10/3/18 Daniel Lazare on America’s Drug War

by | Oct 4, 2018 | Interviews

Daniel Lazare joins Scott to talk about his recent article in for the American Conservative Magazine about the war on drugs. He explains many of the practical reasons to end the war, demonstrated by America’s own history. For instance, alcohol prohibition tended to replace beer with stronger, more dangerous options that were easier to smuggle, like homemade gin. Just so with cocaine replacing marijuana and fentanyl supplanting heroin. Drug prohibition also tends to make violence a requirement of doing business, since parties to the exchange can’t rely on police or the justice system if things go wrong. This endemic violence is a leading cause of the mass migration from areas of Central America to the United States. Despite some good rhetoric in President Trump’s past, Lazare is unhopeful that he will make any progress on this issue.

Discussed on the show:

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the constitution is Paralyzing Democracy and a regular contributor at Consortium News. Find all of his work at his website and follow him on Twitter @dhlazare.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs, by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.Zen Cash; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and TheBumperSticker.com.

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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 had.
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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, time to welcome back Daniel Lazare.
This time writing for the American Conservative Magazine.
You can also find him at ConsortiumNews.com.
He says he has another one coming out real soon there.
This one is called Mexico Must Stand Up to America's Drug War.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Very good.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
And I'm sorry, real quick, what's your upcoming one at Consortium News?
I have a piece about tremors in Saudi Arabia.
The regime is turning shaky.
It's really interesting to speculate, but what will happen next?
We don't know of course, but something strange is going on there.
Cool.
Well, I love all of your Saudi stuff so far.
Hey everybody, if you want to really learn a thing or two, search this in your favorite brand of search engine.
Daniel Lazare and Moussaoui.
And learn about the revelations from Zacharias Moussaoui about the Saudi kingdom there.
And there's a great interview.
Good old Daniel Lazare on Saudi issues, I'm telling you, man.
Alright, but wait, Mexico, because you know what?
You wrote this great piece and we hardly ever talk about this most extremely important issue on this show.
Which is my fault because I'm terrible, but also it's everybody else's fault for not writing about it all the time.
But now you've done some really great work.
And for all you right-wingers who are for the drug war out there, prepare to be schooled in free market economics by a progressive.
Go ahead and tell them.
Dan, you may even be a leftist, so I don't mean to mischaracterize you.
Go ahead and say whatever you want.
I am a leftist.
He's a leftist and he's about to school you guys on economics and win.
Go ahead.
You know, a free market economist did some really interesting work in the 70s about deregulation.
And they sort of showed that bad regulations make things worse.
There are good regulations and there are bad regulations.
But the drug war is based on a regulatory scheme that is from hell.
Absolute hell.
I mean, it bans certain kinds of inebriants.
It leaves others totally free and clear, like alcohol and cigarettes.
And it creates this awesome, utterly awesome black market.
Which is ultra-violent and is spreading throughout much of the world.
Yet no one seems to notice.
No one seems to care.
That's the really incredible thing about it.
Now, Latin America has been inundated by a wave of violence.
And Mexico is the latest example.
In 2007, the U.S. and Mexico signed what was called the Merida Plan.
Which was a plan to radically militarize the drug war.
And it made things far, far worse.
Murders, violent crime in general skyrocketed.
Corruption skyrocketed.
The drug flow didn't stop one bit.
In fact, if anything, with the recent opioid crisis.
Much of which seems to be fueled by imports from Mexico.
Drug smuggling seems to have actually radically increased.
So, here's a policy.
Which leads to crime, violence and more drugs rather than less.
Yet the U.S. is pursuing it without any hesitation at all.
What's going on here?
You know what's funny about this one?
I learned the simple truth about prohibition and how this works in government school.
In junior high, I think.
When they gave us our very first treatment of the FDR years.
Was at that point they realized that this whole thing about wishing alcohol away with laws.
Was just not going to cut it in the face of reality.
And turning everyone into a participant in a black market just because they want a beer.
Or what have you.
You know, simply is not a proper social policy.
We tried it, it didn't work.
They even repealed the amendment to the constitution that made it that way in the first place.
That's a pretty big damn deal to repeal an amendment.
I think that's the only time they ever did that, right?
That's correct.
That's absolutely correct.
And so, in other words, should be at least.
