Gorback’s Thoughts
Oct 31, 2005
By: Michael Gorback M.D.
Placebojournal.com
Living here in Houston near all the refineries, it’s easy to understand why people would want to get rid of local chemical industries. That’s why I sympathize with those states that decided to put pseudoephedrine (PSE) behind the counter. Stay with me - there is a connection here between environmental safety and PSE. In Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and other states you now have to show I.D. and sign for it, and there is a limit to the quantity you can purchase.
Why, you may ask, did they do this? Because meth labs use PSE to make methamphetamine. The states that enacted these laws decided to put the meth labs out of business by drying up the supply of PSE. I think you can see the obvious problem here. With no change in demand (meth addiction is one of the worst there is) and a decrease in supply, someone will step up and provide it; someone willing to incur more risk and be more violent when necessary. Someone who is even farther outside the law than some doper cooking up a batch in the kitchen. Someone with established supply lines and distribution networks and the means to protect them.
Someone like a drug cartel.
And that’s exactly what has happened. The local labs dried up and the Mexican cartels moved in. In essence, we have outsourced our illicit methamphetamine production to Mexico.
It gets better: law enforcement officials actually advocated this. They were tired of chasing down all the labs that kept popping up. The lab operators - often stoked on their product - also had an unfortunate habit of blowing themselves up. Sometimes innocent bystanders got killed (including children). Fires were started in surrounding neighborhoods. Meth labs had to go.
Since we were incapable of stopping these labs, our government basically drove the production to a foreign country with far worse drug interdiction resources than ours. A country where they use cops for target practice. So now we have the same number of meth addicts, but the product is provided by ruthless drug cartels outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement. As they jostle for market position, there will be turf wars and violence, like there used to be turf wars for corners to sell crack. And perhaps the labs will keep blowing up, but hey, they will only be killing Mexican children, and probably just the poorest ones.
But at least it’s not in our neighborhood, and that’s what really matters.
The question has been raised whether we have a moral obligation to continue the war on drugs and we can’t just go by economic considerations.
To review, my contention is that shutting down the supply line to local meth labs doesn’t decrease production, it merely redistributes production to foreign labs outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement. I suggested that while it is unpleasant and time-consuming for the police to have to strip down a meth lab, at the end of the day there is one less producer. On the other hand, many more times that amount of man-hours is required to arrest one drug lord. And as far as I can tell, arresting drug lords does not stop drug trafficking at all. Their competitors or underlings step up to fill in the gap. Their assets are out of the country beyond reach. Their successors are also out of the country, and won’t be arrested until it’s time for Congress to do their scheduled foreign aid review. Then Mexico, Columbia, and the other corrupt drug-producing countries will sacrifice up another drug lord to make it look like they’re cooperating and get the foreign aid.Pablo Escobar has been dead for over 10 years. Benjamin Arellano Felix was arrested in 2002, and his sociopathic brother Ramon was killed the same year. Yet prices are now lower and purity is higher for many illicit drugs.
So the argument that cleaning up the local meth labs frees resources to pursue the kingpins and shut down drug trafficking doesn’t hold water. You’re more effective spending a few man-hours dealing with a local lab. Something actually happens to decrease drug manufacturing. Taking out a Mexican drug kingpin just makes his competitors happy.
As for the morals and ethics of it, that depends on whether one embraces a deontological (certain actions are categorically forbidden or intrinsically wrong) or consequentialist (rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the consequences of the act) view. The libertarians argue the consequentialist thesis that there is less societal harm by legalizing domestic production. History is on their side. The only social experiment done in this country in this regard was Prohibition, and the results are pretty clear: an emphasis on interdiction doesn’t prevent use of the prohibited substance, increases violent crime, and makes criminals rich. Do we have better control of alcohol sales, use, and addiction now or did we have a better situation under Prohibition?
The deontologists, who argue that certain things (like illicit drug use, diversion, or sales) have intrinsic evil to them have a very serious problem with inconsistency and hypocrisy. There are three nontherapeutic, dangerous, and addictive C-I drugs that are allowed to flourish under the CSA: alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. Alcohol and tobacco are documented gateway drugs to hard drug use, ranking ahead of marijuana. As long as some C-I’s are tolerated and others are not, the deontological argument fails. How can you say it’s morally wrong to make methamphetamine but tobacco is ok? There is no moral justification for legal substances that can’t also be made for the illegal ones.
I submit to you that America has already rejected the deontological argument by its acceptance of alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. American society has obviously decided to take a consequentialist approach - it’s better to make those drugs legal even though they may be morally repellent. It would appear, then, that an illegal drug is merely a substance that has no social sponsorship.
Perhaps we should reconsider the libertarian proposal of deflating the profits and dealing with the problem out in the open. Then focus LE on those aspects of use that actually have victims, such as DUI, selling to minors, date-rape, etc - the same as for the current legalized C-I’s. Place addicts into treatment instead of jail. And the illiterate sociopaths who run the multi-million dollar cartels can go back to shoveling horse manure for a living.
