All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Jacob Sullum from Reason Magazine, Senior Editor there.
And here in a little while, we're going to be talking with Matt Welch.
You know, I don't think I've ever interviewed Matt Welch before.
But I like it.
It's the case against Trump by Welch and the case against Biden by Sullum.
So we'll start with you, Jacob.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show here.
And you're such an expert on the drug war and all this.
I could tell by reading this thing that you knew most of this off the top of your head before you went back and wrote it.
But you know what?
I actually, I have been following it for a long time.
But I had to dig back into it to find quotes from Biden going back to the 80s.
And I was actually shocked all over again by by how vociferous he was in in prosecuting the war on drugs.
I mean, I knew that as a general matter.
But when you see what he was actually saying at the time, it's really striking, especially given his his current stance.
Well, and so, yeah, I mean, let's start with that then and really work on that.
One of the things you point out here is his alliance with Strom Thurmond.
And this is something that Bronco Marcheteach wrote about in his book, Yesterday's Man, where Biden spent the whole 80s allied with Strom Thurmond, who was, I guess, to the right of Jesse Helms, right?
He was the most right wing congressman out of all of them, the former Dixiecrat, in order to attack Reagan from the right through the 1980s for being weak on crime and drugs.
Yeah, and this is this was a consistent stance for Biden.
And I mean, it's hard to say how much of it was sincere and how much of it was his attempt to neutralize the crime issue for Democrats.
I think it's it's some of both.
He does seem to be if you look at the, you know, the old videos of him talking on the Senate floor, he seems to be sincere in talking about the need to crack down harder to have more prison space, send more people to prison for longer periods of time.
But at the same time, he is he what he's consistently trying to do is show that Democrats can be tough on crime, too.
In fact, they can be tougher than Republicans.
Right.
So so back when George H.W. Bush waved a baggie of crack on national television, you might remember that and announced yet another another surge in the in the war on drugs, another escalation in the war on drugs, Biden had a televised response where he said they're just not tough enough.
You need to be tougher.
Right.
I don't think they're taking this seriously enough.
This is the number he called the number one threat to national security, i.e., the fact that people use drugs that he doesn't approve of.
And, you know, when he was touting various crime bills that he's been involved in over the years, he was indignant at the idea that Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher.
He totally you know, this is a line that you will often hear from people like Bill Clinton nowadays that, oh, we didn't really want to do all the mandatory minimums and death penalties.
The Republicans insisted on it.
And Biden at the time was like, no way this is all mine.
You know, this is you know, we need to be tough.
And so if you look at him talking about that and this is over and over again, this is not a one time deal.
This is over decades.
He is presenting himself as tougher on crime and tougher on drugs than the Republicans actively involved in all the major and minor crime bills during that period, as he has proudly pointed out over and over again.
There is a clip of him.
I think in the early 90s, talking about crack.
And he holds up a quarter and he says, we decided that this was such a bad deal, that crack was such a bad deal that if you're caught with this much of it, and he explained that he meant the size of a quarter, not 25 cents in crack, that you get a five year mandatory minimum.
That's regardless of whether you were involved in distribution.
So any crack user caught with a small amount of crack.
If he's charged under federal law, he would get a five year mandatory minimum.
Now, you watch it and I actually had to go back and recheck because because people might say, well, maybe he was expressing dismay at that penalty.
Maybe he was saying we went too far.
But no, it's very clear in context.
He was bragging about that.
So, yeah, he's going off to in that footage.
I've seen that footage where he's, you know, making a real big show out of the whole thing.
Yeah, sure.
He's oh, you know, he's always he was constantly getting really indignant at the idea that that Republicans were tougher on crime and drugs.
And that was just to illustrate that he was he was for real on this issue.
Yeah.
So, you know, of course, in retrospect, at the time, a lot of us were saying that is completely absurd.
I mean, even if you support the war on drugs in general, the idea of giving a user a five year mandatory minimum is completely insane.
And yet he thought that that was the right policy.
And basically, you couldn't be too tough on drugs.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
Somebody's got to coin it.
Maybe it's the Hillary Clinton effect, especially in foreign policy, where if you're a Democrat, you've got to be an extra warmonger.
And especially for a female, you've got to prove how muscular your foreign policy is.
It's that same kind of thing on, you know, for Joe Biden and crime that you can't call me a Namby Pamby liberal soft on criminals.
I say Reagan's not tough enough.
How do you like that?
And that whole thing just for exactly the very wrong political reasons where, you know, if the right wing is so bad, they're making you do this.
Why not fight them and tell them no instead of outflanking them and giving in?
But well, that's why.
Well, as I say, I don't think it was purely strategic or purely political.
I think he sincerely believed this stuff.
Yeah.
No, but I'm just talking about that aspect of it.
