Marijuana: No Worse Than Alcohol?

By Andrew Tallman
Tuesday, November 2, 2010

One of the challenges in approaching any complicated topic is to deal with each particular slice of the discussion on its own merits. Instead, we usually try to handle the whole pie all at once, which usually leads to handling each bit quite poorly. With that in mind, let’s look at one limited aspect of the debate over legalizing marijuana: the premise that since marijuana is no worse than alcohol, it’s only fair to give it the same legal status as alcohol.

I think most people fight this idea by trying to show how much worse than alcohol marijuana is. Instead, I’ll grant the assertion for argument’s sake and show that even if marijuana advocates are right, there are still good reasons to not treat it the same as alcohol.

As I think anyone will agree, consuming alcohol in large quantities is bad. It’s bad for marriages. It’s bad for children. And it’s bad for simple health concerns. I also think anyone will agree that numerous Americans consume alcohol in precisely such quantities. Thus, I think reasonable people would agree that our current situation with regard to alcohol overuse is undesirable. If only there were some feasible way to fix it, we would want to.

Furthermore, the current efforts to control alcohol are an abject failure. Teenagers have virtually as much access to it as they would like, and this is certainly true of underage college students. Although drunk driving has been the focus of intense legal and media attention, the number of accidents and fatalities in which alcohol is a factor is still absurdly high. And of course alcohol is a major contributor to domestic assault. All of this is common knowledge.

But that’s the point. Even if marijuana is no worse than alcohol, why would we want to permit people to use yet another drug when the problems from alcohol abuse are so obvious?

If I may rephrase the argument a bit uncharitably, marijuana advocates seem to be saying the following: “Even though our society’s handling of alcohol has been abysmal, we think it’s only fair to let us start handling yet another drug just as badly. We know the social and personal problems from marijuana abuse are likely to be similar to those with alcohol, but it’s just not fair that we’re only allowed to have one substance that harms people, families, children, and society.”

Also, keep in mind that unlike alcohol, marijuana is not ordinarily consumed in moderation by anyone. The point of having access to it is to get high, the rough equivalent of being drunk. Nobody smokes a little pot with dinner for the flavor. So, the effect of legalizing marijuana would be to replicate only the worst parts of legalized alcohol.

It seems to me that a smart society, like a smart person, learns from its mistakes. And although I haven’t mentioned tobacco, a cursory exploration should conclude virtually the same problems exist there, albeit replacing drunk driving and domestic violence with more mundane issues like lung disease and cancer. We as a society simply don’t handle recreational drugs very well, particularly when it comes to their overuse and use by young people.

Taking that observation in hand, it seems beyond strange to me that some people want to add another similar substance to those already available. And just to reiterate, the single, simple argument we’re dealing with is that of fairness, as in, “It’s unfair to prohibit marijuana since you permit alcohol.”

Unfair? Perhaps.

Unwise? Not so much.

Some analogies may help clarify at this point.

Imagine that I have hired two employees at different times from the same college. Although each looked quite good on paper and in interviews, both turned out to be much less excellent than hoped for. Even though I can’t figure out a practical way to fire either of them, does that mean I’m obligated in fairness to hire the next applicant from that college who applies to me for a job? “But you hired both of them!” “Yes, and look how that’s turned out. I don’t intend to be so naïve a third time.” It’s a sadistic philosophy which holds that individuals or societies are beholden to the standard set by their worst decisions for any future choices.

Again, imagine some woman who picks up a man at a bar, dates him for awhile, and then finds herself being abused by him. She breaks up with him and returns to the bar to pick up a new man. She dates him for awhile and finds the same thing happening again. So she ends the relationship. Amazingly, she returns to the bar, but this time, she explains to the man who chats her up how she’s a bit wary of being abused by yet another guy from a bar. “Well, honey, don’t you think you owe me the same opportunity you gave those other two?” Please tell me our public policy advice is better than this.

Yet again, imagine that we as a nation involved ourselves in a failed war such as Vietnam but from which we actually couldn’t extricate ourselves. Then imagine we found ourselves on the verge of another war with similar-seeming difficulties. Would we really believe that consistency required us to engage in it because advocates assure us “it isn’t any worse than Vietnam?” Fool me once, shame on you….

