10/11/07 – Keith Halderman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, thanks for listening and switching up from the Middle East here.
Although, I don't know, this conversation could tend back toward Central Asia at some point, I think, but let's start with the United States and a little bit of history anyway.
It's Keith Haldeman from the Trebach Institute.
He's an editor there, trebach.com, and writes at Liberty and Power at the History News Network, the blog there with the great David Beto, taught the history of drugs in America at American University last year, and is an expert in the history of the American drug wars.
Welcome to the show, Keith.
Thank you, it's good to be here.
It's great to have you on the show.
I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.
Well, let's start with Louis Armstrong.
You heard the cover on the way in here on the bumper music.
Bill Hicks once said that if you're so against drug use out there, all you people, fine, go home and take all your records and all your albums and all your CDs and all that music that's enhanced your life throughout all these years and take home and burn them and smash them, because guess what?
Every one of those musicians, all of them, real high on drugs when they wrote that music.
I think in Armstrong's case, not only when they wrote it, but when they recorded it too, a lot of critics consider his Hot 5 and Hot 7 sessions to be the best recorded jazz in history.
In his books, he actually explicitly talks about one session where they smoked, but it was kind of implied that that was a routine practice for them.
You know, he's a good person to bring up on this level because on one hand, you have the whole jazz musician thing, which makes him, I guess, the poster boy for pot use.
But also, as you point out in this great article I read that you wrote all about Louis Armstrong, here's a man who was nothing but productive his whole life, played music that people enjoyed, improvements in race relations everywhere he traveled, did nothing but work from dawn till dusk every day of his life, etc.
Yeah, he really kind of refutes the stereotype of the marijuana smoker.
His whole life is just one example of why that's not true.
I mean, I think that the worst aspect of the drug war is it is completely against the idea of individualism.
In other words, the idea that, you know, if you smoke a substance or take a substance, that that defines you, that's who you are.
There's no room for any kind of variation in the effects, at least as far as the government is concerned.
Let's talk about that individual liberty.
Basically, what you're saying is, you know, if you own yourself, you can take whatever drugs you want, assuming, you know, you've reached adulthood, I guess.
It does strike at the concept of individual self-ownership big time.
It's also very pernicious, the whole kind of concept is because it negates the idea of individual responsibility.
One of the things that's very wrong with our culture these days is the idea that people are not responsible for their own actions.
And I think that the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs has really contributed to that kind of philosophy.
It's spilled over, you know.
Whenever you do something bad, you blame it on your drug use rather than, you know, and you don't take into consideration that other people are using the exact same drugs and not doing what you're doing.
I think that's a very good point.
You wrote, actually, I think, about some of the ways in which the war on drugs on the policy level affects other policies.
So, like, for example, they start doing no-knock entries in the name of getting inside in time before the suspect has a chance to flush the drugs down the toilet or whatever, and then you end up having no-knock entries for everybody all the time.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's the same thing in the culture.
The government says we have to wage wars against these substances because these substances make people do bad things.
And then the population says, yeah, that's right, that's why I did the bad thing.
It was because of the drugs I was on, not because I'm a jerk.
Yeah, exactly.
You see lots of examples of that all the time.
The war on terror and the war on drugs, I see them as being very similar in their pernicious aspects.
It's not so much the idea that the individual people that they catch up in it that are innocent, and some of the people in Guantanamo that were just basically sold to the American government because they happen to be the wrong ethnic type.
It had nothing to do with terrorism.
There's people there.
They actually had to let some of them out.
But it's not so much what's happening to them.
It's what's happening to just the basic system.
The loss of civil liberties and the potential for even more abuse.
The war on drugs has been contributing to that for a long time, and the war on terror is too.
They're working hand in hand.
There's two wars.
There's the domestic war, the war on drugs, and the war on terror, the international war.
And they're both eroding our civil liberties.
Well, you know, to quote Bill Hicks again, he always said, well, this goes back, what, 20 years ago.
He said, it's not the war on drugs.
Don't believe him for a minute.
It's the war on personal freedom.
It's a deliberate attack on your liberty and your right to decide for yourself.
And they'll call it whatever they want.
And in this case, they're calling it the drug war.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I tend to think that that's right, that this mostly is just an excuse for cops to go around stealing people's stuff and kicking their doors and getting their adrenaline rush.
Speaking of drug abuse.
Yeah, I can't speak so much for other drugs, but like the drug I've studied the most is marijuana.
