03/04/13 – Laurence M. Vance – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Lawrence M. Vance.
His website is VancePublications.com.
He's a regular writer at LewRockwell.com and some kind of fellow or another at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
He's the author of a great many books, but most especially I will direct your attention to Christianity and War and other essays against the warfare state.
And this one, brand new out, pretty brand new out, The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom.
Welcome to the show, Lawrence.
How are you doing?
Good afternoon, Scott.
Doing great.
Good, good.
Very happy to talk to you again.
It's been quite some time.
Yes, it has been a while.
Good to be on the show again.
Right on.
Well, great work on this book.
I sure hope people will take a look at it.
Again, it's called The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom.
And I guess, first of all, it is useful, I'm certain, to have you describe your personal Christian conservatism.
In fact, if you would go so far as to explain which Protestant sect you're a member of and everything, I think people might be familiar with you as the Christian writer at LewRockwell.com.
But because this is the kind of issue where most people fitting your general description see it a vastly different way, it's, I think, useful to explain where you're coming from on this, you know?
Well, I am a conservative Christian libertarian.
In particular, I belong to an independent Baptist church.
Now, because I'm a conservative Christian libertarian, I don't smoke crack, I don't snort cocaine, I don't shoot heroin, I don't pop ecstasy pills, and I don't smoke marijuana.
However, because I am a conservative Christian libertarian, I don't think it's any of my business if you or any of your listeners do any of these things.
The problem is that most Christians, conservative Christians or otherwise, aren't libertarians.
And even worse, they are diehard prohibitionists.
That is, they want to use the power of the state to enforce morality and stamp out vice.
And naturally, this includes drugs from marijuana on up.
But I believe my perspective in this book is unique because I am both a conservative Christian and a hardcore libertarian, a follower of the late, great Murray Rothbard.
I'm sure he's familiar to many of your listeners.
So that's why I think my perspective is somewhat unique in writing this book.
Indeed.
Well, and you start with the moral case, and in fact, even though you make a great utilitarian case, and I'll let you hear it today, you really kind of even oppose the idea of the utilitarian case because you say, well, what if all these objections could be answered somehow?
It's still wrong.
So as long as we're fighting about morality, what's so moral about the war on drugs?
I would actually go so far as to say the war on drugs is itself immoral because you're attacking people's individual liberty.
You're attacking their freedom to make their own decisions as to what they want to consume and what they want to grow on their property and how they want to spend recreation time and how they want to medicate themselves.
So I think that the war on drugs itself is immoral.
I think it's much more immoral to lock someone in a cage where he can be humiliated and raped and lose his family because he had a plant the government didn't approve of.
I think that's much more immoral than for some guy to sit at home and smoke a joint.
Yeah, I wonder about that.
In the book, you say it's kind of a combination of denial on one hand of just how bad people suffer when they get caught up in this thing.
Or on the other hand, maybe there's a little bit of bloodlust being satisfied there that, you know, a lot of people really like being a bully and they can't get away with being a bully themselves.
But they like the idea of cops out there cracking skulls and cracking down and throwing people in cages for for acting wrong.
But, you know, they're so hypocritical because if somebody wants to buy a fifth of whiskey and sit at home and drink the whole bottle and get stoned out of his mind, well, they don't want the cops to go arrest him.
But if he smokes one joint or grows one marijuana plant, then they want him locked up in jail.
And some of these conservatives, you know, Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich and some of these people, they want you locked up and throw away the key.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You do talk about that in the book, the conversation between Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly, where they talk about, I guess, Singapore, where people get the death penalty for it.
And that's their entire mindset.
In fact, I remember Newt Gingrich back in 1994 filed a bill that would declare a national emergency in the name of drugs for the purpose of, I guess, basically preventing the courts from trying to apply the Eighth Amendment, Prohibition on Cruel and Unusual Punishments, from applying to prison overcrowding because they wanted to basically just do sweeps of fighting aged males in black neighborhoods from coast to coast and just lock them all up, I guess.
And luckily that one didn't pass.
But that really is the mindset that, yeah, you know, over there in Singapore, they know how to take care of this.
Well, luckily for Gingrich, the government doesn't have laws on adultery anymore, or he might be in a little bit of trouble.
Right.
In fact, they might still have him on the books in some of the places where, you know, he goes and lives and commits said adultery.
He's maybe just lucky they don't enforce it.
You know, and these conservatives are the worst because they're the ones that talk about the Constitution, following the Constitution and how great the Constitution is.
