just one thing.
Right.
Look, court after court declares, and it's so common that it doesn't even raise any eyebrows.
Court after court will declare that the government, the state has a what they call a significant interest or sometimes compelling interest in such and such.
And, you know, therefore, we're going to defer to a regulatory agency or, you know, the Congress to pass some law which violates liberty.
In other words, they're saying the government can violate.
We believe in liberty.
They'll say we believe in liberty.
We live in the Bill of Rights.
Yes, yes, yes.
Except we will recognize limits on liberty when the government has a significant interest in public health.
Well, that opens the floodgates because you can argue all kinds of things affect this vague, vague term, the public health.
And of course, the more they socialize health care, the more now you're responsible to everyone else.
I mean, I remember back 25 years ago, they had I think maybe they eventually repealed this or maybe the state legislature repealed this.
But in Austin, they had a bicycle helmet law.
Yeah.
And the argument for it was, look, if you hit your head, you're going to go to the public hospital and we're all going to have to pay for it.
And no one said, yeah, but that's your fault for being a communist.
Not my fault for hitting my head.
Well, and Sass was arguing against this pre-Medicare.
So, right.
It's an old argument.
And look, we see it today in the case of the FDA's and private organizations crusade against smoking.
They won't.
In addition to all the other things they say, one of the things they say is the cost to the public or to the economy is immense because smokers take more sick days and they die, you know, they die earlier, 10, 15 years earlier on average, which means we lose productive years and days because of their smoking.
Like your battery in the Matrix, you know.
I'm sorry.
Look, it may be a good idea not to smoke cigarettes.
I don't smoke cigarettes and I would advise people against smoking cigarettes.
The evidence is pretty, pretty strong.
But not because, you know, a smoker owes me his productive time and I'm being deprived of if he smokes and gets sick or dies.
That's not an argument.
That's a collectivist argument.
That sounds like the Nazis or the Bolsheviks, where they claim, you know, the public and therefore the public's health was the property of the state and therefore the state could protect that in the name of serving the people.
That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard.
That smokers, how dare smokers smoke.
They're depriving us of GDP.
You know, and if I was a cigarette smoker, I'd say go to hell.
I don't owe you.
I don't owe you anything.
Yeah.
Well, you know, though, I mean, if anything, nobody ever really teaches the young about this.
Right.
This isn't even they don't explicitly instruct you to be a Nazi commie when you're in school, but it's just sort of all this is just kind of implied.
And they're certain no one is ever exposed to this libertarian unified field theory of liberty that would show why this, that and the other idea are unjustifiable and immoral to even do.
People come at it from the point of view that that's what it means to live in a democracy.
Whatever your point of view is, whatever your opinion is, you work to make that the law to force everyone else to go along.
And then they also work to pass and inflict their laws against you because fair is fair.
And that's what we're all doing here.
And that's what counts as freedom is, is having a share of the power.
Sometimes you feel like.
That that's presented as entirely consistent with, you know, what we think of as sort of the American American way, the idea that individuals have freedom.
And this goes back to a great essay written by a liberal libertarian of the 19th century, early 19th century, France, Benjamin Constant, or a famous essay, which you can find online called the liberty of the ancients compared to the liberty of the moderns.
And he said, you know, throughout our history, there have been these two senses of liberty.
The ancient model was what you just said, you were free if you had a say in the making of public policy.
You know, in other words, you could vote, you can speak up, you can go to meetings, that's your say.
But once the vote happens or once and whether it's a representative or whether you're voting directly, once the vote happens, then you can't complain that you're not free, no matter what the outcome of the vote is, because you had input.
That's the ancient.
Drink that hemlock.
The property you've honestly acquired.
That's the modern version of liberty.
But today, so many people's notion of liberty is this ancient notion, just like you said, well, I'm free.
I get to vote, don't I?
I can speak up about what policy I don't like.
I can go to a meeting.