That aspect.
It's a combination of those two things.
Right.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, it was politically important.
And the 1994 crime bill is a great example of that, where Bill Clinton and the Democrats are trying to outflank the Republicans on crime.
And Biden was bragging about that bill until very recently.
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Well, first of all, I wanted to mention and I just happen to remember, I'm sure you know this, but I wanted the audience to know that when Bush senior held up that bag of crack in his big speech, that the DEA had just set up one of their informants to come and bring some drugs and they prosecuted him.
And yeah, well, as I recall, they had to lure him into the park.
I forget the name.
Is it Lafayette Park?
That's yeah.
Yes, they had to lure him to Lafayette Park because he never dealt drugs there.
And he didn't he didn't even know where it was.
Right.
And they did this precisely so that Bush could go on TV and say right across the street from the White House.
Right.
There are people dealing, you know, this is evil.
And then instead of turning them loose afterwards and saying, thanks for playing your role in our little skit, they put him in jail even though he would work for them.
He was one of their guys.
Yeah.
And then somebody criticized Bush for that and he goes, oh, what?
There's a bunch of advocates for this drug guy.
What drug guy?
He was a he was an informant, man.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that just goes.
It's just I mean, it's really perfect.
Right.
Like even to do their little skit there, the drug wars a farce.
And so take that and and the level of hysteria.
That was embodied in Bush's speech.
Right.
And then Biden goes on TV and says he's not going far enough, he's not being tough enough.
Right.
Right.
So he's like he's always going to one up the Republicans when it comes to being mindlessly punitive.
Right.
Tell us about the 1984 Crime Control Act.
What a great year for a crime control act.
I think, you know, this is just one aspect of I really like and feel like commenting on everybody knows right in the federal system, there's no parole.
Why is that, Joe Biden?
Right.
So that was one aspect of that bill.
It eliminated parole.
The idea being you basically serve the sentence that you're given, which appealed to a lot of people at the time, regardless of how draconian the sentence is.
And you can currently you can get some time off for good behavior, but not not very much.
And there's no parole at all.
So that was one aspect of it.
The bill also expanded civil asset forfeiture, basically gave gave birth to this system where the cops can take your property simply by alleging that it's connected to crime in some way.
And then the burden is on you to prove.
Well, even at the time, there wasn't even an innocent owner defense as it exists now.
But currently you have to prove you didn't know about the alleged criminal activity or if you did know about it, that you did everything you reasonably could to stop it, which essentially means you have to prove your innocence.
And, you know, that's that's obviously a, you know, it turns traditional notions of guilt and innocence on their head.
But also it's the burdens on you to do this.
So it's expensive.
It's time consuming.
It's complicated.
And very, very often the process costs more than the property is worth.
So you find that most cases go unchallenged.
And the drug warriors would say, well, it shows they're guilty.
It doesn't show that it shows that they they looked at this and said, this is not worth the amount of money it's going to cost to challenge it with no guarantee that you're actually going to win.
So that that the seeds of that were from the 1984 bill.
Which, by the way, I got to work in one more thing there, too, is that in recent years, I probably learned this from you at Reason that in recent years the government seizes more in asset forfeiture than all the burglaries and robberies in the country combined.
Yes, and it is I mean, this is a form of legalized theft, right?
If the cops did all this without the laws, the laws that Biden favored, it would be very clear that this is this is theft.
And in any case, he had no qualms about that.
And there's there's a clip of him from, I think, the nine early 90s bragging about this.
How great they can take everything you own.
This is a wonderful crime fighting tool.
So that was in that bill.
It also established the U.S.
Sentencing Commission and created what were at the time mandatory sentencing guidelines.
And that was the first time that they came up with the mandatory minimums.
Well, the statutory minimums came in later in a series of bills.
But yeah, in effect, these are mandatory minimums because at the time the guideline judges had to follow the guidelines through a series of Supreme Court decisions.
Later, the guideline guideline sentences became optional.
So judges could depart from them.
The statutory minimums still apply.
So but this really started the whole ball rolling on mandatory sentences.
And, you know, and together with abolishing parole, the whole idea being that we want people to go to prison for long periods of time.
We don't want them to get out and, you know, no sentences too severe.
That was the general to be to be fair.
It was the general consensus in Congress at the time.
But Biden was a leader of that that movement, very enthusiastic leader.
And he was still bragging about the 1984 bill when he was vice president.
He was saying this is a great example of bipartisanship, working with Strom Thurmond on this bill.
So this isn't any any second thoughts.
He's had a very recent development in his current positions, you know, are dramatically different from what positions he took back then.
But even the positions that he was defending just recently, just, you know, in recent years.
So there followed a whole series of bills that that he was very heavily involved in that kept upping, upping the penalties, creating new enhancements, new mandatory minimums, the bill establishing, say, 86.
