09/12/12 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the phone by my friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute and the Future Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com.
Independent.org, that's his home base.
I'm looking at social liberalism and the drug war.
And then here's, I think, his second piece in the American Conservative Magazine, The Right and the Drug War.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
It's great to be here, Scott.
Well, you totally blew my mind.
Liberals are bad on the drug war, and the right is at least getting much better.
Do tell.
Well, you know, one piece that explores the conservative movement's stance on the drug war, the American conservative, I argue that with Pat Robertson coming out against the drug war, we have the final major faction on the right that hasn't really been represented in its, at least, skepticism of the drug war.
You know, the center-right, the paleocons, even the neocons, the free-market type.
There's a lot of people on the right who at least question the drug war.
The social conservatives, the theoconservatives, tended to be the worst.
But now, maybe there's some inroads, and I explore why it is that, according to at least some conservative values, people on the right should oppose the drug war.
What got me writing about it was it wasn't just one comment off the cuff.
He said repeatedly now that he thinks it's cruel, that there's something very wrong with putting people in prison for this, and so forth.
The other piece is on the blog at the Independent Institute.
It's about how being socially liberal isn't sufficient in bringing about these civil liberties changes.
And I remarked that we have the social liberalism of Clinton, and now we have the social liberalism of Obama, and I think the Democratic Party and the American people, by and large, have become a lot more socially liberal in the last 10, 20, 30 years.
The drug war has gotten worse.
Obama is probably the president who we have the most documentation of having a rich history as a youth of being into drugs.
He wrote about it.
We know he really enjoyed it.
But he's also probably the most strenuous drug warrior in the White House ever.
He's stepped everything up on the foreign policy front, on the ramping up of the raids of medical marijuana facilities, which he's increased quite a bit despite promises that he would relent on that front.
And just in general, the drug war has gotten worse, despite the fact that we've had three presidents in a row that everyone suspects used drugs when they were young, and despite the fact that the Democrats have been in power and they're supposedly the party of tolerance, but when it comes to actually putting people in jail for this nonviolent behavior, they've done nothing to reverse the trend.
Right.
Well, you know, the outcry always depends on partisanship, too, right?
This was Bush's third term without the 22nd Amendment.
And sure, why wouldn't the American people have reelected him?
They love that kind of thing.
Anyway, so then liberals would be really good on the drug war if it was still George W. Bush that we're dealing with.
But since it's Barack Obama, they just want to find an excuse to criticize a Republican and ignore any reason to criticize their own dear leader.
Well, I think there's some truth to that, though I will say that the left in general kind of disappoints me on the drug war.
You have the drug reform movement, which is largely leftist center, and I think that liberals and progressives and leftists and all those people leftist center do tend to be less in favor of the drug war than conservatives ideologically.
And I think it's also true that when you have a Republican in power, they're more likely to criticize him on this basis.
But it's not as though during the Bush years the drug war was ever a major issue.
The mainstream left has never made it a major issue, at least in any recent elections.
It never comes up at all in debates or in campaign materials.
This is one reason libertarians used to be self-conscious of this, and it was said that libertarians focused too much on this issue because on neither left nor right was it a respectable issue.
That might be changing, but...
It's the same dynamic as in foreign policy, right, where every Democrat has to act like a tough guy as much as he can.
You know, if you're a Democrat, then you're a presumed wimp.
And so you can't run on anything that's a stereotypical liberal issue, right?
If you just ask somebody off the street, they would say liberals would be better on the drug war.
And so since that's what people think, they have to prove that that's not true.
Look, we'll lock up even more people.
See, we're tough guys, we're Republicans too, they cry.
Yeah, but you know what?
That only explains some of it, because there was this poll a bit ago that said that in the country, two-thirds of Republicans thought that the federal government should get out of medical marijuana, stop the raids.
Almost all Democrats do.
I don't think that's...
I think that's a majority position now, that on that one very obvious usurpation...
But there's so few Republican politicians who feel that way about it, and so they leave themselves open to be criticized, you know, on their same level, rather than from the people.
Yeah, but...
They don't want to look weak on anything.
What I'm saying is I don't think Democrats even have the excuse of political dynamics.
I think they just don't care about human rights when they're in power, and they don't care that half a million people are behind bars for non-violent drug offenses.
It just doesn't register.
And I think that we saw the Democrats strip civil liberties out of their platform, all the national security-related civil liberties, because all of the effects on civil liberties, in the name of fighting terror or drugs or anything, they might be issues that, you know, mainstream liberals care about a little bit, but I don't think they're a high priority.
I think under the Bush years it was an anomaly that they talked about them as much as they did.
