(The discussion progresses on the Tales of a Wandering Mind blog, my comments, the response to those comments, etc. Some of these comments lifted from my blog comments)

David, thank you for your thoughtful comments on my blog. Looks like we stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest, eh? I wanted to reply to you directly as well as on my blog, because in the anonymous world of blogs and Haloscan comments, reasonable discussions often end up in flame wars. I want none of that and I assume you don’t, either.

However, I would like to reply to some of your points. You wrote:

Just so you know – I hate debating the drug war. It’s like debating religion or politics – you never win and you only make enemies doing so.

I think that is an interesting perspective. The reason I was taught for the prohibition against religion and politics in polite discussion was point that both are topics of intense personal belief where the tools of rhetorical objectivity break down. You believe in Jesus, she believes in Mohammed, I believe in Joe Pesci, but none of us can prove to the other that our belief is true. That’s why we don’t discuss religion. Politics is somewhat similar (though I can prove that George W. Bush is an incompetant illiterate war criminal… insert winky smiley here.)

But the drug war should be something we can discuss rationally. We both enter the argument with a provable observation: there are people who have drug problems, there are people who commit crimes because of drugs. Shouldn’t we then be able to have a rational discussion on whether our current policies alleviate or exacerbate the problems we both agree exist? There is no observable measurement — drug supply, drug purity, drug price, number of addicts, drug-related crime, incarceration rates, recidivism rates, overdose deaths, etc. — nothing to show that the current policy is succeeding and plenty to show the current policy is making the problem worse.

If you treat the Drug War like religion or politics, you are assuming it is a matter of belief where there can never be agreement It also leads to “us vs. them” instead of “we vs. problem” mentality, a desire to “win” rather than “succeed”, and an emphasis on being “right” rather than “correct”.

You also said:

Well, if something is against the law and you break that law then you are criminal. It might not be a big crime – it might be an unjust law – but until it is not illegal any longer you are a criminal none the less.

And, semantically speaking, you are absolutely correct. You remind me of a routine once performed by Art Linkletter (I think). On one of his old TV shows he used to offer some prize ($100, I think, back when $100 was real money) to an audience member. The participant would win the prize if Linkletter could not prove the person to be a criminal within three minutes. Linkletter never had to relinquish the prize money, because he could always find some statute that the hapless contestant had broken. Their car was parked more than 18″ from the curb. They hadn’t signed their Social Security card. They hadn’t ripped the tax stamp at the top of their cigarette pack. All criminals. I myself have ripped off the tag on the end of a mattress before I purchased it. We’re all criminals.

I think we can all agree that someone who breaks the law is a criminal. And as you mention, we can agree that some laws are unjust and breaking some laws are not “big crimes”. But this, if you’ll pardon the pun, is a huge cop-out. We need to be discussing right and wrong, moral and amoral. Yes, a cannabis consumer and a serial killer are both criminals. Given limited law-enforcement resources, on which “crimes” should we focus?

I assume your comment

no wonder I can’t get good tech service from my computer company – the bastards are all high

is a joke. After all, most of the technology that brought you the personal computer was developed by people who were well-known afficionados of cannabis. Furthermore, great achievements have been produced in all walks of life by people who’ve admitted to being high on marijuana or having had tried it in the past.

You seem to dismiss cannabis consumers as a bunch of do-nothing, no-account, criminal potheads. Carl Sagan, a pot smoker, unlocked some of the greatest mysteries of mathematics and astronomy. Montel Williams, a pot smoker, continues a successful TV talk show career. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, every other 2004 Democratic candidate, and a handful of Supreme Court and Circuit Court justices have admitted to smoking marijuana. (Marijuana is truly a dangerous gateway… it leads to politics!) And if you were to excise your CD and LP collection of any works composed or performed by criminal drug users, you’d be left with a few Perry Como albums.

Next I have a commenter named “lorax” who mentions some of the same points I’m making here, albeit in a cruder manner. You responded to him by writing,

And do you mind if I protect the non-drug users from the druggies who are robbing and raping and killing them to get their crack money? Is that ok? Cause I really value your opinion now that I see how lucid the arguments of a doper really are.

