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Sorry, I'll probably coset you.
Okay.
It's our friend Jacob Horenberger.
He is the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, bumper?
Good.
Good to be back with you, Scott.
Good to have you on.
I'm realizing I need my ear goggles on here.
Oh, yeah, that's better.
Hey, so, well, before we talk about your great article that you wrote that I like, let's talk about your big event that's happening on Saturday, June the 3rd at the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott.
How convenient.
Yeah, it's very convenient because the Dulles Marriott Airport is located about three minutes from Dulles Airport.
So people can just fly into Northern Virginia.
They don't even have to go into Washington, D.C. if they don't want to and go to the hotel.
And it's a one-day conference on Saturday, June 3rd.
And I think this may be the best conference we have put on our 27-year history.
It's entitled the National Security State and JFK, and it's going to be analyzing the political environment in which we live, a national security state, all the characteristics of that, and then compare it to what was going on during the Cold War during the Kennedy administration.
Pardon me.
Which is very similar.
Jay, can I ask you to stop cleaning your office while we're talking here?
Yes.
Oh, thank you.
I'm actually hitting my keyboard together.
So yeah, we've got the best lineup.
We've got the Academy Award-winning Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone as our featured speaker.
He, of course, directed the movie JFK, and if there's anybody that can talk about the national security state and the Cold War and JFK, it's Oliver Stone.
And we've got Ron Paul.
We've got Stephen Kinzer, the former reporter for the New York Times.
Michael Glennon, who wrote this fantastic book, National Security and Doubled Government.
We've just got an all-star lineup of people.
It's just absolutely incredible.
So just anybody that wants to get information on it, just go to our website at fff.org.
Man, that really sounds great.
I'd like to see a lot of those speakers.
Glennon and Kinzer especially, but of course, Ron Paul is great.
And David Talbott, I sure would like to hear from him as well.
We've talked about this before.
I just have never really taken up JFK as my hobby that much, except when I was a kid and I saw JFK in the first place, I thought, well, yeah, sure, Dulles did it.
What am I, an idiot?
But one of the things that I found very interesting in recent years was a piece that David Talbott wrote at Salon when he still ran it that said that the moment that Bobby Kennedy found out that Jack Kennedy had been shot, the very first thing he did immediately was pick up the phone and call the director of the CIA and accuse him of doing it.
And he didn't arrest him.
I mean, he was the attorney general.
He should have sent the FBI to go and arrest the guy and shake it out from there.
But anyway, I thought, you know, just the fact that he was that suspicious, even if he was wrong, that tells you right there that the Kennedy brothers were that worried about the independence of the Central Intelligence Agency from the White House's foreign policy and concerned that they would go to such lengths as even to kill the president himself if he got in their way.
Well, it wasn't the first time that that conviction had arisen.
If you look at the whole history of the Kennedy administration, I mean, we never knew this at the time.
And people have asked me over the years, you know, I've done a lot of writing on the JFK assassination and that Cold War period.
And people said, gosh, why do you talk about something so old?
And I said, because it's not old.
It's relevant.
It's this structure called the National Security Establishment that Kennedy was at war with.
I mean, and we can see the relevance today with the war that Trump, at least in the beginning, was waging against the intelligence establishment.
Where that congressman from New York, I think it was Schumer, that said, look, you don't take on the net.
The intelligence agencies are much too powerful.
They can do bad things to you.
And when Kennedy was in, we already had the warning from Eisenhower in his farewell address where he said, talked about the dangers of the national security state, the military industrial complex.
He says, we've never had this way of life before, and it's a threat to our democratic processes.
Well, Kennedy started feeling, suspecting the pressure of the Pentagon and the CIA and the pressure, the tendency toward a coup.
And he read a novel called Seven Days in May, which positive a military coup in America.
And he was so convinced of the dangers of this happening that he had the book made into a movie.
He talked to friends in Hollywood and persuaded them to do a movie, and it was a great movie starring Burt Lancaster.
Let them film it in the White House, right?
That's right.
Over the chagrin of the Pentagon.
I mean, Kennedy had to leave town to go to Highnessport or something.
So it wouldn't look like he was there participating in it.
And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bobby Kennedy told the Soviet official with whom he was negotiating, he says, look, my brother is under severe pressure from a military coup.
If we don't get this settled right now, it's very possible the military is going to take control because they don't have any confidence in my brother.
And then after the assassination, there's the incident you talked about where Bobby sends the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, to the White House and says, did you all do this?
I think it was Helms.
So I want a clear cut answer.
Did you all do this?
And then finally, very few people knew about this, but after the funeral and so forth, there was a trip that a Kennedy friend was taking to the Soviet Union.
He was doing a cultural type event.
