Ball Rolling & other stories

Denver, Colorado.

Probably not a threat.

Overall, the day went as marijuana activists had hoped it would: In the most extraordinary way possible, it was ordinary.

“I’ve been waiting 34 years for this moment,” enthused Chrissy Robinson, who arrived at one store, Evergreen Apothecary in Denver, at 2 a.m. to be among the first in line. “I’ve been smoking since I was 14. No more sneaking around.” […]

The first customer was 32-year-old Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran who campaigned for marijuana legalization and said he uses cannabis to alleviate symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Under a canopy of cameras, Azzariti bought an eighth of an ounce of the marijuana strain Bubba Kush and a package of marijuana-infused candy truffles.
                — Denver Post, 01/01/2014 07:24:53 AM MST

And yet, mysteriously, civilisations have failed to come crashing down. There are no mobs of marauding layabouts forcing people to smoke pot in the streets (thank you, Ayn Rand): there has been no observable breakdown in law and order, people are still going to work, the state has not run out of pizza and no-one is trying to sell weed to children. The big news of yesterday was of course that the 2012 ballot legalization of cannabis in the US state of Colorado went into full effect as of 8am, 2014. This is the first time cannabis has been legal in an industrial state since 1961 (that’s anywhere in the world, although drug laws in a lot of sensible places are not, shall we say, rigorously enforced) and to the surprise of absolutely no-one who has been paying attention, there is a marked absence of any evidence of insanity, criminality and death. Anslinger’s lies may finally get staked at the cross-roads.

Happy New Year

Hangovers notwithstanding.

Status Quo Vade

So I missed six months of last year due to being disconnected from the internet. I did a lot of useful stuff away from the keyboard, but it did blow this blogging effort out of the water. It looks at though for perhaps the next year I shall be reconnected: this is good! However, my computer blew a gasket on Christmas Day, so I’m operating in a borrowed environment: this is less good. For someone in the middle of a research and commentary series about the developing cracks in the Drug War, those particular six months were a very irritating season to miss: a great deal happened in that sphere and I shall return to that theme soon. The original Prohibition series is going to be rebooted; a sufficient number of the existing articles have needed reworking to reflect new developments that I’m going to run the whole series again, to a schedule this time. Watch this space.

I may be limited to that series and some Friday Giant posts for the forseeable, as how much reading time I’m going to get is not always predictable. For today, here are some things I thought were interesting.

Daily Trawl

1. Civil Liberties.
I’ve been knocking around the internet for a good while now. The geek end of the industry has always had a touch of the techno-utopianism about personal liberty and the power of the internet. As the censorship and control efforts of the last few years have got out of hand, more and more serious people have started talking about privacy and personal autonomy as being the early 21st Century’s answer to the Civil Rights era. Just as it was in the 60s and 70s, the two greatest challenges we face in society over the next fifty years are to do with finding a sustainable economic model and redefining the relationship between citizen, state and corporation. Timothy Lee at WaPo has some details. Then they also had this piece from Andrea Peterson exploring the ways in which Hollywood’s dystopian visions from the late 1990s have come true in the surveillance state over the last year.

Friday Giant 4: Island Girl(s)

Editor’s Note: this post in part is a celebration of Yule tomorrow, and in part of my returning to regular internet access after a six-month involuntary detox. That’s also why it’s a little longer than average. Regular service on this blog will resume in the new year. Have a happy holidaymass, everybody.