I can lobby.
That's, but that's the extent of freedom, apparently, because once the vote is in, no matter how much it might violate individual liberty, tough luck.
You had your say and you lost.
That's the way the game goes.
And by the way, that's not liberty.
But they attacked this couple and killed them both.
And I think one of the cops was shot, but not killed.
And as Balco put it, they're clearly the aggressor in the situation.
And I forget the exact numbers, but it was, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 or something of these things a week in Houston.
All they do is just serve warrants all day long on people suspected of possessing prohibited substances, prohibited because they make you feel funny, essentially, which is fine if you're drinking whiskey all the way till you black out.
No problem there.
But if you're doing whichever drugs are on their ban list, they will knock your door down.
They'll send in essentially a sheriff's department's version of a special operations team, just like a night raid in Afghanistan.
And they all just all day long.
That's what they do.
What do you expect the SWAT team to do?
Wait around for someone to rob a bank and take a bunch of hostages?
They're out there looking for work.
And it's again, if you're on the receiving end of this, then you can't call that freedom in any sense.
That is, it's you're on the receiving end, essentially, of lawlessness on the part of the government at that point.
It's ceremonial chemistry.
Drugs are, you know, to be a drug user is to be a heretic in the culture, in the modern culture.
And so they have to be rooted out and almost any means is appropriate to rooting out this heresy, just like any means of finding out who's a witch and punishing or testing a witch.
It really is that perverted and essentially stupid.
George Bush's drug czar, the great, great conservative educator, once said it was we should be shooting planes out of the air when we think they're coming back from Latin America carrying drugs, private planes.
I mean, there's not, you know, they praised, I've seen Americans appraised, you know, the Chinese for, you know, their policy of summary execution.
If you got caught on the street with drugs.
Yeah, Trump has talked like that, that that's what we ought to do.
That'll teach him.
There's the clue.
There's, there's the clue.
First of all, about the ceremonial chemistry idea.
Any means is no, nothing is too much too far too extreme in rooting out heresy, but let's keep something in mind.
And this again is entirely Sassian point.
Drugs don't get into your body on their own accord, right?
You have to take drugs, you have to take a drug.
There are very few cases where someone is drugged compulsorily except by psychiatrists under the auspices of the state.
Very few people who use marijuana or heroin or any of the illegal drugs encountered them through a compulsory, you know, administration of the drug, right?
Somebody knocked you on the head and shot you up in order to get you to be a customer.
That doesn't happen.
So the drug gets into your body because you try it.
And people's first experience with drugs, this was certainly true of most kids and cigarettes, is to get sick.
It's not a pleasant experience.
So the question is, why do you go back the second time?
This, the answer is ceremonial, not chemical.
This is Tom's point.
So you got to be very suspicious where something is considered so evil, where it doesn't where on the face of it, it doesn't violate anybody's rights, that, you know, no means are too extreme in rooting it out.
This is this is heresy hunting.
This is religion.
This is theocracy in scientific guys.
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All right.
Now, on the other hand, heroin is really bad for you.
And I was reading the thing the other day about how men, they're just it's an epidemic of people addicted to heroin just laying around on the damn street in the middle of the road with a syringe hanging out of their arm in San Francisco.
And they're everywhere.
And apparently they got nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
And they're killing themselves.
And it is a public health crisis, Sheldon.
And so who's going to do something about that?
I recommend everybody read a book by Jacob Solem, who is an extremely good journalist with Reason Magazine, also a syndicated columnist for many years.
He's got some very good books, but read this one particular book called Saying Yes.
And so this book starts off this way.
There are lots of excellent books condemning the war on drugs and all of the unintended consequences, the black market, the corruption, etc.
He says this is going to be a different.
But as we said, but all those books begin with.
Now, I'm not saying use drugs.
Drugs are terrible, but there's something worse than drugs.
The war on drugs.
Solem says, I'm not starting my book that way.