I think economic regulation, domestic policy, you know, healthcare, education, this is the stuff that they care about the most.
And environment.
Expanding the state in every way.
Right.
They're much more adamant about expanding the state than shrinking the state.
So there are ways that they would want to shrink the state, where you and I would want to shrink the state, but one way I think about it is what would they prefer, someone like Obama who expands the state in the ways they like, but also in ways they might not like, or someone who shrinks the state in ways they like, but also in ways they don't like.
And I think that most people leftist senators, though certainly not all, if they had to choose between someone like Ron Paul, who would shrink the state in almost every way, versus Obama, who would just kind of steadily expand the state in almost every way, they'd prefer the latter, because as much as they might dislike Big Brother, it's better than a power vacuum.
It's better than letting corporations reign.
And so although I would prefer that the state stop the police state stuff and the war stuff, even if it meant we'd still have this Obama kind of domestic policy, that's not obviously my ideal, but I would much prefer that to this because we'd be over halfway to what I'd want.
I don't think that's ever going to happen, because the real compromise is always between those in power and the Democrats could make drug reform a real issue, and I think they could rally people behind them, they could make the Republicans seem backwards on it, just by pointing out Fiverr.
There are these stories that become stories that the whole country debates, these instances of someone losing their job, or someone getting sick because they don't have healthcare, and for a whole week the blogs are agog with these stories, but there's hundreds of thousands of stories of lives wrecked by the drug war, millions of stories of people who had everything taken from them for the drug war, and they could make a case at least, and it might be risky, but I think that they'd actually, if they were willing to tell the truth, the Democratic politicians, they might get some support, but it's not in their interest, because they manage the government, they like the government, this is just one of the many things government does, and I think that the power is corrupting and there's this institutional inertia, and this is one reason I wrote about the right and the drug war, not because I think ideologically the right is better on the drug war, but because politically I think we're more likely to see reform with the Republicans maybe, just because it'd be easier for them to get away with it, and they wouldn't even, but we're probably also more likely to see it get worse under Republicans, whereas under Democrats I think things will just kind of get worse slowly.
That's funny, anyone who's just tuning in could think that we're talking about foreign policy completely, instead of the drug war, the exact same thing.
Democrats, they must just be horrible, because they probably could benefit politically from doing the right thing, but they just won't, they keep doing the wrong thing anyway, so maybe political cowardice isn't the explanation, maybe they're just evil, and you could be talking about Afghanistan, or the war in the bad part of whatever town you're listening in.
Sure, sure you could.
It's not that different, I mean, the war on drugs is framed in many ways like a war, and it's turned many of our cities into little war zones, and it's the gang warfare that's erupted because of the drug war, and the police have become more like an occupying army because of the drug war.
It's not as bad as a real major foreign war, but it's in the same ballpark, kind of.
Sure.
Hey, remember at that FFF conference, when Jonathan Turley gave that speech, and part of it was all about the Fourth Amendment, and he gave the anecdote about, it used to be if a cop pulls you over on the side of the road, you had to get a warrant to search your car on the side of the road, and then in the name of the war on drugs, it went through like six different steps, of the watering down, and the watering down, and the watering down of the Fourth Amendment protection, to the point where, but now everybody has a cell phone, and now it's actually not a problem anymore to get a hold of the judge, but oh well, we're not going back now that we've made all this erosion, and now, even if we abolish the drug war tomorrow, people can't even imagine, because they don't even remember ever living in a world where a cop couldn't just search your car if he freaking felt like it, like we live now, and they probably still wouldn't even have to go back to the way it was.
Even if we got rid of the rest of the drug laws, their right to search us on the side of the road, all of us, would still be there.
Sure, and the war on terror, I don't think they would have gotten away with as many erosions of liberty in the name of the war on terror, at least at first, if it weren't for a public being softened to this control by the drug war for decades.
If you look at, you mentioned the Fourth Amendment, and this is probably one of the biggest casualties.
Since the 60s, there have been something like 20 to two dozen Supreme Court cases concerning Fourth Amendment issues and police searches and so forth, and I believe on only one did the Supreme Court rule in favor of the Fourth Amendment, and on only one or two did they rule in favor of privacy and against the government having more power.
The general trend has been to strip away traditional liberties as seen coming from, or being protected, rather, by the Bill of Rights.
The entire Bill of Rights, of course, has been shredded in the name of the drug war.
Hey, you know, Newt Gingrich, even back in 1994, introduced a bill that would ban the federal courts from being able to determine that prison overcrowding could ever amount to cruel and unusual punishment in the name of the national emergency, that is, drug consumption.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting because earlier than that, he had an article, or he had a letter to the editor that he had sent to a medical journal where he came out solidly in favor of medical marijuana.
