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The Problem Isn’t Synthetic Marijuana. The Problem Is Prohibition.

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A WVPD vehicle, outfitted for the D.A.R.E. pro...
A WVPD vehicle, outfitted for the D.A.R.E. program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Per CNN, New York governor Andrew Cuomo attributes 160 emergency room visits in his state, over a period of only nine days, to “synthetic marijuana” use. Alabama’s Department of Public Health claims 98 overdoses statewide in March.

The chemical stew — sold under the fiction that it’s to be used as incense or in some other innocuous way , but well-known as a substitute drug for those seeking a recreational, marijuana-like high — reportedly comes with side effects ranging from confusion and headaches to seizures and even death.

Is this latest drug scare a real problem, or just another instance of the hysterical propaganda used to justify marijuana prohibition for 80 years or so? It’s hard to tell. I’m inclined to think that it’s for real and that “spice” is some bad stuff. But either way, the real problem is prohibition itself.

Synthetic marijuana users would probably rather have the real thing. Unfortunately, it’s harder to find. Unlike “synthetic marijuana,” it isn’t sold openly in stores except in a few states. And it too comes with a major side effect: The possibility of going to jail.

In fact, that’s its ONLY major side effect. Marijuana is among the safest drugs around. It’s pretty much impossible to overdose on. It doesn’t impair judgment, motor skills or reaction times as badly as alcohol does. And while smoking it may be bad for the lungs, its users normally don’t go through two packs a day as tobacco users do.

As a public health matter, the obvious answer to the “synthetic marijuana” problem is to end the government’s war on real marijuana. And that’s been the correct answer to all supposed “marijuana problems” since marijuana prohibition came into vogue in the 1930s.

Starting with California in the 1990s, states began legalizing medical marijuana use.  So far 24 have done so. Only four states (Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon) and the District of Columbia have moved to decriminalize possession of small quantities of this relatively benign plant.

Why are things moving so slowly? If you have to ask “why,” the answer is almost always “money.”  Prohibition is a major industry.

The US government spends tens of billions of dollars per year providing “war on drugs” employment to cops and bureaucrats who might otherwise have to find real jobs. Local police departments count on drug busts (and associated property seizures) to pad their own payrolls. The American prison-industrial complex lobbies hard for laws that keep its cells filled. And assorted “non-profits” like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) rake in tens of millions of dollars annually by pitching anti-drug propaganda at a captive audience — our kids.

The war on drugs benefits the prohibition industry. But where the public’s health and freedom are concerned, its costs — people jailed, people killed, sick people denied real medicine, well people made sick by inferior recreational substitutes — far outweigh any benefits, real or imagined.

The war on drugs is a national nightmare. Time to wake up and end it.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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Hubris Unlimited: Tom Cotton versus Reality

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A Tomahawk cruise missile (TLAM) is fired from...
A Tomahawk cruise missile (TLAM) is fired from an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer during the fourth wave of attacks on Iraq in support of Operation Desert Fox (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) wants the United States to pick a fight with Iran. Not an all-out brawl, he says; just an itty-bitty bout along the lines of 1998’s Operation Desert Fox, in which US aircraft carried out four days of airstrikes on Iraq.

Setting aside the fact that there’s just no reason for such an exercise  — P5+1 negotiation theater aside, Iran doesn’t seem to have an active nuclear weapons development program for airstrikes to target — the whole concept of “limited war” is bogus and dangerous.

One big problem with “limited war” is that it seldom produces the results its architects envision and instead becomes a gateway to UN-limited war.

Desert Fox was just one link in a chain of “limited” measures connecting 1991’s Desert Storm to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, followed by seven years of occupation, civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State.

Vietnam started out with US advisors training and accompanying South Vietnamese troops — “limited,” see? It ended with nearly half a million US troops engaged in all-out combat and 60,000 of those troops dead.

A second problem with “limited war” is the naive notion that the United States alone gets to define its wars’ scope, setting, tempo and duration.  The enemy usually has different ideas as to those variables. September 11, 2001, the culmination of a decade of “limited war” against al Qaeda, didn’t feel too terribly “limited,” did it?

US military interventionism in the 21st century sports a sorry record. The twin unwinnable quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, sprinkled with smaller fiascoes like Libya, Syria and Yemen, make it clear that neither “limited” nor “unlimited” war in the Middle East and Central Asia will ever produce good results.

Bringing the same failed doctrine to bear on Iran, a country with three times the population and a far more modern military apparatus than Iraq circa 2003 or Afghanistan circa 2001, is pure folly. It would be a bloody and unprofitable investment in an enterprise doomed to failure.

So, what’s the alternative? Peace, of course.

The United States has incessantly intervened in Iran, covertly and overtly, politically and militarily, for lo on 70 years now, with uniformly negative results.

The first step in getting out of a deep hole is to stop digging. Contra Tom Cotton, it’s time to take war — “limited” or not — off the table.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter addresses this same topic in more depth and from some other perspectives in “A Really Bad Idea: A ‘Limited’ War with Iran.” While this piece doesn’t cite or quote Carpenter’s commentary, it was certainly informed by that commentary, so credit/linkage is very much in order.

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The Kids Are All Right. It’s the Cops and Bureaucrats Who Need to Chill.

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Growing up in small-town southern Missouri, I never realized how good I had it. After school and all summer, I roamed. Alone or with friends, restrained by little other than parental orders to stay within a reasonably large area and check in occasionally, I enjoyed the freedom of childhood.

These days, government treats unaccompanied pre-teens like re-enactments of the Charles Lindbergh, Jr. kidnapping — and their parents like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, executed in 1936 for that abduction and murder.

Ten-year-old Raffi Meitiv, 10, and his six-year-old sister Dvora, have been abducted off the streets of Silver Springs, Maryland. Twice. Not by Hauptmann-style evil-doers, but by police. They’ve been held by Child Protective Services. Their parents have been deemed guilty of “non-specific neglect” for allowing them to walk to and from a park near their home.

The ransom demand in the second of these abductions? That Raffi and Dvora’s parents sign a “temporary safety plan” agreeing to never, ever, ever let the kids go outside by themselves.

The Meitivs have focused media attention on the issue with their courageous decision to fight the nanny state nonsense instead of just doing as they’re told. Their situation is not at all unusual. Similar idiocy takes place every day, all over.

As Lenore Skenazy, “Free-Range Kids” blogger and host of the “World’s Worst Mom” reality TV show notes at Reason, “we all are beginning to understand just how insane, paranoid, and vindictive the state can be when it comes to respecting human rights — in [the Meitiv’s] case, the right of parents who love their kids to raise them the way they see fit.”

When my youngest son was five, he wanted to walk to the deli a block from our house — accessible via quiet, sidewalked, residential streets — and buy his own sandwich. After strict instructions to stay away from the busier street on which the deli fronted, I let him do his big-boy thing.

The first time, I concealed myself and watched him carefully. Once it became a regular thing, I awaited his return on the front porch, prepared to check on him if he was gone longer than expected. Then one day he arrived home in the back of a police car, and I got a lecture on how dangerous it was to let him walk a block and back by himself.

Nonsense! What’s dangerous is treating kids like babies well into their teens, then expecting them to magically blossom into full-blown responsible adults at 18 on the dot. Responsibility is a product of the freedom to learn and grow. When government gets in the way of that freedom, we’re all worse off for the increasingly infantilized society that results.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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