And here's why.
And this is an empirical work, this book.
In other words, he talked to people.
He talked to all kinds of people.
He said, my book is based on the idea that any drug you can name, including every illegal drug, is being used somewhere responsibly by a whole bunch of people.
The reason you never hear about them is because since it's illegal, they're not broadcasting it.
But they're not in alleys.
They're not dying of overdoses.
They're not robbing stores or mugging people because they're using it, any given drug, responsibly the way people use vodka or gin or scotch on a weekend or on an evening responsibly.
They're paying their bills.
They're taking care of their families.
They're living in their communities in nice houses, you know, clean houses.
So you don't hear about them.
The only people you hear about are the people you just mentioned, Scott.
Right.
The part of the person who is found strung out or dead of an overdose, etc., which, of course, is a black market phenomenon, because when you're buying in the black market, you don't always know what you're getting.
It could be laced with something, you know, especially deadly.
Which seems to be the case with a lot of the overdoses now that it's not just adulterated heroin, but it's adulterated with fentanyl.
And so people are misjudging on the low end in a really bad way.
I don't know if that's the right way to describe it, but they end up shooting away more than they meant to with a misunderstanding of how potent the shot is.
And part of the reason is because of the FDA, doctors are scared to prescribe painkillers to people who need painkillers to the extent that they need them.
And so people will sometimes go into the black market to get what they can't get in a more legitimate way because the FDA is looking over the shoulders of legitimate physicians.
And by the way, that's some huge percentage of it, right?
Like there are people who abuse heroin because they had a terrible, abusive childhood or something.
And then there are people who were severely injured in a car wreck and they got hooked in the hospital.
And then their cousin said, I know a guy who can help you now that the doctor made you go cold turkey.
And then so they end up doing heroin, you know, in the black market.
And then, as you're saying, increasing the risk of overdose and all that.
And it's some huge double digit percentage.
I don't know, maybe half.
But according to Jeff Singer, who's a surgeon in Arizona, is also libertarian, but a surgeon and knows quite a bit about opioids.
And Solomon has written about this, too.
It's a very tiny percentage that, you know, broke their arm or had had severe back pain, was given a prescription for opioids.
And then as a result of that, became hooked and went out into the black market.
Most of the cases are people that were never prescribed opioids.
They either maybe took them from they were using other drugs, young people who were using other drugs and took them from their parents medicine cabinet and then went out in the black market to get more or, you know, cases of that nature.
It's a very tiny percentage, like one percent or something like that, where people get properly given opioids by a doctor after some kind of accident or injury.
And then get hooked by that.
That's not the big problem.
The big problem is really just, you know, the black market.
And plus the way the government is trying to make legal opioids tamper proof.
People then have to go into the black market, then go to the black market and start using heroin, which often does have fentanyl in it, which is a super powerful form.
And they get into trouble that way.
So it's not that's manufactured in factories here.
But as far as heroin goes, essentially 100 percent of the heroin is processed in most of it, I guess, in Mexico, but otherwise in other areas of Latin America, maybe some of the American supplies coming from Afghanistan as well.
And there doesn't seem to be any lack of supply after decades of fighting the war on terrorism, the government fighting the war on that basis, that we are going to prevent people from importing this stuff.
And I mean, all they can do is is try harder, because you're saying raise the white flag.
Look, it's a big mistake to think you're going to improve things by driving the an industry underground.
All that means is that the legitimate sort of market based quality control is going to be much less effective because it's not above board.
People have to be afraid they're going to you know, the cops are looking or they're going to get caught as an undercover agent.
And so you end up turning the trade over to thugs and there's going to be serious quality control issues and so uncertain supplies.
So I don't see how you claim you're going to make something better by driving something underground.
That just makes no sense.
It's as almost as if the government is simply licensing organized crime to make this thing rather than have it be made by, you know, just legitimate people openly in a free market.
Right.