My dissertation is on marijuana prohibition in the 1930s.
And so I'm most familiar with the history of that.
And the thing about marijuana is I don't think you have any kind of case at all that it's a dangerous drug and that it needs to be prohibited anyway.
You can't argue the health arguments are falling apart rapidly.
I mean, the most significant one is this guy Pashtent, who was a big anti-marijuana guy, right?
And he just published last year that they did an epidemiological study on marijuana smoking, and they couldn't find any link whatsoever to lung cancer.
Nothing.
And this is coming from a guy who was very anti-marijuana.
Well, in fact, didn't they find the opposite correlation that people in some pots seem to not get it?
Yeah, and they did find a slight correlation.
Again, just no real good argument for health effects at all.
And even if there were, there's all sorts of things.
If you're going to ban, you've got to ban ice cream, too, if that's the rationale.
Well, and that's where we're headed right now.
I mean, bite your tongue and be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, I completely agree with you on that.
You're headed that way, I think.
It's very frightening, yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
When you talk about the nanny state and the growth of the nanny state, it starts with the drug war back in 1906, and even earlier than that, actually.
One of the most important points about drug prohibition that people misunderstand is that it is an artifact of the progressive era.
I mean, all of the principles and the things that are involved in the public policy there begin with the progressive era and our progressive philosophy.
Right, this whole idea that, well, we figured out what's the right thing, and so we need to use the power of the state to engineer people that way.
That's how they outlawed alcohol, right?
We all know it's not good for people to drink whiskey and beat their wives all the time, so let's outlaw it.
Exactly, and it was a total failure, and drug prohibition is just a failure on a smaller scale.
The only reason that there's not the outrage that came with alcohol prohibition is because not as many people use drugs as drink.
But if you had the same number of people using the drugs as people were drinking, you wouldn't have drug prohibition anymore.
I don't believe.
It's just not enough people are using them so you can get away with abusing those people.
To get back to what I was saying before, I really believe that the whole kind of problem is made out of whole cough.
But the other arguments for it, number one, that it makes you lazy in the kind of amotivational syndrome, they come up with that during the Vietnam War, and so on one hand you have them arguing about amotivational syndrome, but on the other hand you have Spiro Agnew going out and saying that marijuana smoking causes you to go out and protest the Vietnam War.
Well, I don't know, if you look at the history of the war protesters, those people were pretty active, you know what I'm saying?
They weren't laying around on their couches, they were out doing stuff all the time.
They got 500,000 people to go to the Pentagon and stuff like that.
So how are you going to argue that these people are lazy at the same time they're doing all that?
And this came right off of the Mitch Romney video where he goes against that medical marijuana patient, right?
He also posted an earlier video where he actually answers the question, why are you against it?
And he brought up the old stepping stone or gateway theory, and he answered that time, he said that it leads to other drugs, right?
Well, every single commission report, and that's what really got me into this whole subject of this story, is these great commission reports.
You have the British Hemp Commission in 1894, the Army's Panama Canal studies in 1928, the LaGuardia Commission in 1944, and you have the Shaffer Commission in 1972, you have the recent Canadian Senate one, and you have the Jamaican Parliament one, so those are fairly recent, so you can't really argue that it was the old marijuana, and now we have this new super marijuana that they're always talking about.
Not a single one of them has ever given any support whatsoever to the idea that smoking marijuana causes you to use other drugs.
That whole, that, Romney's whole rationale for that is completely unsupported.
And not only that, but in 1937 they had the hearings for the first federal marijuana law, the Marijuana Stamp Tax Act, and the guy who was, are you familiar with Harry Angslinger?
Yeah, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Yeah, he's like the, from 1930 to 1962, he is the, I think the single most important historical figure when you look at the history of, he has enormous influence, so in the congressional hearings of the House Ways and Means Committee for the Marijuana Stamp Tax Act, one of the congressmen asks Angslinger directly, is the gateway or stepping stone theory, I don't know if he used those exact words, but the idea that it causes people to use other drugs valid, and Angslinger explicitly says no, it's a completely different group of people.
He's completely saying no, there's no validity to the stepping stone or gateway theory.
Now he changes his tune after the LaGuardia Commission pretty much shuts down the idea that marijuana causes you to be violent and insane.
And in the 50s, yeah, he's talking about the stepping stone theory, but in 37 he's saying no, it's not valid.