Everybody knows that this is how to create an Al Capone where you did not have one before.
What am I missing?
Well, you know, there's actually this one aspect of the prohibition that people are not really quite aware of.
Someone described prohibition as a conspiracy to drive out good beer and replace it with bad gin.
Prohibition tipped the market in favor of more potent substances.
Yeah, bootleggers and Baptists, that's what they said, right?
This was the alliance.
Exactly.
And the same thing happened with the drug war.
I mean, if you recall, go back to the 1970s and 80s.
Marijuana was flowing into Florida from places like Columbia.
Planes were landing in cow fields, dropping off bales of pot.
And the government cracked down.
And pretty soon that stopped.
But what replaced it was instead of bales of marijuana, they had suitcases filled with white powder cocaine.
And by the late 80s, you had a really ferocious crack cocaine epidemic in the cities.
Wait, but go in super slow motion for the people who don't get it.
And why was this?
It's because of prices.
And also, I mean, marijuana is really bad to smuggle.
It's big and bulky.
It's fairly cheap and it's very smelly.
So therefore, government sniffer dogs could spot it a mile away.
So when they started cracking down on marijuana, the marijuana trade was indeed hurt.
OK, so marijuana dropped off.
But smugglers, rather than sort of leaving off and going to other pursuits, simply switched over to cocaine, which is dense, much, much pricier, far, far pricier and odorless.
So you can make more profit off a suitcase full of cocaine than you could off a whole plane load of marijuana.
So instead of pot, the pot disappeared.
Pot got very expensive.
And suddenly the U.S. found itself flooded with coke.
One of the side benefits of this is pot has gotten a lot better.
Well, let me be so there's that.
Because again, higher prices for the same volume, right?
But the data is the data is actually inconclusive.
But the no way.
But it is.
I'm sorry.
Well, some people's data is inconclusive.
But the point is the is that the is that the market was tipped from the relatively mild, fairly harmless substance to a substance which is really very powerful and had its own dangers.
And by the and by the 1980s, urban America was flooded with very cheap, ultra potent crack cocaine.
Again, exactly the opposite reaction you think you'd want from a social policy.
And then the resulting crackdown on crack cocaine and all cocaine only helped to push the rise of a huge percentage, whatever, differential in the market for methamphetamine, which is quantitatively far worse.
Yes, yes.
And also, by the way, the crackdown on crack also led to the incarceration of millions of people, mostly black men.
But that was also another factor.
So, you know, so it led to a dramatic increase in repression, loss of civil liberties.
It was a disaster.
So so this drug war doesn't work.
It has very perverse outcomes and outcomes that are really worse than the than what the drug war is designed to cure.
I'll go ahead and throw in here since you mentioned it with the rise of crack that specifically the Reagan administration and their cutouts were supplying the cocaine that was the bulk of the supply for the crack epidemic in Los Angeles.
First and foremost, but also as Tom Cruise taught us in a recent blockbuster film into Arkansas and also Miami and and whatever during that whole era of give up your guns because the crips and the bloods have some.
So and all of this kind of garbage and and and give up your right, your Fourth Amendment and all of that in the name of keeping us safe from the plague that the Reagan administration themselves were responsible for in huge measure.
And it wasn't just that cocaine was more available.
It was that it was more available through the black market, which meant that the meanest criminals were the ones who ended up controlling it after being victorious in the fights over who's going to control the market.
Same as always.
You know, you can have crips and bloods, but the reason there are war is over all that money, you know, as a part of, you know, those social consequences as a part of that, you know, because, hey, somebody's got to pay for these death squads down in El Salvador and Nicaragua, right?
Absolutely.
Make it the poor black people of Los Angeles will make them pay for it.
Of course, of course, of course, that's the way it works.
You know, and the drug war also had a huge repressive component.
I mean, John Ehrlichman confessed that the reason they launched the drug war under Nixon was to was to penalize black people to to to restore the racist regime shaken by the civil rights reforms of the early 60s of the 60s and early 70s.
I mean, the the next the next administration was, you know, was, you know, one of the drug war because it was racist.
Hold on.
Sure.
So so that so that that racial motive was quite clear.
And going back to the 30s when they outlawed pot and the Marijuana Tax Act was all about an excuse to round up Mexican surplus labor out there in the labor force for menial tasks during the depression.