And by the way, you know, you hear all the time, if you look at, you know, any kind of real critical discussion of the drug war, you'll see people say, wow, as soon as someone that I personally know and care about had a problem with this drug, I realized that, oh, you're actually not a witch after all that.
You know, it's the same kind of thing.
Like these right wing politicians who find out their son is gay and now all of a sudden they don't hate gay people, even though that's all they've done is build a career off of demonizing strangers.
Now that that applies to their own family.
They see the light and this kind of thing.
Although I don't mean to be too cynical about it.
I guess the real point is they realize that.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, sometimes it's their mom or their dad, not just their son or their daughter.
Right.
So anyway, I mean, that's the whole thing about it.
The reality versus the ceremony, as you're talking about here.
And I guess that's my problem is I know I should look at it more in these Jungian ways.
It sounds like you're coming at it from.
Well, you know, I want to make this point, which, again, is Tom's point that the drug taking is behavior, drug take, you know, the government and the official outlets and all on this subject say that drug taking is a disease.
And they say they'll even say, you know, smoking is a disease.
Well, smoking is an activity.
Drug taking is an activity.
An activity isn't a disease.
Some activities can lead to disease.
Yes.
You drink too much.
You're going to hurt your liver.
You smoke cigarettes.
You may well get lung cancer.
So an activity behavior can lead to disease.
But behavior is not a disease.
Behavior is a volitional activity.
It has reasons, not causes.
So it's definitely true.
Somebody can, you know, overuse, you know, use in excess a substance that may end up harming that person.
But the reason for it is not in the chemistry of the substance.
It's in the person.
It's people that are habit forming, not things.
And so people have problems and sometimes turn to booze or something to cope with problems.
I'm not saying that's a good thing.
They should try to work out their problems, get advice, get, you know, find some sort of solution, because, you know, a booze or kind of booze or drugs may not be probably not going to be the solution.
But that's what Tom called a problem in living, not a mental illness, not a physical illness.
It's a problem in living.
We ought to think of it that way, which is, number one, a more humane way to approach it.
You don't call in the cops because someone has a problem in living.
You show some compassion.
If you can be of help, you try to be of help.
Maybe you make a suggestion.
Go talk to so-and-so.
They're good at working out problems like this.
You know, Jeffrey Shaler has a book.
He's a psychologist.
It's sort of in the SAS tradition.
Addiction is a choice.
And he reports in there how at the end, as the war in Vietnam was winding down, there was concern among the military that because so many American GIs were using heroin in Vietnam, they were, you know, the treatment centers back in the United States for them to use heroin.
For them to get off heroin, we're going to be overloaded.
So they've invested a lot of money opening new facilities, getting ready for them.
A very tiny number showed up because most of the people that were using heroin over there stopped it when they came back and resumed their old lives.
I mean, in Vietnam, don't forget, their life alternated between terror and boredom.
And so people turned to drugs.
And heroin was sort of a drug of choice, I guess, was readily available, maybe thanks to the CIA.
I don't know.
When they got back here, most of them just said, I'm out of there.
I have a new life now.
Or I either pick up my old life or I can start a new.
And there was very little demand for, you know, detox and rehab.
So it's not just, I mean, we look at people as if they were robots, right?
And so there's a cause rather than a reason.
There's a cause for what they do.
So then we demonize drugs.
And then, you know, then we demonize the drug user again as a heretic.
And then what follows from that is a terrible situation.
Because, you know, when you have victim laws against so-called victimless crimes, there's usually not a complaining witness, right?
If one person sells heroin to another person, the two people have no reason to go to the cops, right?
It's a willing exchange.
They both expect the benefit from the exchange.
So nobody's complaining.
Well, that means the cops have to figure out a way to witness those things.
And so you get informants and undercover agents and all the violations of civil liberties that come with those things.
It's just a rotten deal all around.
Yeah, all the vices that come with a vice squad, for sure.