Yet a fourth time, imagine that you have before you a heavy drinker who smokes two packs a day. I don’t imagine you would ever dream of saying to him, “I think you’re being inconsistent. Don’t you realize that marijuana isn’t as bad as either of the drugs you already abuse? And since you already smoke and drink a lot (even though you wish you could quit both), don’t you think for the sake of consistency you should add weed to your unhealthy regimen?” But how is this different from the argument at hand?

“So are you saying you favor prohibition of alcohol and tobacco?”

Nothing of the sort. I’m simply saying that the obvious problems we already have from both of those drugs being legal is the best reason to avoid embracing any more recreational drugs.

Now if you offered me a hypothetical society in which neither alcohol, nor tobacco, nor marijuana was in use and asked me to choose which of the three to permit, I can’t really say what I would pick. But it should be pretty clear we don’t have such a fantasy society in front of us. We live in a real one with a real past and a truly entrenched familiarity with alcohol and tobacco. If we add marijuana to the list, there will be more use of it than there is currently, which means more young users, more occasional users, more regular users, and more impaired driving. Needless to say, none of this will make our country stronger.

It seems to me that a wise society is the kind which learns from its mistakes rather than feeling obliged to repeat them out of a misguided sense of consistency. Our standards should improve because of our prior errors, not be permanently held back because of them. “It’s-no-worse-than” thinking is simply not the guiding light toward great personal or public policy.

Of course, as I mentioned at the outset, I know this is only one particular piece of the marijuana discussion, albeit an ubiquitous one. But I hope at this point you agree that this one invalid argument can safely be discarded. Naturally, we might choose to legalize marijuana for other reasons, but we certainly aren’t obligated to do so on the principle of fairness.

Top Five Most Crime-Ridden U.S. Judicial Districts All On Mexican Border

Terry Jeffrey
Wednesday, August 04, 2010

When measured by the number of criminal defendants charged with federal crimes by U.S. attorneys, the top five U.S. judicial districts for fiscal 2009 were all on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In fact, these five judicial districts are the only five on the U.S.-Mexico border -- covering its entire expanse from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.

There are 94 federal judicial districts, covering the area of all 50 states, plus Guam, the North Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

In the Southern District of Texas, which covers a stretch of border from Brownsville past Laredo, the U.S. attorney's office filed criminal charges against 8,801 defendants in fiscal 2009. That gave that district the nation's No. 1 ranking for most criminal defendants charged in 2009, according to data published in Table 1 of the United States Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report for Fiscal Year 2009.

The 8,801 criminal defendants charged in the Southern District of Texas, in fact, was more than four times the 1,959 charged in the Southern District of New York (which includes Manhattan and the Bronx) and more than six times the 1,377 charged in the Eastern District of New York (which included Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island).

Following the Southern District of Texas as the No. 2 district in the nation for the most criminal defendants is the Western District of Texas, which covers the rest of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. The U.S. attorney here filed charges against 8,435 defendants in 2009.

Rounding out the top five are the districts for Southern California (5,554 defendants charged), Arizona (5,155) and New Mexico (3,769).

The 5,554 criminal defendants charged in Southern District of California -- which includes San Diego and Imperial counties and covers the entire California stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border -- was more than twice the 2,581 charged in the Central District of California, which includes the nearby Los Angeles metropolitan area, but does not touch the border.

Not nearly as many criminals were charged in federal judicial districts along the Canadian border. There were 191 charged in the District of Alaska, 806 in the Western District of Washington, 468 in the Eastern District of Washington, 393 in Idaho, 430 in Montana, 355 in North Dakota, 531 in Minnesota, 567 in the Western District of Michigan, 956 in the Eastern District of Michigan, 925 in the Northern District of New York, 183 in Vermont, 290 in New Hampshire and 182 in Maine.

What is going on here?

The United States Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report for Fiscal Year 2009, compiled and released by President Barack Obama's Justice Department, is just more evidence that our government is not doing its job of defending our nation's border with Mexico. According to the Justice Department's own numbers, federal crime is dramatically disproportionate along that border compared to the rest of the United States.

The report also reveals that of the 81,577 defendants convicted in federal court in 2009, 26,538 were convicted in cases the Justice Department categorized as immigration cases. Another 26,399 were convicted in drug cases. That means 33 percent of federal convictions were in immigration cases and 32 percent in drug cases.