And Bobby Kennedy met with him and said, well, the message that was sent through this guy to the Soviet Union, to Nikita Khrushchev, by Jackie and by Bobby Kennedy was, look, we want you to know we don't suspect anything that the Soviet Union was involved in this.
We know that this was part of a right wing plot.
We don't have the evidence of it, but that's what we believe.
And so that incident you're talking about was only one of several instances of the dangers that the Kennedy family felt from the military industrial complex.
All right.
So again, this is the third of June.
It's at the Marriott, the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott.
So anybody can get there for a few hundred bucks.
No problem.
One day conference, June the 3rd.
Glennon is going to be there.
Double government.
The great new book.
Stephen Kinzer, of course, author of Overthrow and All the Shaw's Men.
David Talbot, who wrote the one of the two recent histories of the Dulles brothers.
Ron Paul, the greatest legislator in human history.
And Oliver Stone, the guy that makes great movies.
So, yeah, good times, man.
Good times.
I wish I could be there.
All right.
I want to interview you about what's going on down there in Mexico.
Now here's the thing, man.
You know, you are ideological libertarian and capitalist, which means I don't know exactly your degree of speciality.
I know you were a lawyer in your previous life, but you are, in a sense, an economist, certainly compared to the rest of the people.
And I guess that just means that you have a way of thinking about this problem that other people just can't do.
Grown human adults, they just can't do what you're doing.
Here's what they can do.
They can say, my God, did you see what the drug addict did on TV?
That was the terrible thing that he did.
My God.
Here's what we should do.
We should make those kinds of drugs illegal so that people like that can't get them and do the terrible things that they do.
And then that's it.
And they can't do better than that.
And the fact that it's just right there hovering, it's got to be somewhere in their own brain that we've had a drug war since Nixon, really since Roosevelt.
And it's still like this, it can't sink in.
The same thing goes for your article here is about all the Mexican journalists mourning their slain colleague, Javier Valdez, who was slaughtered by Mexican drug dealing gangsters.
And all they can do is say, man, we ought to consider outlawing this stuff.
And they just can't.
They don't have the part of the brain that you have, the economics part that says, yeah, but what about consequences?
What about second order this and capital goods that and time preferences here and gun control there and all of these things that you are able to take into account that they aren't able to take into account?
How can we ever get them to take it into account, Jacob?
Because look at where we're even having this conversation in 2017.
Can you believe it?
No, it truly is a strange phenomenon.
And you highlighted very well that here that the drug war has been waged, well, since the first drug law was passed in the late 1800s, it was one born and their drug war was born in racism.
It dealt with with orientals or Asians, they were called orientals at the time, or maybe it was the first part of the 20th century.
But the real war on drugs was declared by Richard Nixon in the 70s.
And so we've had, you know, these several decades of severe warfare, mandatory minimum sentences and people kept saying, well, the solution to this is crack down, crack down.
So they just kept cracking down with these mandatory minimum sentences, filling up the prisons with drug addicts and drug dealers.
And then the acid forfeiture that enabled the cops to steal money from people on the highways.
And it just kept getting worse and worse.
But nobody noticed that the drug problem kept getting worse at the same time, and they couldn't draw a correlation, that the more you crack down, the worse the situation would become because it would drive prices upward, which would attract more people into the drug trade, regular people like flight attendants and things that could score big and score fast.
But it was really the ultimate of this was in Mexico, where, you know, about eight or nine years ago, they decided to do much like what President Duterte is doing in the Philippines.
They were going to show everybody how to really crack down.
And they got the military involved.
So the whole military goes across the country and is now trying to get drug dealers.
But in straight laws of economic principles, laws of supply and demand, the more they'd crack down on the drug lords, the prices would skyrocket of illegal drugs.
I would draw in more people that said, I want to be a drug lord.
I want to make that kind of money.
And you had gang warfare and assassinations.
And then any of these journalists in Mexico who would report on the drug lords, they would get killed.
And as you point out, these journalists, they don't see the correlation.
They are calling on the Mexican government.
This is their protest.
They're calling on the Mexican government to crack down.
Well, that's exactly what the Mexican government's been doing.
And some 42 Mexican journalists have been killed in the last 15 or 20 years.
I mean, like you say, they already called out the army.
What are they supposed to do now?
Use a bombs on the Zetas?
Exactly.
And we libertarians have said time and time again, if you want to get rid of these drug gangs and drug lords, there's only one solution.
Just legalize drugs.
Now, here's the thing, though, man.
Drugs are bad.
OK?
No, I'm just kidding.
I mean, sometimes people use them responsibly.
What the hell?
Think of all the all the cocaine done by all the people in New York who make the world go around with all their finance.
Ask them.
They're the most important people in the world.
No question there.
And they get by.
But on the other hand, I've known some junkies.
And in fact, they're all dead or in prison.
You know, you're supposed to say that because after school special or whatever.
But that's actually true about all the junkies I've ever known.