And they even talk about liberty and freedom and free markets.
And, you know, they might even criticize the government, unless, of course, the military aspect.
They'd never do that.
But yet these conservatives are so fond of the drug war.
And I think I mentioned in the book, Lamar Smith in the Congress wants to expand the drug war.
It's not even good enough that there's one drug arrest every 19 seconds in the United States.
That's not good enough for people like Lamar Smith.
So these conservatives who talk so much about the Constitution and they use libertarian rhetoric about individual liberty, they're the worst because they say that out of one side of their mouth.
And then on the other side of their mouth, they're just violating the Constitution because it doesn't authorize the federal government to get involved in the drug war in any way.
Well, now, how much of that do you think is about race and about their perception that, and probably correctly, it's a bunch of black and brown people who are taking the brunt of this and they don't have a problem with that?
Well, that was true years ago.
If you look at the origins of the marijuana laws in the 30s about the danger of Mexicans smoking marijuana and how they were going to rape the white women.
And then later that became applied to blacks, and especially with the crack cocaine.
There's an essay in the book on the sentencing disparities, how you can go to jail ten times longer for crack than regular cocaine, something like that.
But I don't think it's just that anymore because in 2010, which is the latest figure that I have, you're talking 1.6 million Americans arrested on drug charges.
And I think like half of them were just for marijuana.
So the drug war is just totally out of control.
And it's so ridiculous that even the marijuana plant, which is a cannabis plant, the government never says that.
It always says marijuana to demonize it.
But even the cannabis plant itself, you can't even have a plant in your home for decoration.
Or you go to jail for that too.
The war on drugs is just so ludicrous its extent.
Well now, I have a friend who, I guess he would object if I called him a communist.
He's like some kind of left anarchist, but he talks like a commie anyway.
And what he says is, well look, these people, the people on the receiving end of this drug war, they're the lumpenproletariat, which I guess means the extras.
They're not economically viable.
They don't have a place in the economy as it's set up between the corporations and the state now.
So here's a way that we can make money off of them.
Just churn them through the prison system.
And then all the probation officers get paid and the concrete companies get paid and all the prison guard union bosses stay in boats and vacations and that kind of thing.
Well, so many people benefit from the drug war.
And I know I mention this in the book somewhere about how the prison industry benefits and the police benefit.
So many people benefit from this drug war.
Can you imagine if there was no drug war, what would the police have to do?
Other than hide on the side of the road and give you a ticket for speeding.
They'd have to solve crimes.
What are the cops going to do if you get rid of the drug war?
I mean, 1.6 million Americans arrested every year on drug charges.
If you got rid of the drug war, 20 percent of the people in federal prisons and more than that in state prisons are in there for drug charges.
So many people have to benefit from this drug war.
Well, you know, one thing that you guys write about a lot at LouRockwell.com, Will Grigg especially, of course, but you as well, is the wrong house raid.
And this is something that I think maybe can help get it across to the typical drug war supporter who just imagines a bunch of people who got it coming, getting it.
But it's something that we see all the time, especially if you keep LouRockwell.com/blog open in one of your permanent tabs the way I do.
I mean, we see this all the time, little old ladies and everybody else, just on a regular basis being the victims of basically Waco-style paramilitary raids and oftentimes dying in them.
But, you know, the sad thing about this is I don't think that is a deterrent.
Well, first of all, a lot of people don't know about that because they don't read things like the LouRockwell.com blog.
They just listen to Fox News and watch Fox News.
But among the people that are aware of it, I don't think it's much of a deterrent.
To them it's like collateral damage.
Oh, yeah, we killed all these civilians in Afghanistan, but, you know, the greater good is fighting this war on terror, so oh well, collateral damage.
And I think they feel the same way about Americans that are on the receiving end of their door getting kicked down by mistake in the middle of the night and getting their dog shot.
That's happened.
I think even the mayor of some town near D.C., the police kicked down his door at night by mistake and shot his dog and scared his wife and family half to death.
But that's viewed as just collateral damage by a lot of these drug warriors.
It's unfortunate, they'd say, but we need to keep on with the drug war and just maybe make it a little more efficient because we've got to stamp out this drug use.
So these drug warriors are evil people, in my opinion.
Because of the way they just dismiss abuses like you mentioned.
Well, you know, if one of those cases ever did make the TV, then the way you portray it really is right.
There wouldn't even be any alternative explored.
It's just collateral damage.
You would have to be way out on the fringe of who knows where to think that there's got to be another way.