Okay, but so is there some kind of weird religious sort of ceremony for calling off some stupidity like this?
I mean, again, you know, this couple got shot the other day and they're dead.
And this happens all the time.
All the time.
You know, after Waco, it's like never again.
The only thing unique about Waco is that there was a standoff that lasted six weeks or whatever.
I guess, in other words, that the Davidians won the first round and the cops had to retreat after they mercilessly attacked in the first place.
But usually, Waco raids go just fine.
The cops just bust right in and terrorize the hell out of everybody and you're lucky if you don't get shot.
And this happens, I think Waco again has reported this 50,000 times a year.
So that's 1000 SWAT raids a week in America.
1000, which just sounds unreal.
But I trust his journalism on that, assuming I'm paraphrasing him right, I'm pretty damn sure I am.
And that is an extreme level of violence and not all those people are getting shot.
But still, that happens to your family.
It's way over the line.
We have to change people's minds.
And of course, we can take some hope from the fact that attitudes have changed about marijuana.
We have several states that have, you know, certainly there are restrictions and taxes, but they generally allow recreational use or other states that allow medical use, but some have gone from medical to recreational use.
So there's been some progress there.
And, you know, Portugal legalized all drugs.
Glenn Greenwald has written about this.
They did it over a decade ago, and they don't have any massive problems of, you know, nobody's going to work anymore because they're always strung out on drugs.
It didn't happen.
And so there we can see some hope.
It's going to take longer with what we call hard drugs in the United States because the progress with marijuana has been slower, but we can still see some progress.
We need to keep talking about this.
We need to demystify, de-demonize drugs, which I realize is a hard sell.
But Sullivan wrote his book, you know, some years ago.
It's not a brand new book.
He had the courage to do this saying drugs per se are not bad.
It's like a hammer is not bad.
You know, it can be used in a bad way.
You can bash someone's head in.
You can bash your own head in.
That might be hard, but you could do that.
But the hammer per se is not bad.
And so we need to talk more like that.
If we aid in promoting the view that these are sort of demons that jump out of alleys and capture our children or capture us, then we're not helping the cause of freedom.
Well, and even on the issue of just pot, you know, if you really want to help the heroin crisis, you know, replace heroin with really good weed and for people who are suffering chronic pain and that kind of thing.
And then you reduce their chance of overdose to zero.
The only way to die from pot is to get shot by a cop.
But if they just outright legalize pot, you'd see, you know, I think there's already been statistics like this, right?
Overdoses in Colorado have gone way, way down.
It's like drunk driving has gone way, way down.
People still smoking on the couch.
I think it may have been something on an article lately who mentioned that with the increasing availability of legal marijuana in the United States, the flow of harder drugs has fallen across the Mexican border, I think it was.
And so I think there's something to that.
If people can openly get marijuana, they won't be so maybe curious about other stuff.
You know, I have no desire to use heroin or cocaine or any of the things you can name.
I don't use marijuana either.
But I have no desire to, I don't drink vodka.
I have no desire to drink vodka or single malt scotch, which I hear people, you know, sing the praises of as if it were the elixir from the gods.
Maybe it is.
Or bourbon or any of that stuff that people love to have.
So I don't use any of that.
Even responsibly.
You choose your poison.
Look, life is not risk free.
Almost anything you can think of is risky, like getting in a bathtub.
How many people die in bed?
So I guess the answer there is don't go to bed.
So, you know, choose your poison, be intelligent about it, do some reading.
But we got to leave people alone.
The government holds out this fake promise of a risk free society.
And it's going to commit all kinds of horrors in its alleged attempts to achieve it.
So here's a case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease.
Yep.
Well, and it seems like there's an infinite number of them.
You know, in the first interview I did in the Philip Drew interviews in 2003, it was Alan Bach and I asked him, you know, whether he was really an anarchist or some kind of minarchist or what.
And he's like, well, you know, kind of depends on the day.