Like people with with heroin problems.
I've known some people who were burnouts on cocaine who ended up getting their act together and they were OK without ever really causing anybody else any major problems.
But you know, I was just looking at a Twitter feed last night.
That's all crackheads doing crazy stuff.
And it's pretty funny.
But stuff's really bad for people like crank and crack and cocaine and heroin.
Some of these, you know, newer drugs, which, of course, all the synthetic pot that's so bad for everybody is only a result of pot being illegal in the first place.
But a lot of these harder drugs, Jacob, you got to admit, man, that they've got some real societal consequences, not just the war against them, the war against them.
You and I are already of the same mind.
But we're talking about now is just how bad heroin is for people in your family.
You know, I just heard a thing on NPR the other day.
And of course, they're full of idiot solutions and everything.
But the guy was talking about how his son is dead and that all of his five best friends from when he was a kid or three or four best friends from when he was a kid on the baseball team.
They're all dead, too, of heroin overdoses.
They're dead.
They're like 20s.
Their parents burying their kids all across this country right now.
So somebody's got to do something to stop the supply of heroin.
Right.
Well, what?
That's the common mindset.
I mean, that's what guided the war on drugs.
Something is bad and therefore we need to make it illegal.
And we saw that with alcohol.
Alcohol is not exactly the healthiest thing in the world.
I mean, a lot of people consume moderately.
But we also know that a lot of people die of cirrhosis and there's a tremendous alcoholic problem.
Tobacco.
Look how many people die of lung cancer.
The question is, and this is where the critical thinking comes in, is that there are some people that have that ability to think critically and analyze as compared to just deal things with the surface.
Oh, if it's bad, then let's make it illegal.
The critical thinker says, no, wait a minute.
Is this any business of the government?
I mean, even if we concede that heroin is the worst thing in the world and so is alcohol and tobacco, is this any business of the government?
That's the first question the critical thinker thinks.
And then the second thing the critical thinker thinks is, okay, if you make it illegal, what are the consequences?
And if the consequences are worse than before you enacted the law, then maybe you ought to get rid of the law and just go back to just drugs being a bad problem that can be handled in the private sector through rehabilitation and therapy and counseling.
This is what those journalists and so many others can't do.
They're still at that deference to authority mindset.
Drugs are bad.
Therefore, it stands to reason they should be made illegal and they can't go beyond that.
They can't break out the box.
I mean, that's why one of the main reasons we argue against government education here at FFF, at the Future of Freedom Foundation, because that's what government education does to people's minds.
It eliminates their ability to think critically.
Now, look at the positive side, though.
It's true you and I are still having this conversation.
But back when I started at FFF 27 years ago, we libertarians were holding extremely lonely ground when they called for drug legalization.
I think Milton Friedman was probably the only prominent person that was doing so in the mainstream press.
Today, look at the sea change.
People from all walks of life, journalists, federal judges, prosecutors, law enforcement people, people at editorial boards, a lot of them are calling for an end to that.
Most of that's still just pot, though, right?
They're not going as far as you.
They can't imagine legalizing cocaine.
What, you could buy cocaine or heroin at the store?
Oh, my God.
That's what they all say.
Well, that's right.
Look at the sea change and how far they've come, at least with respect to marijuana.
That's through the power of ideas.
They're thinking critically at a very limited level, granted.
But at least they're thinking critically.
The fact that some states have legalized marijuana is absolutely incredible.
I think the whole drug war is teetering.
I think we're reaching that critical mass that is ultimately, and very soon, going to cause a thing to go off the cliff.
There are no more arguments for it, Scott.
I mean, what do they have left?
They don't even have their good intentions left.
That used to be their argument, only mean well.
But I mean, how can you mean well when this is a racist, bigoted war that has produced nothing but death and assassinations and catastrophe?
They've destroyed Mexico.
I mean, you can't, a tourist would be crazy to go into Mexico and just drive from town to town like they used to do back in the 30s and 40s and 50s because of the drug gangs and drug lords and the kidnappings and the highway stops and stuff that these gangs put you under.
This is what the drug war has done and why these journalists can't recognize that.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if they were out protesting for an end to the drug war in Mexico?
I mean, it'd be awesome.
That would be the only solution.
And of course, yeah.
And in fact, coming at it from a counterintuitive sort of way like that is the only thing to get attention.
Like, that's it.
We've had it with these drug lords.
We want to legalize drugs, huh?
That gets everybody confused, right?
Because it sounds like you're saying, go ahead and let the Zetas go into business with a legitimate corporation.
But of course, what that means is the Zetas would go right out of business because legitimate corporations would come in and compete them right out of there with access to all kinds of international capital and whatever and all the advantages that they already have.
We would have basically bear brand cocaine, you know, that kind of thing.