Princess of Wessex

Æthelflæd, Lady of Mercia

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the British Isles has heard of Æthelflæd’s father. Alfredus Magnus, Ælfred the Great, pious scholar, cunning warrior, and skilful statesman. He’s mostly famous for founding the Royal Navy and being a really bad cook. Oh yeah, and uniting the Saxons and the English to kick the Danes back out of the country. Or at least, that’s the Ladybird version. [1] If one is broadly familiar with early medieval history one might know that Alfred died of chronic malaria and religious exhaustion with the job only half done. Mercia was an ally but the Anglias and the Kingdom of York were in vigorous Danish hands, and Strathclyde was a Welsh kingdom hungry for more land. Northumberland was stuck on his rock at Bamburgh and couldn’t do much. At this point Edward, King of Wessex steps into the limelight of history. He is credited with leading an alliance between Mercia, Wessex and, as liberated, the Anglias which ended the Danish kingdoms in England (for a hundred years or so, anyway). The campaign is relatively well-documented, and by all accounts Edward was both a talented soldier and a brave one, being at least as good a warrior as he was a general. Alfred and Edward between them created one of the defining cultural myths which allowed the modern English to come into existence.

What is largely invisible from this narrative is the role played by Edward’s sister. His steadfast ally, Æthelred Ealdorman of the remaining English Mercians, who covered the western flank while Edward rampaged up the east coast, was so steadfast in large part because he was married to Æthelflæd. And he was also dead from the second year of the actual campaign.

Weekly Trawl

In a Denver hotel.

I spent most of last week away from the keyboard, between band rehearsals and the gig last night, visiting my parents and niece, jobhunting and various other shenanigans. There’s been a lot happening in the world, and a chunk of it is relevant to my long-form series that’s still on-going (hence today’s illustration). I read a lot of things but haven’t had time to do any writing, so I need to get back on track. To that end I’m going to dump a brief cull of the most interesting stuff I saw go past while I was away from the keyboard.

1. Popery
Andrew Sullivan is still keeping a very close eye on Pope Francis. I have relatively little to add to Sully’s analysis so far; certainly, what I expected from the early reports doesn’t seem to be the way this Pope is going to swing. I doubt the Vatican Rag is going to be adopted into the liturgy any time soon, but in an institution so weighed down with symbols and subtext, Pope Francis is certainly sending signals that he’s going to be interesting to watch.

2. Austerians and other plagues.
Quite a bit of interesting economic stuff, with several entries from Prof. Krugman. From column a, we start with the news that the EU is actually managing this economic crisis worse than its interwar counter-parts did. The Prof catches John Boehner lying about Lincoln. He remarks once again that trickle-down isn’t, and there’s this excellent NYT Op-ed on California. Krugman is, particularly for him, quite subtle in this one, but if you were paying attention to the 112th Congress you cannot miss implications for Washington.

In other news, the Angry Bear is speaking of inequality and Mike Konczal at WaPo is thinking about the problems with rentiers. And Vinay Gupta is back in the saddle, with this rather interesting look at how to think outside the capitalist / communist dichotomy.

3. Freedom & Liberty: one of these things is not like the other.
Matt Yglesias notes, via the Mercatus Foundation’s interesting worldview, that US libertarianism has some joined-up thinking problems. Examining the prejudices embedded in their system for analysing the comparative ‘free’-ness of various US states, Yglesias notes several points of friction:

Some of the problem here arise from arbitrary weighting of different categories in order to simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism’s strong alliance with social conservatism. Consequently, a gay man’s freedom to marry the love of his life is given some weight in the rankings but less than his right to purchase a gun with minimal hassle. A woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy or a doctor’s right to offer a pregnant woman treatment she considers appropriate are given zero weight. You might think at first that abortion rights are given zero weight for metaphysical reasons rather than reasons of cultural politics, but it turns out that permissive homeschooling laws are given weight as a factor in freedom. Children, in other words, are considered fully autonomous agents whose rights the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents from birth until conception at which point they lose autonomy until graduation from high school.

Texas is deemed very economically free in most respects but it’s dinged for the fact that its local governments have relatively high levels of debt. What on earth does that have to do with freedom? This is simply a policy choice. Arguably, a correct policy choice. […] no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota.

