Culture Vultures: Call Off the Drug War
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Call Off the Drug War T he State of New Hampshire doesn't require much from its school districts — a mutually satisfactory arrangement about to be abruptly...
...The government reckons that, since most guys who wanna do it are gonna do it anyway, better to figure out ways to make it safer.the grounds that it would send (all together now) the "wrong signal": having lots of agencies, no matter how useless, sends the right signal...
...Or take gay sex...
...South of MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...It may well be true that most Mexican police and most Colombian politicians are corrupt, but why wouldn't they be...
...ceases its banana protectionism, Washington will ban imports of...cashmere...
...It doesn't actually matter whether the Mexican authorities are cracking down on their drug barons or whether their so-called "drug czar" and half the cops are on the take...
...So the S86o million given by Carl Lindner, Chiquita's top banana, to the Democratic and Republican Parties will look like chicken feed next to the budget increase the Drug Enforcement Administration will need to combat a more vigorous cocaine trade...
...Don't ask me why...
...the Mexican border, they're nailing up their 1999 "Proud to Be Recognized As a Full Partner in the War on Drugs" signs, recently shipped out by the U.S...
...No sample was forthcoming from the Bolivian car-parker, mainly because he wasn't a drug dealer, but, even if he'd wanted to be, he didn't know anyone who'd sell him any drugs and he didn't have any money to pay for them...
...17 launched an eight-month investigation costing hundreds of thousands of dollars...
...3 0 O n America there are two problems: drugs, and the "war on drugs...
...52 April 1999 • The American Spectator...
...it would rather they lived off America's artificially distorted drug market...
...But I went round to his cramped little Cape, with one bath, with the family's pet turtle in it, and all I can say is, if he's laundering anything other than maple syrup, he's doing it far more discreetly than, say, Aldrich Ames, the CIA traitor whose brand-new Merc and half-million dollar home paid for in cash apparently never aroused the suspicion of his colleagues...
...Almost every drug agent could be reassigned to the new departments of the FDA necessary to regulate federal drugstores, supervise the mandatory labeling of every spliff, etc...
...The American Spectator • April 1999 51 But, with undercover federal agents now commanding such a huge slice of the drug business, the cannier dealers have begun to figure out that, instead of selling drugs in such a crowded and competitive market, it's easier and more profitable to sell drug suspects to the DEA...
...Unless the E.U...
...Hunter was making about $.20,000 a year and routinely took payment in cheese and maple syrup...
...Let us stipulate, also, that most proponents of "medicinal marijuana" are those whose principal enthusiasm for the drug is strictly non-medicinal...
...Pity...
...At that level, it's hard to see the difference between successful infiltration and full-scale participation...
...But, even so, there's something very curious about the vigor with which this administration—led by a president who smirkingly told MTV viewers that, given another chance, he'd inhale—has been determined to reverse the voters' decision and harass any doctors who support it...
...Right...
...residency for him, he could deliver them "Chama," the East Coast distributor for a huge South American cartel...
...Therefore, the fact that no cocaine was forthcoming, that there was no cocaine in sight, and that there was no evidence that the poor chump had ever been in the same room as any cocaine was only further proof that the guy must be a real Mister Big...
...Let us stipulate that, if you believe the latter, you've been inhaling too long: No doubt marijuana has no more medicinal properties than, say, butterscotch pudding...
...So, across the country, undercover DEA agents are staking out undercover FBI agents who are selling drugs to undercover DEA agents who are staking out undercover ATF agents...
...When Vice President Gore suggested amalgamating these warring, inefficient, acronymic agencies into one slimmed-down ultra-efficient DEATFBI, the president ruled against it ondoesn't think the federal government has the right to legislate what you grow in your yard and, anyway, to criminalize it only corrupts the feds...
...Not so with drugs, where the "war" floats free of budgetary constraints and there's enough government largesse to swill around the DEA, ATF, FBI, and at least 50 other agencies...
...government: Look at those smokers huddled on sidewalks...
...And yet, because as a nation Americans are still sufficiently hypocritical (even in these Clintonian times) to be unwilling formally to acknowledge their appetites, the burden of servicing this huge market has shifted inexorably to the dusty ramshackle statelets in America's backyard...
...But who cares...
...Washington objects to countries like Dominica living off the E.U.'s artificially distorted banana market...
...on the home of a small-town lawyer, Will Hunter, and then announced to the world that "it is clear" he'd been laundering drug money: no "allegedlys," no "the investigation is ongoing," just "it is clear...
...And then look at the Medellin and Cali boys snorting all the way to the bank...