I mean, it's like the Mike Johnson and Johnson brand methamphetamines, not Zeta's brand, not Sinaloa CIA cartel.
That's another thing.
What about the CIA and the Sinaloas that, hey, if we have a giant war of cartels in Mexico, I guess American intelligence agencies have to be, you know, in on one side.
Let's arm these guys against those guys.
And that's progress.
Look at our body count.
Yeah.
Well, the point you make about the drug lords going out of business with drug legalization, it is so important to keep pounding on that because that's what the people like these journalists and others that have this deferent to authority mindset, they just can't grasp.
As you point out there in their mind, if you legalize drugs, that's going to give these drug lords a free hand to sell drugs to whomever they want.
They don't understand that with drug legalization, that puts the drug gangs, the Sinaloas, all the drug cartels out of business immediately.
Why is that?
Because those kind of unsavory people can only operate in a black market.
Their method is killing, kidnapping, turf wars through violence, assassination.
Compare that to a private enterprise like an alcohol.
You've got, you know, distributors and producers that are reputable, that are out there in the public.
You don't see them fighting with violence against each other.
And that's what would happen with drugs.
Would drugs be sold?
Of course.
But they'd be sold by reputable pharmacies.
And by the way, pharmacies who would be more circumspect about selling to children than drug lords are.
But the drug lords, they can't compete against reputable pharmacies.
They can only compete in a black market.
Once you legitimize the market through legalization, those businesses go out of business.
And it's important that we keep pounding on that because until these people like these journalists get that, I think they're going to have this sense that, oh my gosh, we legalized drugs and the drug lords are going to be all among us.
Well, you know, let me get back to heroin a little bit here, because this is the one that has everybody panicking right now.
Of course, it's, you know, under the nose, at least, of the American occupied government in Afghanistan that's overseeing the production of 90% of the heroin in the world right now.
You know, that's hitting China, Russia, Europe and the United States.
And yet, you know, I don't think you have to go very far to figure out that in America, at least some substantial portion of people who are addicted to heroin are people who are prescribed opiates by their doctors, but then were very abruptly kicked off under a very strict drug enforcement administration, regimentation, bureaucratic regime about who's allowed to get opiate painkillers and for how long.
And what does it take to trigger an investigation of a doctor and his company and the insurance company, if they have someone on opiates for too long or what have you.
And then I don't know all the different incentives and how it's set up, but apparently now there's a big incentive in getting people hooked on opiates, but just not keeping them on very long because that could get you in trouble.
But you know, with the new and improved Oxycontin and Fentanyl and these kinds of painkillers, you have just regular people who are hooked and then they're kicked off cold turkey by the government slash doctor regime that they're under, prescription regime that they're under.
And then they go to the black market.
Somebody know, hey, I know where you can get some stuff that'll help you get by, blah, blah.
Next thing you know, they're a heroin addict.
And these are people who aren't from criminal life, who aren't from the lawless underclass or whatever.
They're regular, regular people who were in a car wreck or had cancer or surgery or some kind of thing and had some chronic pain they had to manage.
And they end up basically slipping, you know, and then, of course, the only other real heroin addicts, the only other category really of heroin addicts is people who suffered severe childhood trauma and horrible histories like that, who, you know, like an alcoholic, like a war veteran, alcoholic kind of thing.
They have a moment's peace when they're really, really high.
Otherwise they're tortured.
This is not criminal behavior, right?
These are people all of whom need help.
That is all.
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I'm trying to get these wars ended.
Yeah, well, first of all, on your point about Afghanistan, it really is ironic that under the Taliban regime, they had strict drug laws, which the U.S. government favors, and they had tightened up on drugs leaving Afghanistan, then under drug laws, which the U.S. favored.
And then the U.S. invades the country and ousts the Taliban regime and installs its own crooked, corrupt regime.
And now it's the biggest supplier of heroin in the world once again.
It really is ironic.
Another one of the perverse consequences of U.S. interventionism.
But yeah, Scott, you make a good point.
There are people who are addicted to these things, hydrocodone and the other opioids, and we can sympathize with people like that.
They need these drugs.
They find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to kick them.
I can relate.
I used to smoke cigarettes into my late 20s, and giving up cigarette smoking was the hardest thing I've ever done.
I mean, I can't imagine how difficult it must be to give up heroin or some opioid.
But this is a matter of sympathy and empathy.
It's something that, between the patient and the doctor, government's got no business going after doctors and scaring them and threatening them with prosecutions, because all they do is they tighten up on the amount of pills that they're giving patients, which then causes the patient to return to the black market to get their pills, which means, oftentimes, it's a corrupted mixture of drugs.
They don't know what they're getting.
If we just leave this as a societal problem, something that could be worked out between patient and doctor and private rehab centers, and leave the government entirely out of it, that's the key to this.
I mean, look at the most successful drug rehab program in history.