And also to find a and also to also a bureaucrat maneuver to make work for a federal federal bureaucrats who were no longer had, you know, had bad alcohol to hunt for.
Yeah, exactly.
Gave them something else to penalize and to and to some other reason for a for their their domestic war.
Just sick.
Just sick.
Absolutely.
A job.
So here we are still suffering from a jobs program from the prohibition enforcers who, you know, couldn't get it done but didn't want to have to get real jobs.
And here we are in 2018.
And now.
So give us.
I'm sorry, because we've been talking about so many different aspects of this.
But the articles about Mexico and I think myself and I I'm willing to bet a large part of my audience could use a real crash course in the history of 21st century Mexican drug wars here and the American role, especially Daniel.
Well, I think so.
So Mexico is in the line of fire.
I mean, you know, Mexican Mexico is always, you know, the saying in Mexico is a is that Mexico was so far from God so close to the United States.
So the US has put pressure on Mexico since 1970s to restrict the flow of drugs.
And it's backfired every time.
Every time.
Because every time the US tries to force Mexico to repress the drug trade, the result is an increase, a step up in violence.
And in 2007 with the Merida initiative, this happened in spades where the US Mexico was under pressure from the US, vastly militarized the anti-drug campaign.
And the result was a huge increase in murderers, other types of violence and corruption.
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I mean, and you talk about how the thing got completely militarized, right?
It wasn't just the cops.
The Mexican army went out there to fight these groups.
And so they formed armies to fight back with.
A guerrilla armies, but still they got a lot worse in response.
Yeah.
And in one famous case, the Mexicans formed an elite commando unit and they brought in French, U.S. and Israeli trainers to to train these these these groups in and how to fight drugs.
These are the elite of the elite.
And this group known as Los Zetas in the 90s went over bodily to the other side because they were offered more money.
And then they became the core of one of the most feared gangs in in Mexico.
Right.
And then and then you make it even crazier and crazier.
MS-13, which actually began in Los Angeles and then traveled back down to Central America, then gained a foothold in Mexico in order to combat Los Zetas.
So in other words, so I can also one ferocious gang led to an even more ferocious gang.
And this cycle is unstoppable.
Wait, did you mean the Zetas again or somebody else?
No, MS-13 was actually actually reentered Mexico at the behest of certain drug cartels to battle Los Zetas.
Oh, to fight Zetas.
I see.
I thought you were I thought I misunderstood you.
OK, go ahead.
Well, and then so the other thing is the Sinaloa cartel was always the CIA's job, right?
Well, it seems to be really, you know, it's not a conspiracy really is organic to the market.
This is the way black markets work.
You know, if you go if you're going to do a big drug deal with somebody and he's going to he's going to come with with his armed guards and you've got to come with your armed guards.
The CIA are the Sinaloa mercenaries.
Is that it?
It's just like, no, it's like it's like violence.
You know, in black markets, there's violence.
And the bigger the black market, the greater the violence.
And if and if and if you know, if you're in a black market and some crazy guy is coming after you, the only way to ward him off is to be even crazier yourself.
So if he's a homicidal maniac, you've got to be a homicidal maniac squared.
That's the way the system works.
So there's the whole point is that the absolutely important point is that there is no solution to this problem.
As long as you have a black market, you will have a steady escalation and violence.
Yeah.
And and and AMLO, as he's known, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the newly elected president of Mexico, takes office in September and December.
I mean, he will wind up like all his predecessors.
He will be drowned by corruption.
He will not be able to stop the increase in violence unless under present circumstances.
This only way out is legalization.
That's the only solution.
I mean, it sounds it's it's it's the ultimate nuclear option, but it is the only one that will work.
All efforts of compromise will be defeated.
We were talking about before about the social consequences for America for having this drug war and the effect on the poor and minorities, especially here, but on a hell of a lot of everybody, too.
And you know what this has meant for the people of Mexico.
I mean, tens of thousands of people killed since the Bush junior years in these drug wars.
Never even mind the Bill Clinton years and before that, Reagan and the rest of that.
But just even in our most recent time in this era, tens of thousands of people killed.
And so the very same Americans who support these kinds of policies rank and file Republicans mostly, but Democrats, too.
But they're the ones who cry the most about Mexican immigration.
Well, these people are fleeing a country that our government is helping to tear apart.
