The Weekly Standard Is Absolutely Wrong About Drug Legalization

In the May 7th issue of The Weekly Standard, former Bush Drug Czar John P. Walters goes after the advocates who’ve begun the call for legalized drugs, in an article entitled “Legalized Drugs: Dumber Than You May Think.”

Now one would expect the former Drug Czar speaks with authority on this issue, and his entire argument should be trusted; but, alas, much of Walters’ article drips with condescension, is full of sweeping generalizations, misrepresentation of data, and blatant falsehoods.

Walters contends that it is a lie that the drug war has failed. He claims that because drug use and drug crime have both declined in the last 40 years, then government’s crackdowns have worked. But actually, drug use is about the same. Marijuana data shows that use is down in some categories, up in others. The pattern is similar for other drugs. That’s generally considered evidence of ineffectiveness…not a sweeping victory.

But of course a former government official would think his policies are a sweeping success. Otherwise there’d be no reason for him to have ever worked there.

Walters continues on to claim that legalization would dramatically increase drug addiction:

To destroy the criminal market, legalization would have to include a massive price cut, dramatically stimulating use and addiction. Legalization advocates typically ignore the science. Risk varies a bit, but all of us and a variety of other living things​—​monkeys, rats, and mice​—​can become addicted if exposed to addictive substances in sufficient concentrations, frequently enough, and over a sufficient amount of time. It is beyond question that more people using drugs, more frequently, will result in more addiction

We “ignore the science” about addiction? Unsurprisingly, it is Walters who ignores the science.

According to the government’s National Survey on Drug Use & Health, most people who try hard drugs give it up. Nearly 4 million people report to have tried heroin before, but only 213,000 are regular users. That’s about 5%. Same rate for crack cocaine use. For meth, the percentage is even smaller.

Walters also ignores the laws of economics. Demand for hard drugs like heroin is what economists call “inelastic.” Even if the price decreases dramatically, the demand will not increase dramatically. There may be an increase in use, but only on the margins. In other words: most of us have absolutely no interest in trying heroin. And even a dramatic price decrease won’t make us suddenly all crave that good junk.

And our own government says that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. So then, as my former boss John Stossel often asks: “Why do we have Colombian drug gangs, but there are no Marlboro gangs; no wine traffickers; no beer cartels?” Because drug laws create the crime.

Walters also misleads readers about international efforts to decriminalize. He claims that “the newest example for legalization advocates is Portugal, but as time passes the evidence there grows of rising crime, blood-borne disease, and drug usage.”

Contrary to Walters’ claims, studies have shown that since decriminalizing all drugs in 2001, Portuguese drug use has remained about the same, youth drug use is down, and problematic use is down. Drug-related deaths have decreased 28% from 1999. Last year, Joao Figueira, the Chief Inspector of Lisbon’s drug unit told Fox News that because of Portugal’s decriminalization, “the level of conflicts on the street are reduced, drug-related robberies are reduced.”

Walters then claims that we should ignore the calls from Latin American leaders to legalize as a means to weaken the cartels:

Yes, the cartels and violent gangs gain money from the drug trade, but they engage in the full range of criminal activities​—​murder for hire, human trafficking, bank robbery, protection rackets, car theft, and kidnapping, among others. They seek to control areas and rule with organized criminal force. This is not a new phenomenon, and legalizing drugs will not stop it.

Are you kidding me? No sane advocate thinks that drug legalization would completely end the powerful cartels. What it would do is take drug sales (a non-violent crime) out of their hands, so that officials can focus on policing the actual crimes you listed.

NEXT>>>>Continue to page 2 of the article for more of The Weekly Standard’s misleading claims about drug legalization

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: The Train Set

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AEI’s interview with Congressman Allen West is a part of the Enterprise blog’s latest symposium: Death of Osama bin Laden, one year later.

Q: What do you believe the killing of Osama bin Laden achieved?

Congressman West: In a tactical sense, the achievement was that you took out the current leader or a figurehead for al Qaeda. But in a larger strategic sense, it doesn’t mean as much because the organization is still around and you know, we have to be concerned about the potential of body bombs being used on our aircraft. So we can’t be focused on this, it was a great thing that happened, all the credit goes to our men in Navy Seal uniforms that went across the border in that late night raid operation. But we still have to stay focused on—like the State Department official said—on the war on terrorism, which is a hollow misnomer, it is not over.

Q: Do you think, as some have suggested, “that the war on terrorism is over,” that al Qaeda is finished?