That's Alcoholics Anonymous.
It is entirely without government funds.
It does not rely on government funds.
They won't even let the government get involved in their process, and they have been most successful in getting people off addictions to alcohol than any other drug rehab program in history.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing, right?
There's a million of them, and of course, we don't really know what would happen if we had a real free market in these kinds of solutions.
We would probably have all kinds of solutions that we haven't even thought of, that people would be able to come up with.
Well, and you'd have the drug addict more open about his addiction.
I mean, that's the real secret to addictions, is that people have to be free to talk about it, to go into counseling, to go into groups like Narconon.
I mean, they have to seek the assistance of others, but when it's illegal, it's driven underground.
People have to be very secretive about it.
They're scared to death if they tell their friend he may be a narc, and that aggravates the addiction, that in order to solve the addiction, you're much better off just being open with people about it, talking about it, seeking counseling openly, and that can only be produced in an environment of legalization, and as you point out, it's impossible to imagine all the things, the rehab programs that would be coming into existence if it wasn't an illegal regime to consume or distribute drugs as it is today.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I have to tell you, I've tried different kinds of drugs before, but I've never tried heroin, and I'll tell you why, too, because that stuff will make your heart stop, and that's the only reason.
It's not because of the law.
It's because I learned as a kid that the problem with this drug is you take the wrong dose of it, it'll make your heart stop.
Well, I also had previously learned I need my heart to not stop, otherwise I'll die, so that's it.
That's why I don't do heroin, and I think that would, for all the drug war propaganda in the world, it seems like that's the point that they're not making, that like, hey, everybody, the real problem with heroin is it will make your heart stop, so smoke pot instead, you know?
By all means, get drunk, pass out.
It won't, you know, I don't know.
It seems like that, to me, is far better drug war propaganda than whatever else they come up with about, oh, you're helping fund terrorists or, you know, whatever kind of schtick.
The deal is, don't you want to live?
This stuff will kill you, man.
Yeah, I mean, it just goes back to all the nonsense that's been part of the drug war, the just say no campaign, that all you have to do is just say no, just say no, and look, they've had kids under their control in public schools for, you know, decades now.
You would think that they'd have, you know, six hours every day for, you know, 12 years and telling kids just say no, and yet here you have this nationwide drug problem.
Right.
You know, I took the DARE classes when I was in junior high school, and I'll tell you exactly what happened was they simply normalized drug use.
They showed us a film of a bunch of teenage kids at a park sitting out there in the open at a picnic table smoking pot.
And me and all of my junior high school friends were like, oh, my God, like we thought you would have to hide under the house or something to smoke a joint.
Apparently it's perfectly normal to sit at a park at a park bench in broad daylight with your friends.
And apparently all these kids are having a great time.
And this was the drug war propaganda and they're passing around bags of pot, bags of pills.
Yeah, this stuff is all over your neighborhood, kids.
Just basically normalizing it and showing us that, you know, absolutely there is, you know, this stuff is available if you look, which none of us would have ever dreamed at that time.
You know, another perverse consequence of of drug programs by the government.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's my own personal experience.
And I remember kids, friends of mine when I was, you know, junior high school punk ass kids when we were first smoking pot.
I remember some of my dumber friends saying, well, I'm going to try all these other drugs now, too, since it turns out that pot's really no big deal.
Apparently they lied about everything.
So, jeez, I bet those needles that must be a lot of fun, you know, like that's their slippery slope thinking right away.
If they if they overplayed the dangers of weed, then apparently this whole thing is bunk, you know, and so go ahead and lump in the rest of actual dangerous drugs with plain old pot.
Yeah, I mean, that that was the attitude that people saw the government lying about one aspect of it.
So the government must be lying about the other aspects, including heroin.
And heroin's a good example, too, because as you bring up, it's injected by needle in most cases.
And the black market is oftentimes involves the use of needles that other people have used.
So you've got these infectious diseases that are transmitted from person to person because they're using dirty needles.
That wouldn't happen in a free market.
In a free market, you'd have people going into heroin addicts, going into pharmacies, buying a little package with a clean needle, sterilized needle, and then they toss it away or whatever.
They wouldn't they wouldn't have the need to go out and get somebody else's needle to use because they would be freely available for purchase at pharmacies.
Now somebody may say, oh, well, that's just terrible.
You're just encouraging people to use heroin.
Well, that's ridiculous.
All it is is saying, look, you've got addicts.
You've had addicts throughout history.
You've got to place yourself in their shoes.
You've got to have some empathy, some sympathy.
They don't like being addicted to this any more than anybody else.
But they they're going to satisfy their habit one way or another.
There's a certain class of people that simply cannot break their habit.
And so you have a black market that's terribly expensive.
They have to go out and start robbing people, mugging people, burglarizing homes to get the money to satisfy their habit.