So think of all the opportunity costs, all of the development of Mexico that never had a chance to happen because of all of this chaos where maybe they'd be happy living where they're from instead of in your neighborhood where you hate their accordion music so badly or whatever your problem is.
You know, I love their accordion music.
I didn't mean you.
Come on.
And countries like Honduras and El Salvador, which have emerged as key transshipment points for Coke making its way up from Colombia, have been devastated.
Homicides are through the roof.
If you're a kid turning 12 in some Honduran slum, your choices are either to join the gang or be terrorized and possibly killed.
If you're a 12-year-old girl, your job is to be, you know, is either to become a girlfriend of some gang member or turn a prostitute or also flee with your parents.
And where do they flee to?
They flee north to the United States, where suddenly Donald Trump announced that there's a brown invasion underway and imprisons them in refugee camps and tent camps and blames it all on them.
Right.
Well, and Hillary famously also said, send them all back.
And now, so, you know, I saw a right winger, I guess on Twitter before I quit it somewhere, saying that, oh, yeah, right.
See, because Hondurans aren't people and don't make their own decisions and all their problems are our responsibility, something like that.
But it really is true that the Americans have played a pretty bad role in bringing the current regime to the state that it is there.
Oh, it's devastating.
I mean, first of all, America's economic role is overwhelming in these countries, absolutely overwhelming.
So the idea that Hondurans make their own decision decisions is just crazy.
But, you know, the American role has been devastating.
These countries have have been devastated.
And these refugees are fleeing a war zone.
It's a war zone that didn't originate in Honduras.
It originated in the United States.
And it's the drug war overall, but also support for the right in their coup.
And I don't know how things were really before that coup in 2009, but it seems like the consequences have been as severe as they could have been.
And that was the one where Hillary really intervened on behalf of the coup plotters and succeeders there.
Right.
And also, you know, the same thing in El Salvador and Guatemala, where the U.S. back these murder, murderous death squads, which killed killed thousands of people and just also fractured society incredibly.
And it's it's a it's amid that fragmentation, that fracturing society, that that that drug gangs are able to take root.
But but but yes, but the drug war itself is like, you know, it's just a huge avalanche on top of that.
It's just astonishing.
And and to blame it on Hondurans, it's just it's crazy.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, one fun footnote there is Hillary removed her boasting about her role in solidifying the results of that coup when the paperback of her memoirs came out.
She had previously said it was great and only ended up drawing more attention to it by trying to delete her boasting out of there.
Oh, that looks bad.
Oops.
Sorry.
I just had, you know, my sights on impressing Robert Kagan at all costs.
So, you know, that was her attitude.
It's quite Orwellian down the memory hole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, so it's a mess on Mexico that there there simply is no solution to the problem.
You know, Mexico has tried liberalization.
They actually legalized partially legalized marijuana a few years ago.
It didn't it had no effect whatsoever, none whatsoever, because the drug trade is just like way too big.
And the only way to fix this is to do what the United States did in 1933, which is three is repeal.
I mean, I mean, you know, homicides rate rates in the United States declined for for three decades after repeal for decades, actually three decades.
And and, you know, and that is the only solution, the only solution in in Mexico.
You can't be too dogmatic about this.
Now, there really is only one way out.
That is repeal.
And you know what?
Same thing, obviously, for the US.
And what's the worst case scenario here?
Right.
Heroin overdoses, heroin, overall addiction, whatever.
But the solution to addiction is offering help to people who finally hit rock bottom and have decided to make a change in their life.
Or, of course, educating people that this stuff can stop your heart and stop your breathing.
So you ought to be really careful and maybe not become addicted to it in the first place if you can help it.
And this kind of thing.
But locking people up and waging drug wars against addiction, all that is obviously nonsense.
Anyway, it's certainly proven to be nonsense.
It's pretty obvious on the face of it that it can't work.
And, you know, really, it's pretty obvious.
I think you talk about this in your article as well, that it's the black market heroin with the fentanyl in it.
That's causing all of these overdose or not all, but some huge part of the overdose epidemic in the United States here.
When all that's because it's black market junk instead of Walgreens brand pure heroin where, you know, exactly what your dose is.
And, you know, go with that.
And I think in a normal market, it would really be marijuana rather than heroin.
Remember, I said earlier.
That's the thing, too, right, is wherever they've legalized pot, the heroin abuse rates go way down because people are like, oh, OK, now I can just smoke weed and not get in trouble.