And the other thing about it is, and again this goes to Romney's position, is that there's never been any kind of even attempt to explain a mechanism of why marijuana causes you to crave these other drugs.
And the last thing about the stepping stone theory, I'm sorry to go on so much about this, but I think it's terribly important, because again, you've got a political candidate in 2008 who's using this as a reason to deny patients medicine.
And the other thing about it is, it's always presented as a logical fallacy.
If you say that 85% of cocaine users smoked marijuana or something similar, you know, sometimes it's heroin, sometimes the percentage is different, but it's always the same kind of argument, right?
But if you say that 85% cocaine users used marijuana, you're making a cause and effect argument, but you're putting the effect before the cause.
By definition, the cocaine users are the cause, right?
You're saying that marijuana causes people, but you're putting that percentage first.
And that percentage means nothing, because the important percentage is how many percent of marijuana smokers use cocaine.
And that percentage is minuscule and way too small to make the theory valid.
Right, yeah, absolutely.
And I'll go ahead and say, I don't care, I smoke pot and I've never done cocaine.
And I've had, I don't know, at least 100 chances or something to do it.
I've never even tried coke in my whole life.
Yeah, that's what Anglin was saying back in 37, it's just two completely different sets of people.
If there is any connection whatsoever between the two, it's because both are purchased in the black market, right?
So if you were really worried about marijuana smokers moving on to cocaine or heroin, you would legalize marijuana.
You would end that black market connection.
Right, in fact, those are the times I've had chances to do cocaine is when I was scoring a bag of weed, and there was cocaine there too, because it's the, you know, where I am to score my bag is business, you know what I mean?
So they're doing business there.
And when I say the whole problem is made out of a whole cloth, that's the drug I'm most familiar with.
But there's a lot of evidence that the other ones are too.
You know, like take for example, this has always struck me with opium.
Like you start getting the opium laws in, the first one is in 1875, right?
So at the same time you're arguing that opium is sort of kind of the whole withered, sallow skin, kind of, you know, this is opium, destroyed your body and all that.
But at the same time you're making those arguments, you've also got the Chinese building the railroads, right?
And these Chinese are using opium, and I think the reason they're using opium is not because they want to get high, it's because they're out lifting rocks all day, and by the time, you know, for 12 hours a day, and by the time they're done, they're hurting.
And if you smoke some opium, it takes their pain away, right?
But you're also arguing that opium makes you lazy at the same time that the people who are smoking opium are building the railroads, and the reason all the white people hate the Chinese is because they work too hard.
Right, their competition for labor, and this is the thing, and I want to get into foreign policy some here too, but this is really the thing about the war on pot in the 1930s, and Franklin Roosevelt and his stamp tax and all that.
Mexicans worked cheaper than white folks, and there was already an excess of labor, and wages were falling, and it was simple protectionism in the Southwest.
The Mexicans are the ones who smoke the pot, so let's outlaw what they smoke so we have an excuse to lock them up so they're not competing with us for work.
Simple as that.
Well, I got to kind of disagree with you there.
Oh, I did a whole report about this in high school, and read a great book, it's called, let's see, The Strange Career of Marijuana, where they had all the direct quotes of the local politicians in New Mexico and Arizona.
There are too many Mexicans competing for our jobs, let's outlaw pot.
Well, that might be a factor in certain locales.
What I argue in my dissertation is this, the person that makes the argument the strongest is a man, a story named John Helmer, who wrote a book called Drugs and Minority Oppression, and his argument is he connects the Mexicans with marijuana, the Chinese with opium, the opiates, and the blacks with cocaine, and he argues that each one of these prohibitions is an attack on the ethnic group.
But in my opinion, I think it's more of a public choice argument.
I argue in my dissertation that what they're really doing is they don't really care about marijuana, at least on the federal level, it's a means to an end.
What they want to do is they want to pass something called the Uniform Narcotic Act.
What this Uniform Narcotic Act does is it kind of standardizes all the paperwork.
The pharmaceutical companies are very much in favor of it because they don't have to do with 50 sets of rules.
They don't have to deal with one rule.
What the Uniform Narcotic Act is is it's a model law that they try to get all the states to pass.
It's kind of a common practice when there was still some idea of a federalized government where states had rights over the thing.
In fact, they don't want to outlaw marijuana because they believe it won't pass the constitutional test.