You assume that someone who disagrees with your position in the Drug War is a “doper”. Maybe lorax just isn’t a good writer. Is Montel Williams a doper? How about Willie Nelson? Or Rush Limbaugh? Or George W. Bush?

To answer your question: no, I don’t mind if you protect me from someone who robs, rapes, or kills. The crimes in question are something we can both agree to, right? Robbing, raping, and killing are not just crimes because they are written into some statute, they’re crimes because they are assaults on citizen’s life and liberty. I don’t care if Joe the Murdering Rapist Burglar is high as a kite or sober as a judge. I don’t care if he murders, rapes, and robs because he needs crack money or wants to buy a new HDTV or merely hates bald overweight opinion columnists and likes to kill them for fun.

Again, you assume that all “druggies” are criminals. Suppose Joe never gets into murder, rape, or burglary, and instead grows up in a shack in Appalachia, far from civilization, grows his own cannabis plants, and smokes the occasional joint in the privacy of his shack. To you, he is a “doper criminal” whose shack should be invaded, property confiscated, and he should be locked up in a cell.

You continue:

Radical? As good as you are at presenting your arguments – guys like this winner screw it up for you every time.

And cops like the ones who burst in and shoot peaceful people for the “crime” of smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own homes screw it up for you every time.

Continuing, you say,

People who use drugs are just as close-minded about this as you allege cops are, and maybe more so. Because while I am willing to say that some people can use pot recreationally and not hurt anyone, you seem incapable of admitting that drug use does have SOME victims. And until you are willing to do so, why should I try to meet you half way?

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. By your own admission, some cannabis consumers are going to jail, losing their property, and live forever tagged as a drug criminal, despite the fact that they do not hurt anyone. Does that sound like justice to you?

So now I have to come halfway: OK, drug use has some victims. Someone who puts together a meth lab endangers their neighborhood and their children (why do they build meth labs? because they can’t get meth legally). Someone with a heroin addiction breaks into a home and robs an innocent person (why must they break in? because money spent on prisons is money not spent on methadone clinics). Someone with a cocaine addiction ruins their career, family, and health (why don’t they admit they have a problem and get help? because they’d be admitting to being a criminal).

I fear, however, that you buy into the notion that drug use “causes” criminality, that somehow the meth, heroin, or coke user is possessed in such a way that they cannot help but commit crime. I can understand that perception, especially if you spent a law-enforcement career dealing with whacked-out violent criminal druggies.

But by that notion, you’d have to be alarmed at the criminality of alcohol users. Quick, how many domestic abuse cases or public assaults have you dealt with where alcohol was a contributing factor? How does that percentage compare with meth, heroin, or cocaine? And if you can name a case of violence stemming from cannabis use (not trafficking, not turf-war, not deal-gone-bad, but simply a couple of brawling stoners), I’ll be very surprised.

As a former cop, your perception of drug users is out of balance. A majority of drug users use their substances responsibly and without incident (if they did not, then based on estimates of the population of drug users, we should be seeing a whole lot more crime). Freud did most of his groundbreaking work while on cocaine. Poe wrote his best stories while hallucinating on absinthe. Rush Limbaugh managed to put out a three-hour radio hatefest every day while blitzed on hillbilly heroin. And we don’t even have to discuss what the Beatles were using while producing the best rock albums of all time.

Drug laws are wrong. They cause more harms to society than the drugs themselves. You cannot legislate a market out of existence. I do not blame cops for doing their jobs — they enforce laws, they don’t write them. (Just as I don’t blame the troops for carrying on an illegal war in Iraq — they follow orders and I’m glad they do.) Heck, my cousin and her husband are both cops; I seek to make their job safer and easier. Why should they be forced to risk their life in a no-knock raid on a pothead’s house? They’re not making me any safer.

Finally, regarding drugs and crime. It’s strange to me that when faced with the huge amount of gun crimes we have in America, some people who like guns will say, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. But when faced with a huge amount of drug-related crime, the idea of “drugs don’t commit crimes, people commit crimes” doesn’t apply.

Sincerely,

“Radical” Russ

P.S. I like cops. But I’m a middle-aged white guy in a suburban neighborhood with a nice car, a cassette recorder mounted on the dash, a substantial amount of knowledge on the Bill of Rights, and a really good lawyer… my best friend, who is black, doesn’t like the cops as much as I do…