I'll just try that, you know.
Right.
And the you know, and the and, you know, and after 1933, the U.S. beer came back.
You know, beer had been had been was hard to find under prohibition.
But after prohibition, it came back.
And so, you know, so I think the average person, you know, you know, you know how it is.
You're saying as compared to the hard liquor that people were drinking during the prohibition times, the hard liquor, which is often poisoned, which had things like dead rats floating around in it.
You had no idea what was in this stuff.
It could be wood alcohol, could be anything.
Just as you have no idea if you buy some heroin, you have no idea whether it's really heroin or or fentanyl or what.
Yeah.
And if it's fentanyl, it can kill you.
All right.
Now, here's the thing, man.
We got this huge gap between reality and what the policymakers want.
I mean, just how far are we?
Do you think before everybody gets this pure common sense that you're talking here, you're 100 percent right.
Nobody disagrees with you is wrong in every way.
Forget about it.
And yet it never changes, especially a hawk, an anti addiction hawk like Donald Trump, whose older brother basically drank himself to death and therefore who's never had a beer in his entire life and has nothing but the worst of contempt for the inhumanity of anyone who would become a drug addict.
And this kind of outlook in this era, what could possibly make the change on this?
Well, that's that's that's the strange thing about our society.
We have this incredible gap, this reality gap.
I mean, society is committed to these policies that everyone knows is not is not working.
But the policies go on and on just under their own steam.
You know, far, you know, foreign policy intervention in the Middle East, you know, but, you know, a war built up against Russia.
Crazy, crazy scares about Russian, you know, Russian, you know, phony stories of Russiagate and all this kind of stuff.
You know, there's a growing sense of unreality to American political discourse.
And the drug war has been going on for so long that people sort of somehow think that, well, it's just you just can't change it.
So, therefore, all we can do is close our eyes to the consequences and just sort of go on day to day because nothing can be done.
Yeah.
So things get crazier and crazier and crazier.
But still nothing can be done.
That seems to be the refrain on everybody's lips.
And it's and that's that's why I think this country is really heading for a huge crash because its policies seem to be so unrealistic and impervious to realism.
Yep.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because there is a pretty big center, but they're the ones who are the worst on everything.
So, yeah, they really could lead us right to the rocks.
And, of course, the biggest symbol of that is the national debt.
Twenty one trillion dollars.
Does anyone have any idea how much that is?
Who isn't doesn't work in math and science at MIT or whatever?
I don't know how much that is.
That's a lot.
And and it's just it means that the system is broken.
It means that at some point they either have to repudiate the debt or they have to completely destroy the currency, which is completely destroy it in order to try to pay it off with funding money, in which case or either way.
I think, you know, with the repudiation angle, I don't know what all the consequences of that would be, but they would be absolutely as severe as hell, too.
So that's just one example of that.
It's the attitude that got us into that in the first place, that don't worry, we can just do whatever we want and hell to pay.
We'll never have to pay.
It'll be fine.
Yeah.
In England, they call it muddling through.
But in America, it's kind of like muddling through on steroids.
Somehow we can sort of keep on doing the same, the same old stuff.
And if we do it more and more crazily, somehow it'll get better.
Muddling through on CIA cocaine.
Right, precisely.
But it doesn't get better.
It gets worse and worse.
And Washington is crazier than ever.
And U.S. policies are more unrealistic than ever.
But they just keep on going forward.
But at some point, they're going to crash.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, Trump is really not a free market guy at all.
I mean, he's really sort of, his brand of capitalism in New York real estate and all that is all about, you know, political decisions being made and greasing all the right palms and all the right ways to get your way.
And, you know, Atlantic City and the mob and all this kind of thing.
This is not really a free market guy.
But it seems like maybe he'd have a better chance than a Hillary or a Jeb Bush at understanding the processes kind of behind this.
I mean, Hillary Clinton, I'll give her the positive spin on it, as nice as I can, that she's just this doe-eyed ridiculous on it, where she said, well, look, I mean, the question of ever legalizing drugs, we can't because there's just too much money in it.
And rather than, I think, saying the CIA needs that money or some cynical spin, what she was really saying was she thinks that all the worst cartel leaders and their armies now will get to keep all the profits.
Which, one, they're the ones who have them right now, as it is under the current system.
