War on Drugs

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Trump nuked a drug boat – and this is fully in line with what I’ve been saying about fighting the drug trade. It is primarily a logistic issue – and all true strategists concentrate on logistics. In the trafficking of human beings and drugs, we’re talking very large amounts of physical things which must be moved from place to place (and the money, also physical in the form of cash, must also be moved). Our enemy in the War on Drugs has a very long and entirely naked supply line…that is what we hit. We hit it by sealing our borders and by taking out identified drug transport in international waters and air space. Rely on it, we keep doing it, the people who transport the contraband will get the message…it won’t, of itself, stop the trade…but it’ll shift it from moving easily identified and targeted tons down to small quantities carefully concealed. Reminder: the widespread use of drugs like cocaine switched from a vice of the rich to a general vice because the suppliers worked out the means of producing and transporting large amounts of it – driving down the retail price to where everyone could avail themselves of it. Trump’s strategy will make the contraband vastly expensive…once again the province of decadent rich people.

I’d add to this a wrinkle to hit the money – while there are still some major global banks willing to facilitate criminal money, most don’t and all of it eventually gets detected. This is why to this day, to move the money to the cartels it has to be physically carried there. I’d offer letters of marque to anyone who wants to take the risk – outside US territory – to seize this money. Get it back to the USA, and you get to keep half the proceeds. Full title, tax free. Not just money – anything of value; go after everything they’ve got. Make them expend vast resources just to protect their money.

Covid cases are allegedly rising – and some California officials are recommending masking…which doesn’t work. They are getting desperate on the Left…trying every expedient they can. We won’t fall for it again.

Tim Kaine – who is allegedly a US Senator – says our rights are from government, not from God. And that any system that says rights are from God is a tyranny.

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by the Creator…”

I think I read that somewhere once.

If We Want to End Drug Addiction

Mark Noonan39 Comments

Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching the Narcos television series – I’ve mentioned it before and if you haven’t seen it, worth a watch. It covers the battle against the Columbian drug cartels, starting with the infamous Pablo Escobar. It is naturally dramatized but I did check it against reality and its a fairly good depiction of what happened. But it got me thinking that we’ve been going about it all wrong from the get-go.

One of our options is to just legalize all narcotics – let US drug makers produce cocaine, heroin or what have you and let people get high to their hearts content. As the Libertarians would say, this respects personal autonomy and we’d make good revenues from the legal trade as well as making sure the drugs have quality control so people wouldn’t be ingesting actual poison. There is much to be said for this line of thinking but I have considered it and rejected it.

One of the things Libertarians get wrong is how they define “victimless crime”. The Libertarian position is that taking drugs or, say, engaging in prostitution – as long as there’s no physical coercion – is victimless and so not really a crime. As such, we should let people freely engage in these activities and only intervene if someone is being directly harmed by another. But the reason I’m not Libertarian is because I recognize that you don’t have to directly attack someone to do them harm. The millions of addicts we have in the USA cause grave harm every day even if all they’re doing is lying in a pool of their own waste – it is the fact that they are high, filthy and polluting the streets that is the harm. Harms property values. Harms public health. The disorder they represent also attracts crime – not least people looking to rob or abuse the drug addicts, themselves. While our right to believe and say whatever we want is absolute, when you get into people doing things it isn’t nearly as absolute – and if done in the public square then it must in no way impede or harm everyone else who is in or may decide to use the public square at any time. Bottom line, the follow-on effects of having drug addicts are so large that we can’t afford, as a society , to carry the burden of millions of drug addicts. They must cease to be addicts – and as they’ve mostly shown themselves incapable of self control, they must be controlled; primarily in the form of cutting off their access to drugs.

Which we have tried to do, for decades, at enormous cost and zero success. I think this is because we went about it the wrong way.

Our battle has been against the “drug lords”. The cartel bosses; the big guys who are running the operations and making billions per year off it. In theory, going after them makes sense. But only if you don’t really think about it. You see, the problem isn’t people making money off drugs; the problem is the drugs, themselves. It is the drugs we want to get rid of. But we’ve gone after the money made off drugs, instead. But there is a problem with that: Money defends itself.

When you target the latest iteration of Pablo Escobar you’ll find that just like Escobar, the primary thing he has is money. Lots and lots of money. Buckets of money. So much money he doesn’t really know what to do with it all. Escobar had so much money he bought hippos – the descendants of which still live in Columbian rivers and lakes giving everyone who wants to look a hands-on class on species propagation. Escobar was able to operate as long as he did primarily because of bribes. Sure, he also used ruthless violence at need, but the main thing was the money. Anyone who could threaten his operation was first approached with a bribe offer – the killing thing only coming in if the bribes failed. And the killing was quite horrific for two purposes; to punish the particular guy who wouldn’t play ball, of course, but mostly to show everyone that if you didn’t take the bribe (or didn’t stay bought) then the consequences would be the horrible and painful death of (usually) you and your whole family. And Escobar’s successors throughout the entire narcotics trade have taken his lessons to heart – bribes combined with quite spectacular violence.