Congressman West: Well, this is why I get kind of upset—we are really narrowing the focus. Al Qaeda is just one terrorist organization. We have to realize that before al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist organization that inflicted the most causalities on America was Hezbollah. So just because you are focused on al Qaeda… what about Hezbollah? What about Hamas? What about al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade? What about the al-Quds Brigade? What about the Muslim Brotherhood? What about Jamaat al-Islamiyya? What about Abu Sayyaf? We can go on ad nauseum. At a strategic level, we really are missing out on who we are fighting against, we are trying to narrow it down to one specific organization, which would be just like saying the United States of America is fighting about one infantry battalion.

Q: Do you believe that the United States has appropriately addressed the fact that bin Laden was found, having lived many years, just outside of Islamabad?

Congressman West: We have not appropriately looked at that. We have not appropriately dealt with the sanctuaries of the enemy that are within Pakistan. We all know that the Haqqani network, which is probably inflicting the most casualties right now, is right across the border in Pakistan and is operating freely. We have to be honest about the fact that now we come to find out that Osama bin Laden was bouncing around all over Pakistan for the last five to six years or so, we have to be serious about denying enemy sanctuaries wherever he is, we have to cordon off his ability to have a sphere of influence, and we have to win the information operations propaganda war, and we have got to, from a strategic level, cut off his men, material, and financial support. Those are the critical types of strategic level objectives that we should be looking at.

Q: Why do you think it took so long to find bin Laden? Do you think we failed to devote sufficient resources to the hunt?

Congressman West: I can’t make that assessment because I don’t know what resources were allocated to it. Look, you were looking for a needle in a haystack. So you were piecing together many different leads and trying to pull this operation together. I think that when we did get the right, actionable intelligence and the 75-80% confirmed solution, our special operators did a magnificent job. These things are not very easy to do and when you go back and think about how during the Carter administration we gutted our CIA and those intelligence gathering capabilities and we had to be able to infiltrate some of these organizations—it was very hard to get them built back up.

Q: It is hard to know whether we devoted the appropriate resources, because so much was invisible to us. But right now we are seeing unprecedented disinvestment in our military. Do you think that the current trends in investment in the military and in all of our forces are going to have an impact on our ability to conduct these kind of operations in the future?

Congressman West: Absolutely. We are going in the wrong direction. This belief coming out of the State Department that the war on terrorism is over… you see a commander in chief in President Obama that is really not concerned about these additional sequestration cuts that could hit the military, that take us down to somewhat post-World War I levels when you see more volatility in the world right now. Strategically, we are not going in the right direction—you can’t take your Army from 45 combat brigade formations down to 32; you can’t take your Marine Corps down to 181,000, or take your Navy down to 230 naval war vessels when in the 1990s we were at 570. And you are cutting nine Air Force fighter squadrons. We are really not sitting down and doing what a prudent commander in chief would do, which is look at the geographical areas of responsibility and lay out the breadth of those AORs for the next 10-15 years and develop the right type of requirements, capabilities, and capacities to meet those threats. You can’t make the military the bill payer for the fiscal irresponsibility of Washington, DC. The defense budget is only about 19.4%; the true drivers of our debt are the mandatory spending programs—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the net interest on the debt—and that’s what we should be focused on.

Q: What is your view on the politicization of the capture of bin Laden and some of the recent uproar over Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the ad that he cut claiming credit and saying Romney would not have done it?

Congressman West: I don’t know the inside baseball of what happened with that decision but I think that the Navy Seals said it best: Any president would have gone for the green light. I have been on operations and you know, there are many things that go on that presidents don’t know about and the men and women in uniform are the ones who get on the helicopter, they are the ones who get in the Stryker vehicles, the Humvees, and they execute these operations. I think that the most important thing is that, kind of like what coach Lou Holtz used to say: When you score a touchdown, you just act like you have been there before, that is a part of being a quiet professional, and I think that is what our men and women in uniform, especially our Navy Seals, would appreciate.

I find it very funny because you know, in the Bush/Cheney administration, there were liberal pundits like Keith Olbermann, who used to refer to Seal Team 6 as Dick Cheney’s “little black death squad.” But now all of a sudden they want to embrace them and they want to promote them. I think that having been a soldier for 22 years, we can sniff out a fake and a phony and a person who is disingenuous.

Q: Congressman West, anything else you would like to add?

Congressman West: I think the most important thing is that we really don’t have a national security strategy, we don’t have an energy strategy, we don’t have an economic strategy, and that is what concerns me the most. We are just floating along day by day in this country. Eventually, if you are a ship without a rudder or a captain at the helm and you are in a maelstrom, you may get tossed against the rocks. I don’t want to see this country get tossed against the rocks.

Jon Lovitz Outrage Analyzed - Red Eye - 4-25-12