But mostly, you know, the question is, is government causing more violence than it prevents?
I think the answer to that is pretty clear.
And of course, this is the most disruptive force in our society.
The state, our so-called security force, is the cause of so many of our, you know, tensions and contentions and embedded violence in everything.
It's crazy.
People need to ask that question.
Is this a cure worse than this so-called disease?
They don't do that.
They just sort of take it on the faith that the government has its interest and its health at heart.
And what I try to do in this piece is to get people to question that very premise.
You know, when we say the government has a compelling interest in the public's health, who's the government?
The government's not some mystical entity or, you know, justice dispensing machine.
It's a group of people.
It's a group of men and women.
And boy, compelling interest.
That just sounds like a general warrant, as general as one could be almost, right?
Look, it's people.
They're mortal.
They're fallible.
They're flawed.
They're egotistical.
They want big budgets.
They want prestige.
They want big staffs.
They want bigger missions.
They're not some sort of, you know, public-spirited, all-knowing, all-wise, all-good saints who we can trust to be doing, you know, good for us.
And so we don't even need to watch what they do very closely because we know they're out for us.
That's what we mean when we say the state or the government.
So I think everybody should laugh anytime they hear the government has a compelling or significant interest in public health.
You know, you should always say, tell me what that means.
That's a big, airy abstraction.
Tell me what that means.
Who's the government?
How do those people know what's in my interest?
Well, and you know, there's this example this morning on your same subject that we've been talking about lately with the pipes and the FDA regulating nicotine and tobacco products and all of this, where even though there's widespread agreement that, you know, the invention of the vape pen has resulted in decreases of smoking, is really helping people quit smoking and is so much safer than smoking cigarettes, that here they are.
Just like you could have prophesied, right, that they're looking after their own interests, which is finding a way to regulate this in every way that they can.
And the latest from Reason Magazine this morning was, oh, this is the FCC now.
I guess in cahoots with the FDA, that's what they mean by the government.
They want to kick vape pens off the radio, like the ban on alcohol ads on, or I guess it's cigarette ads on TV and radio.
So far, it's one member of the commission.
There's another one who just quickly spoke up against it and said, no, that violates the First Amendment.
Yes, but she, so she's only one person so far.
Let's keep an eye on it.
She says that she would like to see e-cigarette ads taken off radio and TV.
And I assume that means cable because hasn't the FCC extended itself to cable, even though that's not over the airwaves?
So on the grounds that kids are using this stuff, what's going on?
This is interesting because for years, for decades, they've been warning, don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke, it'll kill you.
So the American authorities have been going after that in the name of keeping it out of, away from children.
Lots of people have kicked smoking in Europe using these e-cigarettes when they weren't able to succeed with other nicotine substitutes like the patches and the gums.
But they're working here.
Now, Big Tobacco doesn't like it because they were afraid it's going to cut into cigarettes.
Plus, they've invested, they've done some investing in e-cigarette companies.
But they support tough regulations because they know that the small companies and most of the companies making these things are small.
They know the small companies won't be able to cope with the regulations, but they like Altria, you know, former Phil Morris, they will.
And so you'll get a couple of Big Tobacco companies making e-cigarettes, but also protecting their cigarette market.
So the whole thing stinks.
It's a tobacco, it's a government tobacco complex, just like a military industrial complex.
There's all kinds of rotten stuff going on.
And all of it is designed to impede people from finding a safer alternative to cigarettes.
Safer.
I didn't say they're 100% safe, but nothing's 100% safe.
But there's no question they're safer.
I mean, like I said, even the English, the British public health authorities agree that they're a safer alternative and lots of people have succeeded in quitting.
But the Puritans, a lot of this is Puritanism.
It's science plus Puritanism.
They don't want people enjoying themselves.
So they want to keep these things away from people who are having a difficult time quitting cigarettes.
So they don't really want to quit cigarettes.