So what they're trying to do is get this Uniform Narcotic Act passed, and they're not having a lot of success with it until they come up with this whole new idea that the dangerous new drug of marijuana, and they're using marijuana to scare the state legislatures into passing the Uniform Narcotic Act.
At the same time, I've actually got a letter from Richmond Hopson, who is the founder and head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, which is the most powerful kind of NGO, kind of like the equivalent partnership for a drug-free America in the 30s.
And he's writing to Angstinger saying, you know, let's keep up with this marijuana stuff.
When you see articles about the Uniform Narcotic Act, it is the most important goal of the NGO, the government, the press.
They talk about this all the time.
Every article, it's never not mentioned.
Everybody wants it, except that there's problems, you know, you've got to spend money and the state legislatures are balking.
So in the beginning, you know, they're making constitutional arguments, but around 1933, 34, they start talking about marijuana, and then it becomes like the major argument for it.
That's when you start seeing all the reefer madness stuff come to the front and all that.
The whole kind of Mexican thesis, I think it's more of an enabling factor than an originating factor.
The fact that it's Mexicans and jazz musicians and sailors, and not very many of them, if you take the whole population together, makes it possible for them to pass these laws.
Right.
Because they're the out-groups.
It helps, you know, contribute to the labor, but there's a historian, Patricia Morgan, who writes about that, and she said, yes, there is a big anti-Mexican propaganda that's in the forefront in the 20s when there's a lot of ideas of restricting immigration and stuff like that, the kind of thing you were talking about earlier, but it's not connected to marijuana at all.
When you look at that literature, the anti-Mexican literature, they barely mention marijuana at all.
The anti-marijuana propaganda doesn't come until later in the 1930s.
Oh, that's interesting.
I guess the way I learned it was that the states, that the state legislatures in the Southwest had really been pushing for the act from below.
Yeah, that's the common, you see that argument in a lot of stuff, and it springs from a book called The American Disease by David Musto, who's a medical historian, but the only thing he offered in his book is one article from the New York Times.
That argument has been put forth, and the strange career of marijuana, he discusses the two competing theories, the Mexican theory and what's called the entrepreneur theory, if you remember the book.
I don't remember the second part.
It's been a long time.
Yeah, I'm coming down thoroughly on the entrepreneur theory that marijuana probate is an entrepreneurial act by Harry Ainslinger and the pharmaceutical companies.
Well, let me go a little bit further.
I kind of think of the whole drug war as an entrepreneurial act by the criminals that control our government.
We've seen, for example, in Gary Webb's great book, Dark Alliance, how when it comes down to it, if our national government wants to sell untold millions and millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs to American citizens in order to pay for illegal secret wars propping up death squads in South America and so forth, then they're perfectly willing to do that.
It's a great way to make black market money, and of course the more you increase the penalties, the higher the price and the better the profit margins, and I tend to think of the entire drug war not as folly but as a cynical ploy, basically, for our government to drive up prices, lock up black men right around the time they might be having kids, lock them in cages only with each other, no women around, and go ahead and eviscerate the Bill of Rights for all of us.
I see it all as an entrepreneurial ploy by our national government for them to get over on us and, more specifically, the people who control our national government, the state, the interlocking and international networks of criminals that control our government, they're all into drugs.
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea that you're a big drug war and you don't use drugs, you see countless examples of that all the time.
I mean, are you familiar with the Drug War Chronicle?
No, no.
All right, this is the Drug Reform Coordination Network, and if you really want to keep up on the drug war issue, and you can get it for free, too, it's a weekly newsletter, and it's just a terrific thing.
They just follow all the stories relating to drug policy.
And they have a weekly segment called Corrupt Cop Stories, and I'm telling you, it's there every week, and there's a new story every week, sometimes two or three.
So, you know, the old saw that cops have the best dope.
I think there's a bit of truth to that.
Yeah.
Let's get back to Romney and the kid in the wheelchair there.
I really liked how you pointed out.
This bothered me, but I kind of put it aside.
I'm glad that you kind of harped on it in your blog entry at Liberty and Power, which is this kid came right out and told Romney, he's perfectly happy if Romney arrests every pot smoker in the world except him, but it just wouldn't be fair for Romney to prosecute him since he's in a wheelchair.
I have, like, very mixed feelings about medical marijuana, and it basically comes from Jeff Shaler and Thomas Szasz, and both of those guys are very much opposed to medical marijuana because they say that it's just going to contribute to the rise of the therapeutic state, and that's the idea that we're going to be controlled by doctors and that health is going to be the only value, right?
