The Enlightened Despot

From the man who recently hacked the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program’s database:

I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.

Megan McArdle has an odd response:

Libertarians are, of course, deeply conflicted.  On the one hand, blackmailers are despicable criminals.  On the other hand, the practice of monitoring legal adults to make sure they don’t get high without permission is also despicable, and results in widespread undertreatment of severe pain.

I’m missing the conflict. Blackmailers are despicable, so one wouldn’t want to give them $10 million. The program is bad news, so it’s not a bad thing for the data to be lost. And paying up wouldn’t do anything to repair the breach of privacy. I’d say all signs point to letting this hacker’s bad deed go unrewarded.

Pete Guither of Drug WarRant, a drug policy blog hosted by Salon, has this to say about my last post on legalization:

There are many kinds of legalization. And different ones would be appropriate for different drugs. Legalization does not preclude regulation - even severe regulation (I sometimes think we need a better universal understanding of the word “legalization”). The advantage of legalization of some kind for each drug is to remove (to the extent possible) the black market control.

Sure, legalization of heroin in the tobacco model might have more adverse effects than positive effects, while legalization in an adaption of the Swiss model (free or low-cost heroin maintenance in clinical setting, removing both the sexiness of it and the profit for criminal dealers) could actually reduce the negative affects through legalization.

The point about different forms of legalization is well taken. Hard drugs in Switzerland are not as freely distributed as marijuana in the Netherlands, which in turn is more regulated than alcohol and tobacco here, and even those are regulated and kept artificially expensive through taxation. Personally, I’d like to see restrictions on even the most dangerous drugs reduced to levels substantially lower than those in Switzerland, but this doesn’t mean that you’d be able to buy heroin at the corner store.

On the other hand, I think Guither’s hypothetical is wrong: regulating heroin like tobacco almost certainly wouldn’t be a net negative change from our current system. I don’t think it’s the way to go by any means, but I don’t see how it could do enough damage to outweigh the potential for a sane Afghanistan policy (though it seems we’re about to take a few baby steps in the right direction), a huge boost in tax revenues, and the elimination of the illicit drug trade. There are plenty of paths toward legalization that might make us all worse off in the short-term, but I don’t see how any end-state that can honestly be called ‘legalization’ could actually be worse than the system we have in place now.

And to think I debated whether that title was too childish to publish once. But Frederick brought it back with this response to the original:

I would focus on marijuana, for what I think is the very convincing reason of humility. It’s a certainty that legalizing drugs would have both good and bad effects; what’s uncertain is the exact nature, ratio, and pattern of those effects. It’s also certain that the effects, both good and bad, of legalizing cocaine would be more dramatic than those of legalizing marijuana. Why not then legalize marijuana first and observe the results? Then, after a time of say ten years, we can decide whether we want to legalize cocaine; assuming we do, we’ll know better what to expect and be able to legalize the other drugs in a more elegant way, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad.

As it happens, I disagree with this, but I don’t think it’s obviously wrong, and it wasn’t what I was objecting to. I wasn’t really talking about policy at all, but rather about what people say about it. If people want to push for marijuana legalization, that’s terrific - I won’t campaign for it, but I’ll vote for it. But I do object to people using arguments that obviously apply to drugs en masse as if they apply only to marijuana. Legalizing cocaine and heroin is so massively unpopular that admitting that what you are saying implies that we should do so seems to serve as a reductio of your reasoning. But people also prefer to avoid the ‘marijuana isn’t so bad’ argument if they can. So you get rants about personal freedoms, the evils of the marijuana war, the lost tax revenue, the crisis in our prisons, etc., as if these things decided the issue. Which I think they do, in fact. But what these folks really mean is that all these things are true and marijuana isn’t so bad; if it were worse for you than it is, all those ills would be outweighed. Otherwise, they’d be arguing for legalizing it all.

This, for instance, makes me want to stop arguing altogether, and start stabbing people with a fork:

The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It’s racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can’t get education, can’t get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we’ve got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

Rich white people snort cocaine with impunity too! The marijuana trade is turning poor black people into hardened criminals? I hate to be crude, but, seriously, fuck you. The truth is, as a society, we don’t care about drug use per se. We’ve elected two presidents in a row knowing full well they’d used cocaine. We invest our money with people who use cocaine. We send our kids to college, where they, too, use cocaine, and we don’t lose too much sleep over it. But if we get our hands on the rat bastards who sold it to them…

Okay, that’s enough. I’m taking some deep breaths. If you aren’t bored of this already, there are some thoughts on why I think Frederick is wrong on the policy angle after the jump.

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I am reluctant to quarrel with Akhbar, one of the most correct men I know. But I must respond to this:

The bigger issue, though, is that this marijuana-centric outrage is complete bullshit. If you want pot legalized because you think it’s harmless and you enjoy smoking it, then knock yourself out. But once you bring up tax revenues, personal freedom, or the evils of the drug war, you really owe an explanation for why you’re focusing on marijuana. And while I’d love to hear it, I doubt that explanation would be very convincing.

I would focus on marijuana, for what I think is the very convincing reason of humility. It’s a certainty that legalizing drugs would have both good and bad effects; what’s uncertain is the exact nature, ratio, and pattern of those effects. It’s also certain that the effects, both good and bad, of legalizing cocaine would be more dramatic than those of legalizing marijuana. Why not then legalize marijuana first and observe the results? Then, after a time of say ten years, we can decide whether we want to legalize cocaine; assuming we do, we’ll know better what to expect and be able to legalize the other drugs in a more elegant way, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad.

The Patron Saint of Hyperbole strikes again on his new favorite subject, marijuana legalization. In reference to Obama’s response to a question on the topic at his press conference, Sullivan says:

The chuckle suggests a man of his generation. The dismissiveness toward the question of ending Prohibition as both a good in itself and a form of tax revenue is, however, depressing. His answer was a non-answer. I’m tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it’s trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it’s deadly serious. As for your online audience, Mr president, have you forgotten who got you elected?

There are a lot of hysteria warning signs here. First, note the capitalized ‘Prohibition’. When Sullivan starts introducing terminology, you know you’re in for it. Then there is the weird claim that this was a “non-answer”. What he actually said was ‘no’. That might not be the answer Sullivan wants to hear, and it might have been nice to hear the rationale behind the answer, but this is as clear-cut an answer as you could hope for. And, finally, Sullivan provides a fairly insane Easy Question of the Day: has Obama forgotten who got him elected? No, he no doubt remembers that he was elected by a coalition of people who knew he was publicly opposed to legalization, people who didn’t know and didn’t care, and people who hoped he was in favor but were too lazy to look it up and can presumably be counted on not to notice now, either.

The bigger issue, though, is that this marijuana-centric outrage is complete bullshit. If you want pot legalized because you think it’s harmless and you enjoy smoking it, then knock yourself out. But once you bring up tax revenues, personal freedom, or the evils of the drug war, you really owe an explanation for why you’re focusing on marijuana. And while I’d love to hear it, I doubt that explanation would be very convincing.