"Violence along the border of the United States and Mexico has increased dramatically during recent years," says the U.S. attorneys' report. "The violence associated with Mexican drug trafficking organizations pose (sic) a serious problem for law enforcement. Mexican drug cartels have taken over some of the drug trade in the United States and are working with several gangs, according to a report by the National Drug Intelligence Center titled National Drug Threat Assessment 2009. According to this threat assessment, Mexican drug trafficking organizations represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States and the influence of Mexican drug trafficking organizations over domestic drug trafficking is unrivaled."

Clearly, the surge in immigration crime and drug crime and the concentration of crime at the U.S.-Mexico border are inter-related.

"Illegal immigration provides the initial foothold with which criminal elements, including organized crime syndicates, use to engage in a myriad of illicit activities ranging from immigration document fraud and migrant smuggling to human trafficking," said the U.S. attorneys' report. "Federal prosecution of border crime is a critical part of our Nation's defense, and federal jurisdiction over these offenses is exclusive. Proactive border law enforcement is an important component of our counterterrorism mission because it is known that terrorist organizations utilize cross-border criminal activity as a source of revenue and that smuggling organizations offer terrorists easy access to the United States."

Do you think Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have read this report? Do you think they will do anything about it?


Top Ten U.S. Judicial Districts for 2009 by Criminal Defendants

Southern Texas ---- 8,801

Western Texas ---- 8,435

Southern California ---- 5,554

Arizona ---- 5,155

New Mexico ---- 3,769

Central California ---- 2,581

Southern Florida ---- 2,514

Southern New York ---- 1,959

Middle Florida ---- 1,780

Eastern Virginia ---- 1,485

Kidnapped by the Cartels

George Will
Sunday, March 22, 2009

PHOENIX -- Police Chief Jack Harris, a solid block of a man with a shock of thick gray hair, is stolid and patient but there are limits. Clearly he is weary of explaining that this is one of America's safest large cities, with declining rates of violent crime and property crime, even though it has one of the nation's highest rates of home foreclosures. Unfortunately, there are the kidnappings.

There were 368 reported kidnappings for ransom here last year -- perhaps more than anywhere else, other than Mexico City where kidnapping is such a long-established industry that the wealthy sometimes buy kidnap insurance. It is difficult to know how many kidnappings occurred there or here: Many are not reported because it can be dangerous to do so. And because they are settled before there is time to report them. Receiving a finger severed from the kidnap victim often speeds ransom transactions in Mexico. Not here yet.

In any case, law-abiding citizens here are rarely at risk. Most of the kidnappings are drug smugglers and human traffickers preying on one another.

Some of the smugglers who bring in drugs from Mexico bring people, too, along desert trails and through dry washes, to "drop houses." Regarding both drugs and people, Phoenix is a transshipment point: Most of both are distributed to other states. But some of the people become pawns in horrific transactions. A person in the United States might pay, say, $2,500 to have someone smuggled into the country, and then might receive a phone call: Pay another $5,000 and we will stop raping or torturing -- do you hear the screams? -- the person you want.

A small "drop house," with no functioning toilet, may, Chief Harris says, hold 60 people -- he has seen 100 -- in squalor. Fifty of them just want to move deeper into America in search of work, but all of them might have only their underwear, their clothes having been taken away to prevent them from running away.

The cross-border traffic in narcotics and people is, Harris says, just one way globalization is shaping crime. When the United States tightened controls on supplies of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the precursor chemicals for manufacturing methamphetamine, American motorcycle gangs were pushed out of the business. The production of those drugs, which had been done in many improvised labs in rural America, or even in American kitchens, moved to Mexico, where drug-makers imported ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from China.

To the problem of reducing regular crime -- homicides in Phoenix were down 24 percent in 2008 -- Harris has applied proven methods. They include the nimble deployment of manpower to high-crime hot spots, close relations between police and neighborhoods, and intense concentration on the small number of career criminals who commit a large majority of the crimes -- often hundreds a year by each individual.

Phoenix's familiar sorts of crimes have not much to do with most of the city's immigrants, legal or illegal. They commit a smaller percentage of the crimes (10 percent) than they are of the city's population (24 percent). But the lurid crimes that are giving this city an unmerited reputation as dangerous represent the seepage of the Mexican cartels into his city.

For them, Harris says, "The answer is not in Phoenix. The answer is in Washington." We know how to close a border, says Harris with acid dryness -- " build a wall" and deploy "machine gun nests." But, "I personally think that is stupid." For now, however, the United States "has turned immigration policy over to Mexican thugs." So we have reached a point at which barbed wire, car batteries and acid become the business tools of kidnapper-torturer-extortionists.