The bill that was the bill that established this distinction between the smokeable and and and snorted forms of cocaine, right, between cocaine powder and and crack and the way they set the weight thresholds implied that crack was 100 times worse than cocaine powder, because to trigger the various mandatory minimums, the amount of cocaine powder you needed was 100 times more than the amount of crack.
And this made absolutely no sense because these are just two different ways of consuming the same drug.
But it's it's kind of hard to recapture the amount of hysteria at the time, but it was reflected in Bush's TV speech and Biden's response.
And and again, to be fair, at the time that this was established, a lot of black politicians went along with it because they thought this is going to help their communities get rid of the crack dealers.
Right.
But it turned out that since federal crack offenders were overwhelmingly black, they were getting substantially more severe sentences than the cocaine powder offenders who were much were more likely to be white or Hispanic.
So so you have a situation where people committing essentially the same crime, two different forms of cocaine, same amounts.
One of them, who happens to have darker skin, is getting a substantially more severe penalty than the other.
And that became clear early on within the first few years.
And then black politicians started to turn against it.
And Biden eventually turned against it, but not fully until 2007 or so.
Yeah, like I say here, 16 years later, he admitted, oh, oops.
Well, yeah, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, 16 years later, he was saying, oh, we might.
I think the exact phrase was we might not have gotten it right.
But yeah, by the by the early 90s, people were saying we really need to reform crack sentences.
And he did not get on board in years later.
And then in 2007, he introduced this is when he was seeking the 2008 presidential nomination.
And he introduced a bill that would have eliminated the distinction so that crack crack and cocaine powder would have been treated the same.
That still has not happened.
There was a law that was passed in 2010 that reduced the disparity.
So it went from a hundred to one ratio.
It was just completely insane to an 18 to one ratio, which is also totally irrational, but but slightly less insane.
And and so, you know, but ironically, you know, his son Hunter smoked a million dollars worth of cocaine and strippers in about a year.
So it was the money that he got from Burisma.
That was where it all went to was the smokable kind, you know.
And that's just fine.
Oh, you know what?
My son, he had a problem and he overcame it.
And I'm proud of him, says says Biden in the recent debate, while people are buried alive in these prisons under his policies for the exact same things.
Exact same things.
Yeah.
So now I guess given given the general theme of this discussion, I shouldn't be too charitable to Biden.
But one might go ahead.
You can because I agree with him about his son has the right to be a crackhead and get over it.
But it's just how come that doesn't apply to everybody else?
Well, now it is possible that that experience played a role in changing Biden's thinking.
I don't know if that's true, but you have seen cases like that where somebody either gets addicted, you know, himself or or or has a, you know, somebody close to them.
And they realize this should not be treated as a crime.
Right, let alone, you know, the kind of crime you can go to prison for five or ten years for.
So that's possible.
But of course, strategically, politically, it also he also had a very strong motivation to change his his positions on crime and criminal justice because public public opinion in general has shifted dramatically since then, and especially within the Democratic Party.
Right.
You cannot run as a drug warrior nowadays.
You know, Biden, as he was back then, could not possibly have gotten the nomination now.
Yeah.
So so they're very strong political reasons for him to change his position.
Now he says we should abolish mandatory minimums.
You know, back then he was bragging about them.
Now he says we should abolish, you know, the scores of death penalties.
And back then he was bragging about those.
And, you know, now he says people should should not go to prison or should not go to jail simply for using drugs.
Back then he was a big supporter of that notion.
I mean, he explicitly said we really we have to go after drug users.
He still won't promise, though, to legalize pot on the federal level.
Right.
Right.
His position is states should be allowed to legalize pot on the federal level.
And people shouldn't go to jail merely for, you know, possession.
But he says he's still thinking about whether repealing federal prohibition is a good idea.
He thinks marijuana might be a gateway drug.
And he wants more evidence about that.
Now, I should say, by the way, under the law, isn't it correct, Jacob, that he could, quote unquote, reschedule pot by himself?
That's the authority.
He has already been delegated by Congress on this issue, correct?
Technically, it's the Controlled Substances Act gives the attorney general the authority to to reschedule drugs, including marijuana, move it from one schedule to another.
And the attorney general has delegated that authority to the DEA.
And there is a process involving consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services, you know, that they're supposed to go through when they want to reclassify a drug.
I think it.
The problem is that the Controlled Substances Act probably does not allow the executive branch, excuse me, to deschedule marijuana completely because it refers to international anti-drug treaties that require some kind of regulation.
Right.
So it's clear that they could move marijuana from Schedule one down to a lower schedule.
It's less clear that they can unilaterally take it off the schedules entirely.
That that seems to require an act of Congress.