But here's something they can do instead, where they'll still get some of the satisfaction and enjoyment, but the government's throwing obstacles in their way.
Right.
Well, and as to be expected, and in the name, again, of public health, making things worse, because that's what's better for them.
Of course, they put themselves first.
Why wouldn't they?
No, see, once they don't have the profit motive, they become angels.
That's what it means to be a government employee.
Isn't that your experience with government employees?
That they're all public-spirited angels with a higher wisdom?
They stand taller and see further into the future, as Madeleine Albright said, right?
In a strictly economic sense, they profit with bigger budgets for their bureaus, bigger staff, more prestige, more power.
That's profit.
That's psychic profit, and in many cases, money profit, because their salaries could go up.
Plus, once they leave office, they can go to work for some company in industry, you know, if they've cozied up enough, and get a cushy job or a board position.
We know about this in the armed industry, and make a lot of money that way.
So, this idea that the so-called public servants—I call them public self-servants—the idea that they're different from those of us in the free market, in the marketplace, is complete nonsense.
They are different in one way.
They face perverse incentives that people in the marketplace don't face, because they can tax.
The money they get is through taxation, in other words, through compulsory extraction, through theft.
The rest of us can't do that, and that creates perverse incentives for those people.
So, it's true.
People in the government sphere, while they're human, they differ from the rest of us in the sense that they have power, which produces perverse incentives, and we don't.
So, this idea that they're somehow sainted or better than we are, and therefore we can trust them, has no basis whatsoever.
Especially when, if you go down to your local bureaucracy office, these are people who can't get a job anywhere else in the first place, you can tell.
That's why they're there.
I know a place where you can get a job where you hardly have to do anything, but they give you a pension you wouldn't believe, because they force everybody else to fund it.
Right.
And of course, they don't face the discipline of profit and loss, which is very important, because it means that if you do face that discipline, you have to cater to consumers, to customers.
You have to be on the ball and figure out what your competition is doing, what it may do tomorrow, and what you can do today to attract customers.
And that puts you in the position where you have to attend to the interests of customers, of consumers generally.
You have to be thinking about what they find in their interest.
Well, I thought that was a good thing, to be paying attention to the interests of other people.
I thought that was regarded as a good thing.
But that's what happens in a free market if there's no privileges.
Well, and they show what they think of you, too, the way they set all these things up.
I mean, the DMV around here, for one thing, it's a government office.
There's a DMV and another couple of things.
It's in a pretty nice part of Austin, Texas.
But you go there.
It's not quite like being in prison, but it is like being in jail.
And you better get there at 6.30 in the morning to get your place in line, because there's going to be this huge line.
They're not going to have anything like the staff to take care of it all.
And probably half the people working there are cops who are standing there watching you like armed guards, like some violence is going to break out if they weren't there.
And they may be right, because that's the way that they set it up.
And you have to wait around like you don't have a job to do in the daytime.
And of course, they close before you get off of work, too.
The whole thing.
And when you're in there, they act like you're essentially, at best, like a kid in trouble at the principal's office, if not actually arrested and in their custody for the time being, while you beg them for your papers and your tax stamps and whatever.
It's crazy.
Well, we have to demystify the state.
They're just people.
And they have interests that may not necessarily line up with ours.
We need to start thinking of it that way.
And I think we'll make progress when that's a much more widely held point of view.
It's just the state.
A badge is a piece of metal.
Yeah.
All right.
Tune in next Friday, folks, when I talk over Sheldon Richman for 45 minutes.
Thank you, my friend, for coming on the show.
My pleasure.
I look forward to doing it next week.
All right, you guys.
That's Sheldon Richman, executive editor at the Libertarian Institute.
My padna there.
Libertarianinstitute.org.
And every Friday he writes TGIF.
This one is called Who Owns You?
I don't know if he meant to be that confrontational.
Maybe it was Who Owns You?
Something like that.
All right.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