Well, in a legalized market, heroin would be reasonably priced.
The needles would be clean.
That's the humane way to deal with addictions, not by slamming people, putting them in the jail because they happen to be addicted to a drug.
Again, Scott, that's just not any business of the government.
There's a lot of things in life that are bad, bad for us.
They have bad consequences.
But do we want people put in jail for them?
That's the fundamental moral question that I think everybody has to ask.
And my answer is this is none of the government's business.
Yeah, I mean, there was a time where it was even a crime to go and provide clean needles to addicts.
I had when I was in high school, my science teacher, it was a private school.
My science teacher would go out at night like Robert De Niro in Brazil or something and, you know, smuggle illegal contraband, clean needles to heroin addicts and say, hey, guys, let me teach you about how HIV works and how you can protect yourselves.
And yeah, what a what a crime that was.
Right.
Trying to prevent the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C and all these terrible things.
And now.
So back to Mexico for a minute.
I can't really see it from here, but what I can see from here is a bunch of complainy old white right wing Americans who never stop bitching about Mexican immigrants coming to this country.
Donald Trump is the president of the country.
Now, which at least it ain't Hillary.
And at least he's funny.
Those are my disclaimers.
But anyway, he's the president right now because he said, I must stop these Mexicans from coming.
And yet who in America is the constituency that supports the war on drugs other than those very same Mexican hating white right wingers who are so mad that all the Mexicans are fleeing their country that our government has helped to destroy?
And I mean, what are they other than economic refugees from the consequences of America's empire?
No different than what's going on in the Middle East right now.
And all the refugees coming into Europe from, guess where, all countries that we've been attacking recently.
That is a fantastic point that the U.S. government goes in there and creates chaos like it's done in the Middle East and crises and death.
And when people say, gosh, I don't want to die, I want to escape this, this mess that the U.S. government has inflicted on this part of the world.
Well, we want to flee.
Everybody gets upset.
But very few people say, well, why don't you stop the interventionism so those people can have try to restore some semblance of balance and stability?
I mean, the U.S. government, this is what a lot of Americans don't want to face, is the instigator of much of the crises and the chaos.
I mean, invading a country like Iraq that never attacked the United States.
That's why there's an ISIS.
That's why there's a civil war in Iraq.
That's why there's a refugee crisis.
And the interventions go on with Libya and Syria.
And then, as you point out in Mexico, here you have this drug war that has destroyed the country.
I mean, it's just massive death and destruction.
No, like I said earlier, no American tourist in his right mind would travel freely around the country.
And so people try to flee that.
They say, well, I'm going to go to the United States and get a job.
And all of a sudden they're condemned as horrible people and terrible people that shouldn't be doing this.
We need a wall against them.
And here's another aspect of this.
Trump wants to prohibit American businesses from moving into Mexico.
Now, look at the perversity of that.
People complain about Mexicans that come to the United States for jobs.
Here are American employers that are ready, and they find it in their interest, to establish operations in Mexico, which would be hiring Mexican workers down there.
And people say, no, prohibit that American businessman from doing that so that Mexicans then have to come to the United States, get a job.
But, oh, wait a minute.
We don't want them to do that.
I mean, it's the entire perverse history of interventionism.
Yep.
Well, and you know what?
I want to bring up something else, too.
One last thing before I let you go here.
What you mentioned at the beginning, and it shouldn't get short shrift, and that is the racist motivations of these drug laws as they were passed going back to the 19th century.
But I know from a report that I did in high school about the war against pot that that was just protectionism for the labor market, that poor blacks and poor Mexicans were competition in the Great Depression for poor whites who already were having a tough enough time getting jobs.
And so, Sheriff, round them all up and drive the price of labor up a nickel.
And, you know, that kind of thing was a huge part of the illegalization of pot in the first place.
And that's just pot.
And it goes, of course, you know, a lot for the rest of this.
If you go look at all the reefer madness and whatever, all these horrible Negro jazz musicians are smoking this stuff and all this kind of thing to scare the hell out of everybody.
And well, I guess is the setup for your answer coming up here.
What difference has it made to the blacks and the Mexicans then of this country and white people go to jail for drug crimes, too?
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not trying to say like, you know, it's only it's the whites doing this to the blacks and the Mexicans, because that's not how it works.
But it is the government by far picking on minority populations compared to the rest of society.
Is that not true?
It's absolutely true.
I mean, the drug war was born in racism.
And you do all you have to do is study the story of Billie Holiday.
I mean, here is this this tremendous entertainer and who unfortunately was addicted to drugs.
I mean, she fought against her addiction and man, they went after her with a vengeance and they prosecuted, they persecuted.
They really just the drugs were destroying her life, but they just they just destroyed her life completely, putting her in jail for for something that she was struggling against.
I mean, word where they get off doing that.
But it is a racist war.