I mean, it seems like in some ways the pot war is really medical marijuana was the foot in the door and now there's a couple of states that have legalized it.
And so maybe we're getting a little bit of progress there.
But as far as, geez, this whole federal militarized DEA system of mass incarceration and mass Bill of Rights erasure is just not working.
That point of view is never allowed on TV, really.
And as long as it's not, it remains, you know, we might as well be talking about white supremacy or something.
It's this fringe thing that some kook talks about but doesn't really have anything to do with anything, you know?
And, you know, some libertarians contribute to this because they avoid the topic.
I mean, they might talk about abolishing welfare and conservatives would agree with them and cheer what they're saying.
And then they might talk about cutting the military budget and you might have some liberals cheer that on and say, yeah, cut it.
But some libertarians, I think, they avoid the issue because they think it's embarrassing.
If you say, like Ron Paul boldly did on TV where he talked about legalizing heroin, you remember that incident during the campaign?
And some libertarians, they think that's embarrassing, you know, absolute drug freedom.
They might talk about medical marijuana, but that's the extent of their talk about the drug war.
Well, I'm glad you used that example because...
Some libertarians have dropped the ball on this.
I mean, that's a great example because it actually worked, too, is he basically attacked them all from the right and said, oh, yeah, boo-hoo for you.
You'd all use heroin if the government didn't stop you, huh?
And they all went, oh, man, you got me, you know?
He said, oh, what is this nanny state-ism that I'm not allowed to use heroin?
And they all went, wow, I am a hypocrite.
And, I mean, he just won over a whole room full of right-wingers in an instant like that.
Exactly, because if you look at him, he's not a long-haired, you know, typical dope-smoking hippie that this image that conservatives have.
He's this godly Christian family man, and here he's explaining why there shouldn't be laws against prostitution or heroin.
So how can you just see him as some guy that just wants to get high?
Now, another huge part of this, and this is, I guess it's just as invisible as the prisoners, the millions of prisoners are, in a way, and that is the victims of American foreign policy, particularly to the south of here in Latin America, from Mexico all the way down to the tip of Argentina, and the consequences of our drug wars for those people.
I just talked with this McClatchy News reporter on Friday, Lawrence, about the drug war down in Mexico and how in the last six years since Calderón came to power and declared a military war on the cartels, that what's happened is 70,000 people have died and 23,000 are quote-unquote missing, disappeared, and apparently the vast majority of those are disappeared by corrupted police and soldiers who end up working for one or the other cartels, etc.
And the simple sixth-grade economics of the black market have kicked in.
You've got 100,000 people dead or missing in this thing in just the last six years, just south of where I am here in Texas, and it's hardly the subject of any discussion at all, unless maybe Fast and Furious talk leads to, well, it's these drug cartels down there.
But there's just almost no recognition about, I mean, can you imagine 100,000 dead and no comment?
Or 100,000 dead or missing?
Our government has helped Mexico fight this drug war, so our government is partially responsible for this, and I have an essay in the book about why in the world is our government helping Mexico fight their drug war?
I mean, if Mexico wants to have a drug war, that's their business.
We shouldn't get involved in that.
But, you know, I'm glad you mentioned Mexico, the president, because the previous president, Fox, I guess his name is, he's come out in favor of drug legalization, I believe.
Yeah, that's true.
In fact, Tim Johnson was his name.
That reporter pointed that out, of course.
He waited until he was out of power to do it.
But we do hear some talk like that from time to time about, well, geez, what about at least legalizing weed?
What's interesting, though, is nobody ever says, hey, man, it's a red herring.
It's a waste of time to talk about just legalizing possession.
The whole point is you have to legalize the drug business.
You have to take the black market out of it and just let companies deal in these drugs.
And whatever problems are caused by the abuse, we'll deal with them in another way other than criminalizing the business, because that's what's causing all the wars and the dead bodies is the black market nature of it.
But it doesn't have to be black market.
There's nothing that, you know, nothing determined, written in stone that says it has to be a black market in recreational drugs, you know?
I mean, we used to have drug freedom in the United States from the beginning up until basically up until 1937 when the government really went after marijuana.
So we should just have a return to the way it used to be.
And nobody is saying, nobody like me that believes in absolute drug freedom is saying there will never be any drug addicts or there will never be any problems.
We don't make ridiculous statements like that.
But you know what these conservatives would have us believe?
The typical conservative drug warrior would have us believe that if we legalized drugs, everybody would just be stoned all the time, bus drivers, taxi drivers.
