Never Would Have Guessed This

When I was a Patrolman in the late 80s, about 100 police officers were shot to death each year. One of my most frightening moments was when I received my body armor (relatively new then). I had been waiting a month, still on the job each night working 11-7, and when I put the vest on the first time - I could see how much of me was not protected. Not comforting at all. Lucky for me I was never in need of the vest or more than the vest in 3 years of police work.

I'm glad that it is safer now, and I believe it will be safer still when the US finally gets over drug prohibition.

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/police-deaths-study.php

When Will the Dam Break 20160912

Would you support the drug war, prohibition of drugs, if you believed the despair described in the linked article was the symptom of all of the costs of that prohibition?  We have believed that we can protect ourselves from drugs by law for a long time, despite all the evidence to the contrary (evidence like we can't even keep drugs out of prisons).  I view the drug war as just another cultural delusion regarding what the government's monopoly on coercive force can create or accomplish.

Without the drug war, there would be no drug black market, there would be no funding to pay for the guns and ammo, there would be no drug turf over which to fight, the current practice of arresting poor young men dealing would end, so there would be a chance for young poor men to father their own children.  There would be young, poor men around for young poor women to marry.  The chance for family would be restored.

If then experiment - if the drug war, then mass imprisonment is the only way to reduce violence.  Else - no drug war, less violence, less money to be spent by criminals on guns, more incentives to enter the work force (even if it is only the legal sale of drugs).  It wouldn't be utopia, nor will we find utopia under any circumstance.  But a drug war free US would be better than the current bloodbath and the way it pits the populace in these circumstances against the police officers who would try to protect them from crime.  If no drug war, then many fewer reasons for police to confront minorities while each fears and perhaps hates the other.

But of course, this "conservative" author cannot even pin point the drug war as the problem - it would be akin to expressing doubt in the christian god in her circles to suggest that using violence to stop drug use is stupid, dehumanizing and ultimately more lethal to US citizens than al qaida.

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-black-body-count-rises-as-chicago-police-step-back-1473631079

When Will the Dam Break?

A day later, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who's been a cop in this city for 27 years — long enough to qualify for advanced degrees in sociology, psychology and economics — provided a pertinent footnote to the Labor Day weekend violence. "Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope do these kinds of things," he said. "You show me a man that doesn't have hope, I'll show you one that's willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it."

Maybe that's more than a footnote. It might be a chapter, or the thesis. There can't be a simple explanation for why people shoot at each other, destroying themselves and their neighborhoods, can there? No, but gangs — these days, often with weak or no leadership — are at the heart of the violence.

Gang structure has atomized, creating block-by-block turf battles. Gangbangers shoot at each other over drug sales or factional rivalries, over petty insults on social media or over a pair of shoes. They fight and shoot perhaps because they don't care, or perhaps because fighting and shooting gives them something to care about. The shootings beget retaliatory shootings. Illegal guns are easy to find. So are targets.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-shootings-chicago-police-murder-laquan-johnson-edit-0908-jm-20160907-story.html

You see, it's not the drug war that created all this violence, it is guns.  
If you want to do an insightful, heart felt, moving and depressing article about violence and oppressed minorities and people without hope, you can't mention inconvenient facts like:
-the government oppression of those who want to get high
-fiscal empowerment of those who sell drugs in violation of the law
These all too pertinent facts cannot be mentioned because for an inexplicable reason, we still cling to the idea that government control of drugs is protecting us.  It's not protecting us any more than alcohol prohibition protected us.  Prohibition doesn't make drugs less available, nor did it make alcohol less available.  For those caught up in these turf wars over who gets to sell to whom - from inner cities to small towns in Maine to the nation of Mexico - the drug war is dehumanizing them and killing them.

Thankfully, the evidence is clear and it's only a matter of time until people can speak in public and be frank about the stupidity, the criminality and the barbarity of drug prohibition.

We Must Blame Guns, Not Prohibition

The elephant in the room the writer dares not even speak - where'd these people get all this money to pay for guns? Why do they want them? Why do gangs have turf to defend? These are all created by prohibition, just like they were with the prior attempt at prohibition.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-chicago-murders-shootings-july-fourth-orlando-0703-jm-20160701-story.html

Is This Worth Killing Someone?

As long ago as 1949, H. L. Mencken identified in Americans “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” an astute articulation of our weirdly Puritan need to criminalize people’s inclination to adjust how they feel. The desire for altered states of consciousness creates a market, and in suppressing that market we have created a class of genuine bad guys — pushers, gangbangers, smugglers, killers. Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs. And there will be no victory in this war either; even the Drug Enforcement Administration concedes that the drugs it fights are becoming cheaper and more easily available.
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

I see little justification for the violence the government delivers in the name of stopping the use of drugs.  I fear the decriminalization, much like those must have feared the end of prohibition.  The common habit of thought is pretending the drug war's consequences - gun and other criminal trafficking, subversion of legitimate purposes of law enforcement, empowerment of criminals, thousands dead in drug gang violence and thousands more in jail for non-violent crimes - justify the minimal degree to which the drug war reduces consumption.

I hate what drugs do to humans.  The drug war takes all of that and makes it worse.