...Yes, drugs are a danger to society—though, on balance, they're probably not as big a threat as America's Number One addiction, food...
...Neither the U.S...
...Still, the signals the present system's sending are, to say the least, mixed...
...Since 1980, the budget for the "war" has increased by over moo percent...
...Yeah, he, like, told me it was loo percent pure ground Argentine, but, like, it turned out to be a lethal cocktail of dog turd and English beef...
...What's known here as "America's drug problem" might more properly be described as the rest of the world's America problem...
...This is their end of the conversation: Yeah, what I'm trying to do is —since it's a matter which is quite serious—big—and from the other things that I've seen like this, when we can't be playing with, with unclear words and...that's why what I, what you did, and I asked you if you'd spoken with him, because I know that he has the financial capacity and after all he's, he's a partner of, of, of, and, and in the end anything will yield a profit if we're hanging on to a big stick that's on a big branch and, and we won't have any problems...
...But if the cowering, fetal-positioned Caribbean banana loses to its thrusting Latin neighbor, what's left to switch to...
...nor the E.U...
...The amount of drugs in this country, there's no way they're all coming in on Piper Cubs...
...The only problem was there was no "Chama," so instead he gave them the name of a guy he knew, a parking lot attendant who worked 6o hours a week for minimum wage...
...and the "war" is the bigger one...
...Best of all, like almost all other awards in the American school system, you get it automatically: every educational establishment in the state triumphantly displays the same sign, regardless of whether it's a Drug-Free School Zone or a School-Free Drug Zone...
...That's real bad s--t, man — 'specially the English stuff...
...In 1996, it was revealed that, as part of their infiltration of one Latin American drug cartel, federal agents had successfully smuggled millions of dollars' worth of cocaine onto the streets of America's cities...
...Speaking up for Peter McWilliams, legalization advocate Richard Cowan put it this way: Everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does...
...McWilliams hit the jackpot: he's got AIDS and cancer...
...But I don't believe America has the right to destabilize its neighbors, harass its own citizens, and corrupt its justice system to maintain a fiction...
...Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows...
...N. Scott Stevens, my near-neighbor in New Hampshire and the head of the White Mountain Militia, thinks there's a lot of this going on...
...If only to deter the feds, I should say I loathe drugs and have no interest in partaking of them...
...When I asked Agent Bradley, DEA agent-in-charge for Vermont, why he didn't just drop by at Will Hunter's place at nine in the morning, he sighed, "Mark, that's not the way we do things...
...has lined up behind Latin American bananas, while the British and French are on the side of AfroCaribbean-Pacific bananas...
...It irks me...
...Cowan is right...
...actually grows bananas, but this is the twentyfirst-century version of those nineteenth-century imperial disputes, where the great powers line up behind one obscure tribe or another and stage a proxy war...
...The fact that over 5o percent of the population is now classified as overweight has far more serious consequences for society than drugs do...
...In 1996, California and Arizona passed propositions decriminalizing marijuana or mandating it "for medicinal purposes...
...Yet no one suggests driving hamburgers underground, forcing junk-food junkies into the arms of back-alley "Mac" dealers...
...The minimum-wage car-parker, being Bolivian and not speaking much English but familiar with America's many telephone salesmen, replies: "Of course...
...But the beauty of this scam was that, according to DEA experts, true Class One dealers never give samples...
...If we lose the banana industry," says Eugenia Charles, former prime minister of Dominica, "we lose the country...
...Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night...
...And that's why it'll never happen...
...That's why I'm rooting for the Europeans in this transatlantic banana war...
...America blames everyone but itself for its habits...
...But given their adeptness at managing the drug trade, these guys might at least manage it on behalf of the U.S...
...But it seems the best we can hope for from our public education system these days is that our children aren't heroin dealers by the time they've been through it...
...No surprise there...
...Because all the evidence shows that no one can regulate you into the ground like the U.S...
...With most cases, the informant has to wheedle out a small sample of cocaine from the trafficker to prove to the feds that he's really in the business...
...The "drug war" is a civil war: The problem is American appetites—and there are different ways to manage those...
...In this instance, the U.S...
...Americans consume drugs in large quantities...
...You probably haven't noticed that we're in the middle of a banana war, except maybe for the extraordinary number of stories in business publications headlined "Yes, We Have No Bananas...
...For even kindergartners and first-graders must understand that they, too, are foot-soldiers in the "war on drugs...
...It never occurred to the DEA to wonder why the East Coast King of Cocaine is parking cars 6o hours a week and living in a one-room apartment...
...Washington still "recertifies" them, because not to do so could send "the wrong signal...