To get after such people – that is people who have no sense of decency – requires you to get down in the gutter with them. It is a dirty, nasty business staffed by the cruel and the corrupt. And as you work your plans to get the drug lords, you are surrounded by the offers of bribes and the threats of horrific death. To operate among such people you have to take on their coloration. Do you see where this leads? You become your enemy. First in ruthless cruelty against them and finally in going along with them. You take the bribe.

Think how easy that is. Don’t condemn anyone too harshly who took the money. Especially after they’ve been at it for a few years and they see for all their efforts – and maybe a few big targets taken down – the drugs continue to flow. The bribes continue to be paid. The violence associated with it on the lower levels continues unabated. So, maybe that fifth or sixth time the bribe is offered, you take it. The Narcos aren’t stupid; they’ll let you seize a small shipment every now an again. Let you arrest a few minor players (especially if those players have become an irritation). Life will go on; but now you’re not risking anything and that ten grand a month in an offshore account just grows and grows.

And, so, my point: taking down the drug lords is a pointless exercise. Even success is useless. Escobar got his chips cashed in back in 1993 and the drug trade never skipped a beat. Because the bribes continued to flow. The violence, too. And we’ve been at this so long that I’m very confident by this point that huge numbers of our people are on the take. The sheer volume of contraband crossing could not occur without active cooperation in official circles in the USA. And the propaganda machine which works non-stop to keep border control a joke is almost certainly Cartel funded at least to some major degree. We’re really getting the worst of it here; we use to have a drug problem, now we’ve got a drug and corruption problem.

Stopping the problem – drug addiction turned into massive corruption – has always been about keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts. It has been more logistic than anything else. Somewhere along the line, the logistic chain has to be broken. Can’t stop the production of the drugs – that is in South America. Can’t stop the shipment of drugs – most of that is outside the USA and while a complete sealing of our borders would stop it, that isn’t practical given the amount of trade we conduct day in and day out. So, the only place we can break the chain is internal distribution. that is, going after the small time hoods who transport and sell relatively small quantities of the drugs. The mules and the pushers: they have to go.

And by “go” I do mean in a quite literal sense. Gone. No longer around. Dead. Quickly and in large numbers. And at first glance what I’m suggesting might seem cruel. They’re just small fry, right? Not the big, bad drug lords. Sure. But it is the mules and pushers who actually hand out sufficient illegal drugs to cause 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the USA. In Latin and South America the number of people murdered by the drug trade is probably past a million by now. What I’m saying is that a few hundred – tops – dead mules and pushers and the supply of drugs on the streets dries up; and a vastly higher number of people don’t die next year.

It would work because the reason they’re in the business is that it is low risk/high reward. Drive that truck from San Diego to Chicaco. Easy. Sell those drugs in Chicago. Also easy. Probably won’t get caught. If you do, its a bit of jail time but because you’re smart, not too much; you didn’t keep sufficient drugs on your person to make your arrest a major rap. So, what I’m saying is that if we catch a guy selling an ounce of coke: kill him. You seriously would only have to do it a hundred times or so before people got out of the business.

The retail dealer can’t hide. He’s not like a drug lord in his guarded palace with an army of gunslingers and lawyers. He’s just a guy on a street corner (as it were) selling small amounts of narcotics. You can see it; seriously just drive into the more run down areas of any major city and no matter how innocent you are, in a short time you will figure out who the dealers are. He’s also in routine contact with drug addicts – people not well skilled in avoiding surveillance. We could, on any given day, arrest most of the drug dealers in any given city. And if we then placed them on trial the next day and shot them the day after that…week at the outside, nobody wants to move product on the streets any more.

Because that is the thing; it has to be death and it has to be swift. If it isn’t death and if it isn’t swift, just wasting your time. What you’re trying to do is instruct not very bright people. People who have a dim ability to see the future and very limited concern about other people. The only thing that can get their attention is violence. If you do want an alternative to execution you can try flogging. Fifty lashes with a bullwhip. But who shall apply the strokes? And that might not work; might become a macho game with these idiots to see who can put up with it the best. But death is death; these people very much want to stay alive. You put the word out that if we catch you with an ounce of coke then 48 hours later you’re dead, they’ll get the message.

All of this is only if you want to end the scourge of drugs. You don’t have to. It can turn your stomach and you can turn away. But if you want to end it – strictly speaking, make it such a small thing that it has no effect on overall society – then this is what you’ll have to do. They are killing 100,000 a year via OD. More via murder and mayhem. Are your sensitive feelings more important than the 250 or so who will die tomorrow because you didn’t shoot ten drug dealers today?

One day we will again be a serious society – a real country which identifies a problem and applies the appropriate solution even if its a hard thing to do. When that day comes, my ideas here – to one extent or another – will be applied. It is just a question of how long it takes for us to wake up.