Never mind that.
But when, of course, the reality is that they would all go out of business.
Because freaking Johnson & Johnson and Marlboro and a bunch of corporate criminals would take over those markets.
And they would kick everybody else's ass with economies of scale.
And that wouldn't happen.
It would be open market, publicly traded corporations that take over, certainly, meth and cocaine and heroin and all these drugs that you can't really just make yourself very well.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
If I want to buy a bottle of scotch, I don't go to a bootlegger.
I go to a liquor store.
I mean, you could grow your own pot, right?
But the rest of them, no.
But she has no understanding of that at all.
She's just like, no, that would mean letting the bad guys win.
And she doesn't see at all how that would be, no, putting the bad guys out of business and replacing them with open market people, not black market criminals, right?
I'm not saying corporate chieftains are wonderful people, but I'm saying it's the open market versus the black market of machine guns and backstabbing.
So, come on, right?
Absolutely.
By their standards, that ought to be an improvement.
But she can't even get it.
That's my point, right?
Yes.
But I wouldn't put any faith in Trump.
I mean, look at that.
I mean, Trump came into office, you know, vowing to reset relations with Russia.
And nothing happened.
Well, stick to Mexico for just a second, though.
I mean, on this.
Just one thing.
It takes a step further.
And so nothing happened.
The war machine barreled on regardless.
Trump was schooled in how Washington works.
Russiagate was used to scare him into lying.
And now relations with Russia are worse and getting worse all the time.
The same thing happens with a drug war.
The drug war steams ahead under its own power.
And even if Trump wanted to turn it around, which he doesn't, but even if he wanted to, he couldn't do it because the forces are in place.
It has a mind of its own.
The organism goes forward.
Right.
And drugs are such a great, in his way of thinking especially, they're such a great placeholder for the devil and pure evil and all that is immoral and wrong and bad.
And on the other side of that, cops, police cops, his favorite kind of cops, you know.
So heroes versus pure villainy.
Not much for him to think about besides that, really, right?
Well, actually, actually, in the 1990s, Trump called for legalization.
Believe it or not.
Oh, yeah?
Yes.
See, that's one of those things.
It's just like where he differentiates.
You can catch him differentiating between the Afghans and some al-Qaeda international terrorists who supposedly are around them somewhere.
And it's like, aha, see, he does know better.
He really does.
He can understand the economics of prohibition.
Come on.
That's not that hard.
He never took a minute to think about it.
But, yeah, not that he would ever act right on the issue.
Just like Palestine, just like Afghanistan or Syria or anything else.
Just because he knows better doesn't mean he's not going to continue doing it.
The system is in control.
Not individual human beings, but there's some kind of systemic force which is driving this.
I mean as a leftist, I would label it U.S. imperialism.
But I don't know if you agree with that.
Yeah, of course.
This is the war state.
One of the things I always really appreciate about Gareth Porter as well is he's a leftist, but he certainly says, hey, look, it's the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the NSA, the agencies.
This is the heart of the empire.
Yeah, Lockheed Martin.
Don't let him off the hook.
The military industrial firms and all the perverted corruption in the markets and in the economy surrounding all this militarism, they all play their part.
And don't let them diffuse responsibility by any means.
But the heart of the empire is the Pentagon.
They are the empire in reality, and they're the ones who have the say.
And as we see over and over again – I just finished interviewing Gareth about this.
I mean we didn't talk about this exact aspect, but we were talking about how basically Mattis cornered Trump and said anything that happens bad in Afghanistan, if you pull out of there, I'm going to blame it on you.
And this is like blackmail by the military.
They will not allow for a president to tell them no on this stuff.
And the drug war at this point is so huge.
It's amazing.
But also what's important is the drug war has morphed into the war on terrorism.
And so one war began another.
And you can't – this militarism just builds more and more and more, and it's unstoppable.
I mean the US is really hooked on this drug.
And it won't stop it.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I have to go because I want to keep asking you stuff about Mexico, but I think we more or less pretty much covered it.
And sorry for all my ranting and rambling, but I love talking with you, and I really appreciate your great work here.
Okay.
Great, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
All right, you guys.
That's Daniel Lazare.
The Frozen Republic is his book.
And at the American Conservative Magazine, he's got this great piece called Mexico Must Stand Up to America's Drug War.
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.

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