Everybody would just be stoned 24 hours a day if we legalized drugs.
And, you know, that's ridiculous.
I mean, alcohol is legal.
People are drunk all day on alcohol.
So the thing has been overblown, the bad things that could happen if drugs were legalized.
But we would just have to deal with, as a society, just like we deal with alcohol abuse or eating disorders or anything like that.
The government gets worse.
It's a very powerful statement, I think, to be Lawrence Vance and say, hey, listen, I would never touch these drugs, but I'm still for legalizing them.
But also, though, I wonder if it's maybe counterproductive to accept the pro-drug war point of view that drugs are just so horrible.
Because, after all, I mean, well, I smoke pot.
I don't care.
Who knows?
It's not a big deal at all.
I've never done cocaine, but I've known lots of people who have done cocaine, and the vast majority of them did not destroy their lives over it.
They just did some cocaine.
So what?
It's nobody's business.
And it's actually not even a big deal.
It really isn't.
It doesn't turn you into a madman or a rapist.
It doesn't make you sell your house and become a crack fiend until you die in a gutter or whatever.
You know what I mean?
And even heroin.
Some people use heroin, and then they go on with their life.
And like, yeah, I used to do heroin, but now I don't anymore.
I've known people like that.
So it seems like we let the hysterical wives committee or whatever define what substances it is that we're talking about in the first place.
You know what I mean?
I'm sitting here smoking a bowl through this whole conversation.
What difference does it make?
Exactly.
Like these government commercials about, you know, here's your brain, smoke marijuana, this is what's going to happen to you.
And you raise an excellent point.
These criticisms of drugs as being just so deadly and dangerous is way overblown.
And I think I point out in the book, and I don't remember exactly where, there was a medical journal, I think the Lancet over in the U.K., a prestigious journal that did a big study on the most dangerous drugs, and alcohol was the most dangerous drug they came up with, not marijuana or even heroin or cocaine.
Right.
Yeah.
I never was a drinker, but I sure was a cigarette addict for a long, long time, and really, if I die young, that will probably be the reason.
I quit about a year ago now, so it is doable.
I'm glad to hear that.
But yeah, I mean, those things will kill you, man, for real.
You know, how many people have ever died from using marijuana?
Zero.
There's not one documented case where someone died because they smoked marijuana.
But how many hundreds of thousands of people die every year in the United States because of tobacco, because of what it does to your body?
Yeah, hundreds of thousands.
Alcohol and tobacco are two of the leading causes of death in the United States.
And you know what else is legal prescription drugs kill more people than illegal drugs.
People overdosing on these painkillers and getting prescribed, you know, wrong medication by doctors and things like that.
So the attack on the drug war, and especially marijuana, is so ludicrous, in my opinion.
And now one more thing.
We're almost out of time.
Really, we are out of time.
I wanted to give you space to make the point one more time about the destruction, not just of the Constitution as a piece of paper, but the severe change that has taken place in the order of power in America just based on this.
All the multi-jurisdictional task forces and all the, obviously we talked about the militarization in terms of equipment and raids, but it really kind of has changed what America is, what the word America even means, right?
Yeah, I mean, we live in a police state.
There's no question about it.
And it's all directed top-down by the federal government.
And yet anybody who went to high school read the Federalist, James Madison, the Federalist No.
45, where he said that the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.
Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.
Nobody who claims to believe the Constitution should be in favor of the drug war in any way.
The federal government has no authority whatsoever to ban or regulate or prohibit any drug of any kind, even if the drugs are just as dangerous and evil as people say.
The federal government still has no authority.
It has to be done on the state level.
Now, I don't think the state government should have drug wars, but if we're going to have a drug war in this country, it should be done on the state level.
The states are the ones that are supposed to regulate drugs and things like that.
The federal government should have absolutely nothing to do with it.
And anybody who says that they're a patriotic American and they love the Constitution, they should hate the drug war.
That's what I'm saying, too.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate the work.
It's a great book, and I appreciate your time on the show, Lawrence.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Everybody, that is Lawrence M. Vance.
You can find him regularly at LewRockwell.com, especially on the blog there at LewRockwell.com.
He's also at the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
And you find all his books at VancePublications.com.
The latest is The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom.
And you know what?
Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, that is such an important book, especially the revised edition and all of that.
So especially if you have right-wing Christian family, friends that you want to try to influence, handing them one of those would not be a bad thing, I promise.
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