With a force large enough to police the nation's fifth-largest city, Harris can deploy 60 officers to deal with one kidnapping. That would be impossible in smaller cities, to which such crime might be driven by success here. But "don't give me 50 more" officers to "deal with the symptoms." Rather, says Harris, who was raised in a rough Phoenix neighborhood, give me comprehensive immigration reform that controls the borders, provides for whatever seasonal immigration the nation wants, and one way or another settles the status of the 12 million who are here illegally -- 55 percent of whom have been here at least eight years.

For those whose profession it is, law enforcement sometimes seems like bailing an ocean with a thimble. Harris wants not a bigger thimble but a smaller ocean.

A War We Are Still Losing

By Terence Jeffrey
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The terrorists swept into Cananea in a convoy of 15 vehicles. They were on a brazen, murderous mission.

They kidnapped seven policemen and two civilians. Outside town, they shot and killed four of the policemen and dumped their bodies in a park.

Local police who had not been kidnapped deserted their posts to a man. "When the state police arrived, there was not a single municipal police officer," the local governor later told The Associated Press. "We had to take over the command. There wasn't anyone there. They had all left."

Government forces tracked the terrorists into the nearby mountains. A pitched battle ensued. Fifteen terrorists were reported killed. Others got away, melting into the local population or deeper into the hills.

So went another sad episode in a region of the world where anarchy reigns. Assessing the day's carnage, the mayor of the targeted village spoke with bitter candor. "Our municipality has become the victim of the violence that pervades this entire country," he said in a statement. "The events of this morning are beyond shocking."

Where is this placed called Cananea? Is it in Iraq? Afghanistan?

No. It is almost in Arizona. Specifically, it is about 20 miles south of the U.S. border in the Mexican state of Sonora. Pull it up on Google Earth, as I did this week, and you will see that the nearest town of any size is Nogales, Ariz. The nearest big city is Tucson.

Cananea is in the war zone next door. It is a place where Mexican criminal syndicates, bolstered by Mexican army deserters, fight one another for control of the best smuggling routes into the United States.

The terrorist raid on Cananea, which took place on May 16, points to a monstrous strategic blunder by our government.

More than six years have transpired since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the quest to make our nation safer, we have sent armies halfway around the world to occupy and attempt to create democracies in both Afghanistan and Iraq. But our government still has not secured our own border.

The Government Accountability Office last week presented testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee that demonstrated just how porous our southern frontier remains.

"Mexico," said the GAO, "is the conduit for most of the cocaine reaching the United States, the source for much of the heroin consumed in the United States, and the largest foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market."

In the years since 9-11, the drug cartels that trade in South American cocaine have found Mexico to be a more -- not less -- attractive route for smuggling their product into American cities and towns to sell to American kids.

Citing an annual U.S. government analysis called the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement (IACM), the GAO said: "From 2000 to 2006, the IACM reported an increase in the estimated amount of cocaine flowing through Mexico to the United States -- from 66 percent in 2000 to 77 percent in 2003 to 90 in 2006."

"Despite the apparent increases in cocaine arriving in Mexico, the amount of cocaine reported seized in Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border for 2000-2006 did not increase proportionately," said GAO. On average during this period, GAO said, only about 13 percent of this cocaine was seized.

The record was worse for heroin. "Reported heroin seizures in Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border averaged less than 1 metric ton or less than 5 percent a year of the estimated export quality heroin produced in Mexico between 2000 and 2005," said GAO.

Americans have and will pay many prices for the failure of our president and Congress to secure our border. In 2005 alone, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, people using cocaine visited emergency rooms 448,481 times, while people using heroin visited emergency rooms 164,572 times. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that in 2002 Americans paid $180.9 billion to cover the negative consequences of drug use, which includes health costs, criminal justice costs, disability and death-related costs, and the cost of lost productivity.

Then, of course, there are the criminals that cross our borders to conduct business here for the cartels. Mexican drug trafficking organizations, GAO said in an August report, have "regional managers throughout the country and rely on Mexican street gangs to distribute illicit drugs at the retail level."

If, one day, the powder that comes across our border is not heroin or cocaine but something even deadlier, and the thugs who bring it through are not drug dealers but al-Qaida terrorists, the current president and Congress will not be able to say: No one saw it coming.