And we all know that it that it's impacted families across the board, including white families.
But it has clearly fallen disproportionately on blacks.
I mean, this is a racist dream come true.
It's what the the African-American scholar Michelle Alexander and her fantastic book calls the new Jim Crow.
I mean, this is better than segregation.
Segregation kept the races apart within cities.
What the drug war enables them to do under the guise of helping people and enforcing the law is remove blacks entirely from communities and relocate them in penitentiaries and then deprive them of the right to vote, which is, of course, what one of the things the biggest we're always trying to do it in the South, keep blacks from voting.
Well, now they they've developed the legitimate way to do this, and that's through drug laws.
And we see frame ups like in the big scandal in Talia, Texas, where they framed all those blacks there and sent them up to the penitentiary for 20 or 30 years.
And it was it was all a bogus deal.
Man, you look at the prisons there.
You could make a direct I'm sure she does in the book to make direct analogies to the plantations where these men are forced to work for a quarter an hour and this kind of thing.
For a symbolic amount of money is what they're paid to work and not making license plates, but answering phone calls for AT&T or growing crops that are sold, you know, by companies at the store.
They get their markup and everything.
It's sold in the regular capitalist market.
Only it's these guys doing all the labor in the field.
I mean, this is insane.
This is the kind of thing that it sounds like I'm lying.
Right.
It sounds like it, but it's you're you're absolutely right on.
I mean, this this is a bigoted war.
Now, I want to say that we've got a new program that we've established that I think I'm I'm probably more proud about this than anything else I've done in twenty seven years.
We've established outreaches to what are called historically historically black colleges and universities where we're doing conferences called in the drug war.
And we've done two so far.
These are predominantly black colleges.
They're called historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs.
And we did one in Morgan State and Baltimore and another one at Florida A&M in Florida.
And what we're doing is, you know, I noticed over the years that African Americans very rarely come to libertarian events.
So I said, OK, we're going to take our events to them.
And you cannot imagine how successful these have been.
These kids are just so pleased that we've come onto their campus and we were bringing something that they all know that this is a war that while on the appearance it looks like, oh, it's beneficial, it is one that is really a war against blacks.
There's no other way to describe it.
Well, the thing is, too, is it shouldn't be asking that much for people who aren't from the black side of town to just stop and pretend for a minute and imagine it from their point of view.
There's a war in America, not a civil war in the sense of a war for control of the capital city, but we call it a war, the war on drugs complete with these militarized SWAT raids and all these things.
Well, if this isn't happening in your neighborhood, it is happening to somebody.
So just pretend for a moment that it really is you and your family and your neighbors, your cousins, your extended family, you're the guy on your block, your best friend from a block over.
The people you grew up with are constantly the victims of the violence of the government's war against drugs like this.
And it looks like nobody else even cares.
You know, it sounds silly when when, you know, black leftists say, oh, white people are behind doing this to us or whatever.
Well, you kind of got to admit most white people are pretty silent about it.
Most white people don't seem to really care about it.
They don't seem to bother to take a look at just how terrorized your neighbors are.
Why are they complaining so badly?
How come if a couple of outside agitator leftists from Black Lives Matter show up in town, the whole neighborhood joins the march?
It's not because they're all a bunch of leftist radicals.
It's because the whole neighborhood is really feeling the stress of this drug war.
Above all, you know, the militarization of police goes beyond the war on drugs or whatever.
But the fact that they're screaming and crying is maybe an indication that something is wrong, that they're being treated unfairly.
And maybe that's why they feel like they're being treated unfairly instead of, well, geez, I don't know.
It's just not happening to me.
What am I supposed to do?
Stop and extend my imagination to how somebody else feels for just a second.
And, you know, I don't remember where I first heard this, but I'm pretty sure it was an old black guy I must have met, you know, driving a cab or being a rent-a-cop or a skateboarder kid somewhere or something told me that, well, you know, the whole purpose of the war on drugs is to keep black men in prison at reproduction age so that they can't get married and start families.
It's a genocidal war against their reproduction, against their very existence.
And I don't think I really believe that because I can't find anywhere where in a footnote where, you know, whitey committee, they said this is why we should do this.
So I'm not really saying that.
But what I am saying, Jacob, is imagine if you really believe that the war on drugs was about annihilating you and your people, annihilating you.
And it was plausible enough because, in fact, all of the reproduction age peers of yours were in the pen with a bunch of men and no women to become their wives.
The fact that that accusation is even plausible says that, man, oh, man, just forget the Middle East for a minute.
We are living in sin.
This is not right.
This is this is horribly wrong that it's gotten this far that anyone could even think that.
Right.
Well, right.
But, you know, I can I can I can sympathize with that.
I mean, you've got the eugenics movement that was directed a large part toward blacks.