"The Press", A Joke

And yet, so far no reporter has raised the possibility that Yee supported tighter restrictions on guns in order to keep gun prices high and his own services in demand. Economist Bruce Yandle popularized the idea of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” coalition. The apocryphal Baptists want to ban alcohol. Bootleggers don’t make much money when liquor can be bought legally at a grocery store or bar. So the bootleggers bankroll the Baptists’ effort to ban booze.

Now I sincerely doubt that Yee was that clever. The more likely explanation is that he believes in gun control and he’s a greedy hypocrite (and maybe not too bright either). The fact that gun-control policies are to his advantage is just a happy coincidence.

What’s interesting — and vexing — to me is that this sort of analysis is all the rage when it comes to conservatives and Republicans, and utterly incomprehensible to most journalists when it comes to liberals and Democrats.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/31/leland_yee_the_kochs_and_the_press_122114.html#ixzz2xXWX76ME 
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter

WHAT?

Over a decade has passed since Portugal changed its philosophy from labeling drug users as criminals to labeling them as people affected by a disease. This time lapse has allowed statistics to develop and in time, has made Portugal an example to follow. 

The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/07/portugals-successful-drug.html

Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.

Create a Monster With Coercion, Blame It On Liberty

The ATF’s alleged malfeasance is all the more disturbing when considered in the context of the Mexican drug war. The problem, however, is not legal U.S. gun dealers.
The media — for example, Reuters — have widely reported that “nine out of ten guns” found at Mexican crime scenes came from U.S. gun dealers, but this claim has been debunked: The statistic takes into account only guns traced by the FBI. Such tracing is possible only if the Mexican authorities submit a weapon to the FBI, and they submit only weapons designed for the U.S. civilian market (the only kind of gun the FBI is equipped to trace). Once all guns retrieved in Mexico are included, only 17 percent come from U.S. gun dealers.
There are plenty of places for the cartels to buy guns other than the U.S. retail market. A goodly portion of weapons trotted out for the press cannot be legally purchased in the U.S. without the ATF’s say-so and approval from the local chief law-enforcement officer (short-barreled rifles, for example). Rocket-propelled grenades and newly manufactured machine guns are not available at gun shows. Further gun control imposed on typical American buyers would have no effect on the ability of the cartels to purchase these military-grade weapons.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262423/mexican-criminals-american-guns-david-rittgers

Interesting Stats on the Drug War

Cloaked in a debate on The Factor.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/11/sting-cant-be-right-about-the

"A 1994 study (PDF), based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey, estimated that 17 percent of cocaine users qualify for a diagnosis of "substance dependence" at some point in their lives, suggesting that Kelly is off by a factor of more than four. The same data indicate a lifetime addiction rate of 15 percent for alcohol. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health also indicatethat addiction rates for alcohol and cocaine are similar.


The entire situation is gut wrenching, and we're a long long way from being willing to admit we're wrong and facing up to the massive change that would result from de-criminalization."


But the simplistic answers are still simplistic.  The affronts to liberty and compromises of government inherent in drug criminalization are too large to pretend they don't exist.

Paying One's Debt To Those Paying Their Debt To Society

Would be interesting to see what drives these costs.  Most likely, employees are the number one cost drivers, and who's to say that folks working under these conditions don't deserve all they can get?  Or that we shouldn't reward them handsomely so as to be able to attract competent folks to manage what could only be described as a bad situation? 

What would the costs be if there were no 'drug war'?  How many of these costs - which become a repression of those not in jail at a certain fiscal tipping point - are the unintended consequences of the 'prisoner rights' crusades which require that we treat them 'just so'?

http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/09/cut-california-prison-costs/print

"War On Drugs Equals War On Peace"

http://www.cafehayek.com/
'War on Drugs' = War on Peace
Posted: 27 Mar 2010 02:48 PM PDT
As noted earlier <http://cafehayek.com/2010/03/the-violent-war-on-drugs.html> , the Wall Street Journal's own Mary Anastasia O'Grady understand that Uncle Sam's 'war on drugs' promotes violence. This letter <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704896104575140293827255352.html?KEYWORDS=Beto> , from someone on the scene, confirms Mary's wisdom:
Mary O'Grady's March 22 Americas column "The War on Drugs Is Doomed <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703580904575132153106546066.html?mod=article-outset-box> " is one of the best pieces ever written on the connection between U.S. drug policy and drug violence in Mexico. I just hope it can inform public policy discussions.
I am on the City Council of El Paso, Texas, across the border from Ciudad Juárez, where more than 5,000 people have been killed since President Calderón was elected. We are living the drug war, and it has been disastrous for our community.
In addition to bearing witness to the horrific killings of men, women and children in our sister city, it has become very clear to us that the failure of Juárez portends the failure of El Paso.
Juarenses spend more than $1.4 billion in our economy every year; more than $51 billion in U.S./Mexico trade passes through El Paso/Juárez ports of entry annually (almost 20% of trade between the two countries); Juárez economic activity is responsible for 60,000 jobs in El Paso; and, as you might imagine, family, business and other relationships extend over the border and are the basis of much of the economic and cultural success that we enjoy.
It is clearly in our interest to find a solution to this drug violence, and it is clear that central to that solution is acknowledging the role of drug consumption and drug prohibition in the U.S.
Ms. O'Grady has done an outstanding job through her columns in educating the public on the connection between drug consumption, drug prohibition and drug violence. Communities like ours are dependent on a better understanding and eventual action by our national elected leaders.
Beto O'Rourke
El Paso City Council
District 8
El Paso, Texas