But, you know, the point isn't isn't whether Biden could do it all on his own.
The point is, you know, does he continue to support marijuana prohibition?
And the answer is yes, he does.
And this idea about marijuana being a gateway drug, this is a claim that goes way back, at least to the early 50s, when Harry Anslinger was talking about, you know, he used to talk about how you use marijuana and then you become a murderer.
And then he stopped talking about that because it wasn't so convenient when that once it had been banned and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which he ran, was in charge of this and supposed to be taking care of it.
You know, talking about all the murder and mayhem caused by marijuana, you know, might have made him look bad and also annoyed prosecutors, by the way, because they could get these cases where people would say it wasn't me.
I didn't do it.
It was the marijuana that made me do it.
And the prosecutors were very annoyed by that.
So Anslinger switched from saying that marijuana makes you violent to saying marijuana turns you into a heroin addict, that you start with the marijuana and then you don't you don't get the same thrill anymore and you move on to heroin.
So this is he was saying this in the early 50s.
And this is what Biden is still worrying about now.
There's been a tremendous amount of research on this subject.
So the idea that he's calling for more research is absurd.
The basic problem is you cannot ever definitively, definitively resolve the issue because you can't do a controlled experiment.
And so if he's waiting for definitive proof in this, in the sense of a you know, a controlled trial where you take babies and randomly assign them to either get marijuana or not and see how many of them become heroin addicts.
Right.
That's never going to happen.
So he's by saying he's waiting for definitive evidence concerning the gateway effect.
He's saying he's never going to support a repealing prohibition.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, a law of prohibition is not a magic wish.
And clearly it doesn't do a thing to diminish the supply of pot or heroin in this country whatsoever.
So gateway effect, they're not anybody wants a bag of weed can get one.
So what difference does it make at that point?
Other whether other than you could be potentially ruining the life of someone who actually didn't do anything to anyone.
He just got a bag of wheat.
Right.
But yeah, so look, he's he has moved quite a ways from the positions he was taking in the 80s and the 90s and also in the first, you know, in the arts as well.
I mean, he was still introducing drug legislation at that point.
I mentioned it in the article, the Anti-Rave Act.
Which was designed to go after the scum, as he called them, who throw throw raves because people use drugs at those things.
And that's not right.
And so dancing with neon lights.
Oh, no.
So, yeah.
So he passed he wrote this law that was designed to crack down on basically rave promoters.
But but really any kind of event where people use drugs.
And if you can show that the people who sponsored that event had reason to know that there was going to be drug use going on.
I mean, that's pretty much any, you know, any rock concert, really.
Then you can find them, forfeit their property, send them to prison.
So and he didn't put a lot of thought into that because one of the very first uses of that law was to shut down a fundraising concert that was sponsored by students for sensible drug policy and Normal, the national organization to reform marijuana laws in Montana.
The DEA came and showed them Biden's law and said, you know, you better think twice about having this concert if people are going to be using drugs there.
So they didn't have it.
So that's obviously, you know, it obviously has a chilling effect on on the exercise of first First Amendment rights.
And I'm sorry, we're almost out of time.
So talk about the Patriot Act, because we've already covered his role of getting us into Iraq or two on this show pretty extensively.
But tell us about his role in writing the Patriot Act real quick, if you could.
Well, he just just to say that at the time that the Patriot Patriot Act was passed, he bragged that he basically wrote it, but that it had been legislation he'd been pushing since 1994 or so that was basically the same the same provisions.
So he had, you know, by no means had any misgivings about it.
This is stuff, you know, before, you know, not a lot of them before, you know, the terrorist attacks he was he was pushing, you know, increased surveillance authority, less protection from Fourth Amendment rights.
Yeah.
And and, you know, in the article, I mentioned a bunch of other issues where there's a consistent pattern where he whatever he perceives as a threat to either national security or public safety, he can be counted on to panic about it and to introduce legislation that is really short sighted.
He doesn't think about the downside, what the unintended consequences might be.
And and he shows no, you know, he has changed his position on some of these issues.
Right.
But he has shown no sign of reconsidering that general stance of having this knee jerk reaction to whatever he perceives to be a threat or a crisis.
Right.
And that's what really alarms me, because I don't think he's going to go back to being, you know, a vehement drug warrior.
I don't think the Democrats would let him.
But I worry about all the other stuff he might do, given how mindless he is in his approach to public policy.
You know, they should have had Larry David play him instead of Sanders, where he's just going around apologizing to everybody all the time about how he spent his entire life, you know.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
I got to interview your buddy, Matt Welch, here about the case against the other guy.
So thanks very much for your time.
Really appreciate talking to you again, Jacob.
No problem.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Jacob Sullen from Reason Magazine, Reason.com, the case against Joe Biden, Joe Biden's politics of panic.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