And they see it as actually pernicious.
And I would argue with them and say, well, but the main problem you have with marijuana is that you've got to change the image of the marijuana smoker because the image of the marijuana smoker pre-medical marijuana is this hippie who's, you know, opposed to the war, he doesn't work, he never washes.
It's the whole cheek and chong thing, the idea that, you know, cheek and chong are typical marijuana smokers, you know?
And the value of the medical marijuana movement has been that it would change the image, right?
So instead of now the medical marijuana being, you know, this hippie, the marijuana smoker is now, like, you know, some 50-year-old woman who's got leukemia and has to take anti-cancer drugs, the chemotherapy, and she's smoking it to get through that, and that's a much more sympathetic image, right?
And I think to a large extent it did help change that, you know?
It's changed the dynamics of people's perception.
But I'm beginning to believe, and I sort of hinted at that in what I wrote, is that it's kind of reached this point of usefulness.
The things I liked about it, I think it's accomplished that, and now it's becoming an obstacle, and you have people like this guy in the wheelchair saying, you know, screw everybody else, you know?
Right.
Like, once you say, well, it's medical, then they can say, well, you can't do that because it's too hard to regulate and look at these doctors, they're giving it to anybody, and, you know, the kind of arguments that they're having out in California about this.
And ignoring the argument that we started with, which is, hey, people own themselves, they can take whatever drugs they want as long as they're not violating the rights of anybody else.
Yeah.
And this is my problem, too.
If you take, you know, the average American who has no experience with illegal drugs whatsoever, why is it, how is it that they believe that they got the right to tell other people that they can't?
How is it that the average American with no drug experience is for the drug war, apparently, and don't immediately bump up against the idea that, well, you know, I don't want people telling me what I can take or smoke or eat or whatever it is?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's what you're saying is exactly, that's the other thing that really bugs me.
I always kind of associate with this phenomenon, I associate Bill O'Reilly with that.
Because, you know, if you listen to O'Reilly, and I have a job where I deliver things for one day a week, and so I'm riding around my car, and my daughter is full of coke on my radio, so I have it like I can only get two stations.
Oh, no.
One is Bill O'Reilly, and the other one is like they talk too much.
They don't play enough music.
I like talk radio better anyways.
My favorite buttons are stuck on these too, so I end up listening, and I can only take them for like about ten minutes at a time.
You know, it just drives me crazy.
And his whole thing is that, well, I never use drugs, but then he's going on and on about all these horrible things that marijuana smokers do and stuff.
And I think that, you know, if I ever got a chance to confront him, I would say to him that, you know, the war on drugs is built on two things, I believe.
One is it's a cheap and easy way for some people to feel superior to other people, because Bill O'Reilly can sit there and say, I don't use drugs, so I'm a better person than you.
Right?
Right.
And, you know, in the meantime, who knows what he's doing, you know?
Well, and when it comes to his role model, Rush Limbaugh, we see he can be addicted to opiates and engage in black market exchanges and so forth to acquire them, and he doesn't get in any trouble at all.
If he was a poor black guy, he'd still be in prison.
Yeah, absolutely.
The drug war is the most racist institution we have in this country today.
I mean, it's just right out there.
And it, you know, it may not be your racism and that, you know, they don't say if you're black, you get worse penalties, but that's the de facto op, the way it operates.
Absolutely.
Hey, tell me, how many Americans got arrested for possession just a pot last year, do you know?
I think there was a new study on that beer scene that they said it was, I don't know what the exact number was, but it was a record.
In other words, it was higher than any time before.
Yeah, it was millions.
The figure I've heard before, like that, you know, sort of sticks in my mind, it's like 700,000, but again, it went up again.
I'm not sure what issue that was.
It was either this last issue or the issue before that, where they actually had the statistics.
Well, now, what about foreign policy, too?
I kind of wish we'd spent a little bit more time on this, but we've got all kinds of opium trade going on in Central Asia.
We've got drug wars in Colombia or, well, some kind of wars in the name of drug wars in Colombia and other parts of South America.
Well, it's going to be Mexico now.
One of the things that's hidden in the Pentagon's new budget is $1.4 billion for anti-drug aid to Mexico.
That's like in the new Pentagon budget.
They're going to give the Mexicans $1.4 billion.
What the Mexicans did is they involved the army in it in a big way.
The head of the government's National Human Rights Commission is just going ballistic about all the things that the army has done.