And so you have that Tuskegee syphilis experiments that were directed to blacks where they they experimented to see if syphilis would spread, letting leaving blacks convinced that they were being treated and they weren't being treated at all.
They were just guinea pigs.
So, man, if I were black, I'd certainly be suspicious of any government program.
If you if you look at the disproportionate effects on blacks that the drug war has brought, Milton Friedman brought up many, many years ago in that open letter to Bill Simon back in I think it was 19 1980 or so, 1990, where he said the crack cocaine was developed within the black community because cocaine was so expensive that blacks needed a cheaper alternative.
And so you had this perverse outcome of the war on cocaine with crack cocaine, devastating people in the black community.
And then, of course, there's all the allegations that the CIA was involved with cocaine smuggling.
And I'll tell you, if I were African-American, I'd be a little bit suspicious myself.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, too.
Sorry I'm keeping you so long, but I'm having so much fun talking about this with you because so important, too.
And I don't know.
You're right.
People are talking about it more and more.
Maybe it's not as necessary.
But, you know, the the way that they discredited Gary Webb was they said that he said that this was all a big plot to destroy the blacks of L.A., which he never said that.
Show me a quote where he ever said that.
He didn't say that.
And they go, oh, well, how outrageous and ridiculous is that?
Well, if you were a black that lived, a black person lived south of the 10 in Los Angeles in the 1980s, it might sound pretty plausible.
And then check out what's the actual truth.
Right.
The runner up excuse is they didn't care at all what happened to the blacks of L.A.
They didn't care at all that the land south of the 10 had turned into a war zone down there that people were dying.
Their only answer was sending the Marines to do counterinsurgency, even though, you know, the cops, all the LAPD, they knew it was CIA cocaine.
And that's the answer is it wasn't a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the blacks of L.A.
It was just they could not care less at all what happened to them.
Again, you know, it sounds bad on the face of it, but think of it like you actually live there.
And it was they actually didn't care that this was happening to you.
I mean, in the neighborhood where I grew up, this was something on TV, not something out my window.
So but, you know, it didn't it shouldn't be too hard to imagine that, you know, what it's like to be on the receiving end of this kind of policy.
And this is why I always hated the Republicans so much.
Even when I was a young kid, I knew this, that just say no and big Ronald Reagan drug war and lock up all the blacks for using drugs and then come to find out it was Ronald Reagan and Oliver North were the dope pushers all along.
You got to be kidding me, man.
So, you know, that helped radicalize me before I was at a junior high that look at what bastards these people are.
And it was that obvious to who was taking the brunt of it, you know?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, blacks have long suspected that.
I mean, you you you have the black leaders in the inner cities that in the early days were supporting the war on drugs.
I mean, they were like these Mexican journalists.
And it's it's it's difficult to be critical because that seems like the logical consequence.
You see your neighborhood getting devastated.
You see young people involved in the drug trade.
You see drug addicts destroying their lives.
And so you think, yeah, bring in the cops.
But what nobody could think about at the time was, hey, there's there's only one solution and that's legalized drugs.
It's a counter intuitive solution.
But I think and abolish the CIA and abolish the CIA along with it.
I mean, the whole national security state.
But now I think more and more people are finally realizing this when they see that this is just an excuse to abuse blacks, that the search and seizures, the pat downs, the insult.
I mean, if you remove this ambit from police officers, the drug war, you have removed the biggest excuse they have for stopping blacks and patting them down and subjecting them to humiliation and searches and so forth.
I mean, you still got that the driving white black syndrome, which is a crime in many areas.
But by removing the drug war, you have removed one of the biggest elements of abuse that law enforcement could could ever have to inflict against blacks.
All right.
Hey, sorry for keeping you so long.
But this has been great.
I really appreciate Jacob.
Hey, I enjoyed it.
Thanks for having me on as always.
Keep up the good work.
All right.
You too.
OK, guys, that is Bumper Hornberger.
He is the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation, and they're putting on this big thing on June the 3rd.
All you got to do, you fly into Dulles Airport, tip your cabby.
Well, OK, come on, be fair.
It's a short trip.
He's waited like three hours for a short trip, but it's just a short trip right there to the Dulles Airport Marriott right there adjacent to Dulles Airport on June the 3rd.
The National Security State and Jack Kennedy, JFK.
And check out the speakers, Stephen Kinzer, Michael Glennon, David Talbot, Ron Paul and, of course, Bumper himself.
Oliver Stone is going to be there as well.
And so if you're on the East Coast or if you can afford it to get there from wherever you are, go ahead and head over to the Dulles Airport Marriott to check out the National Security State and JFK.
OK.
Oh, and find out all about that.
Of course, all the links are at FFF.org, the Future Freedom Foundation.
OK, I'm Scott Horton, which means you got to go to Scott Horton, dot org, Libertarian Institute, dot org, slash support and find me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
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So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
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