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The War on Drugs is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, North Carolina Edition

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Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) found at Chat...
Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) found at Chatsworth House, a large country house eight miles (13 km) north of Matlock in Derbyshire, England. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apparently this month’s crop of stabbings, armed robberies, rapes/molestations and teacher/student sex scandals in Catawba County, North Carolina aren’t enough to keep the sheriff’s department busy. Or maybe they just have too many deputies on the payroll. Something’s obviously out of balance: They have time to go after gardeners.

“A man was arrested after deputies found nearly an acre of opium poppy in a Catawba County field,” Charlotte’s WBTV News reports. “Deputies spent the day pulling plants and loading them into their trailers.” According to the Charlotte Observer,  the uniformed bandits also stole the victim’s pets and livestock.

Our fearless flower thieves estimate the value of their haul at an insane $500 million. That’s a goody from the American drug warriors’ bag of dirty tricks: Their guess is based on the total weight of the plants, not on the tiny amount of opium that might eventually have been extracted from each flower. They also love to do this with LSD, which is measured in micrograms, including the weight of the paper the chemical is embedded in. Bigger numbers make for harsher charges and more publicity. In reality, if those poppies were destined for the street market, the take would have been closer to half a million dollars than half a billion.

A few  other numbers to put this circus into perspective:

According to Statista, approved pharmaceuticals are a $446 billion per year industry in America, a country accounting, per CNBC for about 80% of global prescriptions of opiates. Call that particular market $20 billion per year.  And its giants don’t like competition.

Then there are the tens of billions of dollars in tax money spent every year on the “war on drugs,” which has over time become a make-work program to pad the budgets and payrolls of law enforcement at every level.

Meanwhile, as I note above, there are actual criminals committing actual crimes in Catawba County. But solving those crimes and busting those criminals isn’t nearly as sexy or lucrative as trampling a guy’s garden, seizing his other property, and talking smack about it on TV.

If you’re a taxpayer in Catawba County or anywhere else, you’re paying for this “drug bust” in two ways: Higher taxes and higher crime.  Every dime and every minute spent busting pot-smokers, heroin junkies and flower farmers is a dime taken out of your pocket and a minute spent making you less, not more, safe from real crime.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Memorial Day 2017

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I sat down this morning to write a Memorial Day column, and discovered that I like last year’s better than what I had going for this year. And, also, that there’s a problem with the site’s WordPress installation that I’ve already spent an hour on and may be messing with all day. I’m not normally into “recycling” columns, but this time I’ll make an exception. So:

This Memorial Day, Remember the Victims of Democide

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SCOTUS: Patent Trolls’ Loss is a Win for Honest Commerce

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English: The Supreme Court of the United State...
The Supreme Court of the United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On May 22, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously — and correctly — on a fairly obscure case that nonetheless has huge implications in an area where millions or even billions of dollars are frequently at stake. In TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods Group Brands, the Court came down against the practice of “forum shopping” in patent disputes. Hopefully this will reduce the incidence of “patent trolling.”

“Forum shopping” is the practice of filing suit in the court where you think you’re most likely to get the result you want. It’s a neat trick if you can get away with it, but in the normal course of things suits must be filed in the jurisdiction where the defendant resides.

Patent trolls exploited a loophole under which they could pick any jurisdiction to sue in so long as they claimed an infringement occurred there. Federal courts in Texas and Delaware became the patent litigation capitals of the US due to their troll-friendly reputations. The Supreme Court ruling restores the requirement that you must sue people where they live, not wherever’s most convenient.

So, what is “patent trolling?”

Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution empowers Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” For better or for worse (opponents of “intellectual property” as such say worse), copyright, trademark, and patent are longstanding features of US law pursuant to that power.

Here’s the way patents are supposed to work: You invent something. You register your invention with the US Patent & Trademark Office, and for 20 years after that only you, or people who receive permission from you, may manufacture that invention (if it’s a physical thing), use that invention (if it’s a process), etc.

Here’s the way patent trolling works: The troll procures ownership of a patent by filing it directly with USPTO or purchasing it from its original filer. Then the troll goes around accusing companies of infringing that patent and demanding “licensing fees” or other payoffs on threat of being sued. The troll neither produces, nor pretends to want to produce, anything useful. He’s just running a scam.

Often the victim will pay up on the reasonable supposition that doing so is cheaper than going to court. And of course each victim who does pay up makes the patent troll’s potential legal case against other victims a little more plausible.

Patent trolling works best with very vague, broad specifications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Stupid Patent of the Month” award recipients include, recently, a patent on dispatching taxi cabs, a patent on storing files in folders, and a patent on carrying trays on carts.

Obviously a little more common sense on the part of the Patent & Trademark Office would go a long way toward ridding us of patent trolls.

Failing that, the Supreme Court’s ban on “forum shopping” will at least make it harder for patent trolls to cash in. That’s a good thing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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