...Dame Eugenia doesn't spell it out, but what she means is that the more economically depressed those small West Indian islands get, the more they degenerate into mere staging posts for drug-smuggling into the U.S...
...Maybe they ran some numbers and discovered that Scottish cashmere workers are especially partial to bananas...
...The phone call to a West Coast office was a stroke of genius: He knew that the Californians would be terrified of losing the case to East Coast agents and so would keep it a secret...
...Those guys have got foreign bank accounts, they're running three or four cars, they're wearing silk suits...
...But because, like a majority of his fellow Californians, he believes in the right to "medicinal marijuana," he's sitting in jail, facing a ten-year sentence, while prominent supporters of his are staked out by various Federal agencies on apparently limitless budgets...
...A Bolivian on the lam from his own cops, and wanted in Argentina for every scam going, washed up in Washington and, after a fruitless attempt to sell his wife's heart, lungs, and kidneys as she lay in a coma, finally hit the federal gravy train...
...I have some sympathy for these harassed Latins...
...And all of this is completely unnecessary...
...Possibly, this was just a brilliant facade, albeit one he kept up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year...
...look at those tobacco companies, constantly fending off one government shakedown after another, no matter how furiously they spread their dough around Washington...
...Nobody does, though...
...They took three years to indict him for anything, and eventually settled for a single count of mail fraud...
...But I can appreciate that that probably doesn't have the glamour of swooping down in your chopper at dawn and leaping out, guns a-blazing...
...Nothing, it seems, can deflect the federal government from its "war...
...He called a DEA office in Southern California and claimed that, if they could get the charges in Bolivia and Argentina dropped and fix U.S...
...In the West Indies, bananas replaced sugar cane plantations when the British figured out sugar could be more profitably mined from beets...
...At board meetings, I'm tempted to stand up and demand we replace it with "You Are Now Entering a Latin-Free School Zone" — which at least has the merit of being indisputable...
...The guy punches a time clock, so his records can be verified, but so what...
...50 April 1999 • The American Spectator Back home, meanwhile, the "war" has been taking an interesting turn...
...You'd get rid of drug crime, drug murder, drug informers, drug cartels—and all those drug agencies...
...look at the poor gun manufacturers, contemplating the same future...
...Personally, I know or care very little about Latin America, but I'm fond of the British West Indies, and the contorted drug delivery systems required by Washington are destroying one sleepy, shabby island idyll after another...
...Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could...
...1 addiction: food...
...Funnily enough, federal agencies never To the victor go the spoils...
...And instead of being quietly ashamed of this stunted redefinition of education, we flaunt it as a badge of pride, out on the highway, even at a rural north country elementary school...
...It's an interesting case study in addiction: Like some crack-frazzled zombie, the government staggers on blindly, unable to be weaned from its self-destructive and sociopathic course...
...And that's more or less how the "war on drugs" goes for grown-ups, too...
...Not only did they do that, they paid him $30,000 plus expenses and several flights to California into the bargain...
...Even if he'd been laundering drug money, the raid on that country lawyer in Vermont cost far more than he could ever possibly have laundered...
...We've learned to live with the remorseless corruption of the "war," but, even so, out in California, the government's pursuit of Peter McWilliams breaks new ground...
...government...
...In 1995, over the river in tiny Cavendish, Vermont, a team of seven fully-armed DEA agents in bullet-proof vests swooped down out of nowhere at 3 a.m...
...But I digress...
...Given HIV rates of 50-6o percent among homosexuals in New York and San Francisco, you could easily make the case that gay sex is harmful and should be banned...
...Treasury rather than some pockmarked bozos from Colombia...
...One of the few things the state does require of my small grade school and every other one is that they post signs on the road warning motorists they are now entering a "Drug-Free School Zone...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Call Off the Drug War T he State of New Hampshire doesn't require much from its school districts — a mutually satisfactory arrangement about to be abruptly terminated due to an asinine Supreme Court decision declaring our entire education system unconstitutional...
...As it happens, yes, everyone has plenty ofbananas, but that's still no reason for the United States and the European Union not to go to war over them...
...Which goes to show that no matter how crack addles the brain, it's nothing to what investigating crack does to it...
...On the strength of this, the DEA44 On balance, drugs are probably not as big a threat as America's No...
...Instead, they call him up at home and try to entrap him...
...If drugs were made legally available ingovernment drugstores, the price would decline, enabling the government to make a tidy profit and addicts to cut down on their property theft...
...Au contraire, vast resources are devoted to finding ways of making it less harmful, from protease inhibitors to the race to invent the concrete condom...
...He doesn't do drugs, but heseem to notice those sorts of things...
...Americans like drugs...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