So far, 1,500 people have been killed by the army in this whole thing, all kinds of rapes.
There was a mass rape of 14 women after a local police chief in Coahuila arrested a soldier, and there was a mass rape of 14 women.
There's another pickup truck that failed to stop.
They shot and killed three women and two or more school teachers, and two children were in the truck, too.
Again, it's amazing what's going on there.
Yeah, it sounds like they were actually in Basra or something.
Yeah, and again, if you're looking at that 1.4 billion dollars in the Pentagon budget, the time we're at war in Iraq and the time that we don't have the proper body armor for our soldiers, the ride-around vehicles with no armor on the bottom and getting blown up, we can spend $1.4 billion.
Dr. Trebek's book, Fatal Distraction, is all about that.
He really documents how well this is taken away from other things we're trying to do.
It's a matter of resources.
We don't have unlimited resources, and the ones we're using in the drug war are being wasted, in my opinion.
Well, and it's just an abject ignorance, too.
If you accept my premise, which I don't know if you do, that this is really all a big cynical ploy just to steal our liberty by the people in the national government, it's also a policy that has millions and millions of supporters across this country.
And their argument basically rests on the premise that if you send in government guys with laws and guns, that they can eradicate the supply of something that there's a demand for.
And that is the stupidest thing in the world.
There's no examples of that ever working in human history, I don't think, other than maybe containing the smallpox virus to certain laboratories or something.
Other than that, hey, guess what?
Austinites, for example, love cocaine.
And guess what?
It's never going to stop coming here.
And if they eradicate all the cocaine in Mexico, all they did was just drive up the price of cocaine from Bolivia.
And this whole thing is ridiculous.
And the other thing I think it does, too, is that when you have prohibition, and when I teach my class I call this the iron law of prohibition, that when you try to prohibit a drug, that one of the consequences that happens every time is that people are still going to use the drug, but they're going to use it in more concentrated and more problematic forms of that drug.
Just like when they raised the drinking age.
All of a sudden the kids who used to be able to go out and drink at 18 and so forth, now they go to parties at friends' houses and completely get all the way trashed.
Well, alcohol prohibition is the greatest example of that, because you had a real serious decline in the amount of beer and wine drank and hard liquor and then the homemade stuff, which was actually very dangerous sometimes.
Same thing with crack cocaine in L.A., right?
There's a 1922 report by a guy named Kolb who talks about some of these laws that, like some of the first laws, were against smoking opium.
And what he said is that in the report, the 1922 report, he said, yeah, you had a big decrease in the amount of opium smoked, but you had a huge increase in the amount of morphine and heroin being injected.
Right, which is certainly worse, right, in terms of addiction?
Yeah, when Harvey Wiley, are you familiar with him?
No.
Harvey Wiley is the head of the Bureau of Chemistry, and when they passed the Food and Drug Act in 1906, he's put in charge of it.
He's in the Agricultural Department, the Bureau of Chemistry.
And he just arbitrarily decides that coca is a poison.
It's just him making this decision, and he bans coca in all food.
And at the time, coca was pretty prominent.
There were coca candies, coca wine, coca tea.
It was a fairly common food ingredient, and no evidence that what's thought of it was harmful.
Besides the fact that he banned something that was a useful product for no good reason, what he did was the only thing that was legal after that was pharmaceutical cocaine.
So people who were using coca products, a lot of them went for the cocaine because you get it.
Went for the strong stuff, yeah.
And at the time, there wasn't any real laws against it.
You could go in a pharmacy and buy it.
This was before the Harrison Act.
If you fast forward to the 1990s, or really the 1980s, during the Reagan years, you have the very same thing to the next degree with crack cocaine.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's a really good example of the iron law.
What they did was they clamped down on the border with marijuana.
They made a serious dent in the amount of marijuana coming in through Florida and stuff, so people just started smuggling cocaine.
And you had a big rise to that.
Then you had an oversupply of cocaine in the country, so somebody had to invent some way in order to sell it cheaply to people who were too poor to buy, because back then it was going for like $100 a gram, and that's when crack arises.
So you could sell it for $10.
People could come up with $10.
A very good example of the iron law.
Vietnam is another example of that.
In the beginning, the soldiers in Vietnam were smoking pot, and the army cracked down on the pot, so they went to snorting heroin.
The army cracked down on the heroin, and they went to injecting heroin.