Newt Gingrich did.
I think sometime in the 80s, early 80s, a long time ago, before he was very much ahead of his time on this, but maybe that was before he lost some of his last shreds of integrity, I don't know.
Well, you know, his goal is always just to look smart, so if he can imagine that he looks intriguing by taking a medical marijuana position and that it won't cost him too much in another way, then he's going to say it.
That's basically all there is to that.
But, you know, and also I like to point this out, too, and I know you do, too, if you're thinking of it, and that is that the ATF lied and pretended that they believed that David Koresh had a methamphetamine lab in order that they could ask Ann Richards, the governor of Texas, who was quite happy to loan them Huey attack helicopters from the Texas National Guard so that they could attack the Branch Davidians in their initial raid like it was the Vietnam War or something, flying by, shooting their machine guns, and it's been so many years now I forget the name of the man who was eating cornflakes, sitting on his bed eating breakfast, shot through the window by a Huey attack helicopter.
Probably that was the first he knew that there was a raid going on at all.
And that was, of course, one of the reasons they burned the house down was because of all the bullet holes in the roof that could have proved that.
But anyway, so, people should never forget that, the role that the bogus drug war played in the raid on the Branch Davidians.
I mean, hell, without that air support, they might not have even gone in with a giant raid like that.
They may have gone ahead and arrested them on the side of the road on the way to Walmart, or just sent two guys in suits to knock on the door and politely ask them to step outside, or something like that.
But they had their air support, that made the whole thing a pseudo-Delta Force operation from the very beginning.
That's true, that was the first major exception carved out of Posse Comitatus, was for the drug war.
I mean, this has got to be insane.
Well, it is insane, but I just don't...
Sometimes I just don't see why people don't see how crazy something like this is.
I mean, there's... in the name of terrorism, you know, maybe some even worse things have been done.
But with terrorism, at least someone is, by definition, murdering someone else.
And there's this, at least, pretense that it's being done against violent people.
Of course, I don't buy into that, or believe that you can suspend someone's rights for that reason either.
But with drugs, you know, just to make sure someone doesn't have the wrong chemicals on them, or the wrong plant, they've completely destroyed American liberty.
And it's just... it's baffling to me how people don't see this as a core issue that is impossible to overlook when you're trying to figure out the blueprint to a free society, or whatnot.
People talk about freedom, and they don't see what's been done.
And when the social liberals talk about tolerance and acceptance, they're missing a pretty huge problem here.
I mean, this is a crusade that's actually inflicting massive damage on a lot of people.
Well, you know, one thing is here, too, is that, I don't know, you're thinking in terms of people being human beings, and all that kind of stuff, which is, of course, you know, true.
But it kind of misses the point, maybe.
Maybe, economically speaking, my commie friend is right that, well, look, the drug war, poor black people, whatever, they're lumpenproletariats, man.
Their lives are worthless to a corporatist.
He doesn't want to hire them.
He's got no use for them.
They're the lumpen.
I guess that means the leftover poor people, after we're done using up however many we got, from the corporate point of view.
And isn't that what's going on here?
Is it just that we've got an excess of poor black people, so lock them in prison, say, the board of directors?
Yeah, I think that is part of what's going on here.
Obviously, the war on drugs has a racist taint to it, and Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, which I highly recommend, really explains how this works.
Why is the drug war so racist?
How it's so racist?
Because a lot of conservative types would be put off by this thesis, because they'd say, well, American society's not quite that racist.
A lot of liberals would point to it as just one more symptom of racist American culture.
But Alexander very convincingly shows that this is a whole other animal, that the criminal justice system and the war on drugs are more racist than almost anything else in society, by far.
That this is where most of the institutional racism is in our country.
It kind of absorbed the racism of Jim Crow.
It got directed into the criminal justice system, and especially the drug war, and that's where it is.
And so while there's still problems elsewhere in society, this is far worse than the situation in the workplace or the general economy or whatever.
Ron Paul's made the same point, that things have improved a lot concerning race relations.
Not to perfection by any means, but they have improved.
And it's a mistake to pretend they haven't improved, but here, in this area, they have not improved.
And in fact, I mean, hey, a certain point of view, it's just re-legalized slavery, because all those people are working for private corporations in those prisons, too.
That's a whole other show.
We're out of time for it, but Wendy McElroy just wrote something for FFF about it.
All right, we've got to go.
Thanks very much, Anthony Gregory, at the Independent Institute for Social Liberalism and the Drug War, and at the American Conservative, the Right and the Drug War.
Thanks very much, Anthony.
Thank you.
See you tomorrow.
ScottWard.org.