Every time they enforced the prohibition, they moved up to a more dangerous drug.
Well, that's all right.
At the end of the day, everyone in the audience, they all still love government anyway, and they all still want government to make everyone behave the way they want to, and it doesn't matter that every single time there's a disaster, every single time the effects are the opposite of what government promised.
It's all for the good.
The head of whatever regulatory agency gets more power and something new to regulate, and people get to sit in their houses and feel like they're powerful, knowing that cops are enforcing their will on strangers far away somewhere.
And apparently, here we are after 100 years of this absolute nonsense, the rights of individuals being violated by the state in the name of this ridiculous drug war for a century now, and are we really any closer to decriminalizing drugs?
I mean, what would they say if you just came out and said, Look, we've got to legalize cocaine and heroin and pot and the rest of it so that drug use will go down and so that we can save our Bill of Rights?
They'll run you out of town on a rail, Keith.
What do you know?
Well, I think they acknowledge that among themselves.
There was just Dave Borden, who had a nice editorial in the Drug War Chronicle, and he told a story related to the story of Arnold Trebok.
And back in the 80s, people would say, Yeah, you know, to Trebok, I'll talk to you about this, but we can't talk about it in my office.
We've got to meet me in some restaurant or something because I don't want to be seen with you.
You know, I think they acknowledge it.
They know it's a failure and that.
But again, there's a lot of money involved.
That's what I'm saying.
The two twin pillars that are holding up is with the average people, it's the idea that you can fill a period of people.
Let's face it.
You can say anything you want about a marijuana smoke.
You make a joke about a marijuana smoker, say that marijuana people are lazy or whatever, and nobody's going to bat an eyelash, right?
You can't do that about gay people anymore.
You can't do it about black people.
You can't do it about Hispanics.
But marijuana smokers are fair game.
And I don't think the evidence is there to back it up.
That was the point of my Louis Armstrong piece.
He's the exact opposite of that.
And he's not the only one.
Take Peter Lewis, for example, the progressive insurance.
Billionaire, right?
If marijuana is so debilitating, how did this guy become a billionaire?
Well, I just won the Best in Austin award from the Austin Chronicle yesterday for my Iraq war coverage.
Yeah, congratulations on that.
I guess it's because I'm so zonked out on pot or something.
Yeah, I mean, when you start looking at...
I don't know if the site's still up, but it was a great site by Lester Grinspoon.
Are you familiar with him?
No, afraid not.
Lester Grinspoon was head of the psychiatry department at Harvard.
And he wrote a book in the 1970s called Marijuana Reconsidered.
And it came out of the fact that his son had cancer, and he actually died of it.
But he used marijuana to relieve the nausea.
So he started really studying it.
And this is a terrific book about this.
And he had a site called marijuanauses.com.
And I'm not sure.
I haven't been on it for a while.
But it was all just ordinary people like stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, some anatomists, some that, telling their stories about how it's useful in their life.
And it wasn't, you know, people that are on Skid Row.
These are people that are highly successful people.
There are millions of Americans.
Yeah, and let's face it, what's the mark of a successful drug user is the idea that nobody knows they're using it.
I remember one time seeing an editorial in the Washington Times, and it was kind of like a hysteric, like people were supposed to interpret it, 85% of all people who use drugs are employed.
And of course what they're trying to do is the image of people, of stoned people driving forklifts off a loading dock.
But, you know, if 85% of them, that's a higher percentage probably than the general population.
Right.
You know?
I mean, you know, the unemployment rate, there's a lot of people that aren't looking for jobs.
They're not included in the unemployment rate.
Oh, yeah.
Wow, that's very interesting, the way you spin that.
I hadn't thought of that one.
Then the other thing is Holland, right?
You're always going against Holland, saying, okay, well, you've got these liberal, you know, drug laws, and, you know, people smoke pot in Holland.
But I remember one time seeing in paper there was a list of European countries and their unemployment rate, and everybody had double-digit unemployment except Holland, which had about half the unemployment of every other country.
Yeah, well, that's because they get to relax when they get off work at night, and so they're ready to go the next day maybe.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm just making that up.
All right, I'm going to let you go, Keith.
Okay.
Everybody, it's Keith Haldeman.
He's the editor for the Trebach Report, that's T-R-E-B-A-C-H dot com, the Trebach Institute, and he is a blogger at Liberty and Power at the History News Network.
Thanks a lot for your time today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I enjoyed it.