4. Grand Ornery Party
Andrew Kohut of Pew has an excellent (longish!) WaPo opinion piece on epistemic closure and the numbers which suggest that the culture warriors of the TEA-Party are losing. Now, I’m not one of those who thinks the GOP is about to go away, or that the bigots and billionaires they work for are not going to find representation somehow. Ezra Klein has a succinct rebuttal of the more hysterical viewpoints. But it does look, and increasingly so, like the mortal lock the religious right has had on the GOP primary process since the Gingrich revolution may be doing the party some structural, as well cyclic, damage.

5. And Finally…
That ball does just keep on rolling. In just the last few weeks…

On the medical front, we’ve got news that’s particularly interesting to me about the cannabinol which is good for your guts, and more evidence that Big Pharma and their governmental prohibitionist allies are starting to scramble a bit.

We’ve got a law blog armed with infographics. The progressive lobby now have their own SuperPAC. Maine wants to legalize, following Washington and Colorado last year. Rhode Island’s decriminalisation takes effect today (and the choice of date indicates someone over there has a sense of humour); and Vermont are talking about following suit. And all of this is just the recent developments inside the USA.

While mindful of Jonathan Bernstein’s second-favourite caveat, this looks suspiciously like momentum. And as the activists who’ve been hammering on the Bible Belt’s brick intellects for twenty years over SSM can tell you, when momentum turns into progress it can take you by surprise.

Perverse Incentives IV: Economies of Forced Labour

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control.
                Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate

The US state of California imprisons more people than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That state alone incarcerates more citizens than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The United States as a whole imprisons nearly two million people. The US locks up, proportionately and absolutely, more of its citizens than Soviet Russia under Stalin. Estimates vary, but a likely figure is that half of those prisoners are non-violent marijuana users, and that’s why California locks up so many people. The primary enforcement regime for pot possession busts is administrated via state and local policing.

Eric Schlosser was writing about this at the Atlantic in 1998:

The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation’s incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States.

In other words, that explosion in incarceration tracks precisely with the increasingly punitive history of US drug prohibition. He goes on:

In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America’s inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment—or would not be considered crimes at all—in the United States now lead to a prison term.

That’s journalese for penny-ante possession convictions.

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. […] private companies regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent.

So the question is, who’s benefiting from this? When you see a public policy where the numbers make this little sense, somebody somewhere is making a whole ton of money. And the sums involved are very large indeed: this is from HuffPo in 2012.

At the federal level, the political action committees and executives of private prison companies have given at least $3.3 million to political parties, candidates, and their political action committees since 2001. The private prison industry has given more than $7.3 million to state candidates and political parties since 2001, including $1.9 million in 2010, the highest amount in the past decade.

No-one spends that much buying politicians if they’re not making considerably more than that as a result. So how do people extract Robber Baron profits from running prisons? Forced labour.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this obstinate moral predicament presents itself in the private contracting of prisoners and their role in assembling vast quantities of military and commercial equipment. While the United States plunges itself into each new manufactured conflict under a wide range of fraudulent pretenses, it is interesting to note that all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other equipment used by military occupation forces are produced by inmates in federal prisons across the US.

The United States has institutionalised a culture of bonded labour which generates very large incentives to lock up more people, whatever the excuse. Now, if you’ve been paying close attention to the motivations behind the War on Drugs, you may be expecting the next reveal by now. Why might America think it was a good idea to permit and promote financial incentives for locking up a whole bunch of people?

More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners are black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita. Approximately five million people — including those on probation and parole — are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. […] “For private business,” write Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, “prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries.”

No-one ever went bust buying IBM and Microsoft. If you’re looking for the skeleton in an American political closet, it’s safe to bet on money and racism. And it gets worse: through proxy organisations such as ALEC, the prison-industrial complex gets to actually write laws which expand the incarcerated population when they need more labour:

The membership consists of state legislators, private corporation executives and criminal justice officials. More than one-third of state lawmakers in the country (2,400) belong and they are mostly Republicans and conservative Democrats. Several major corporations and corporate foundations contribute money to ALEC. Within ALEC there was until recently a “Criminal Justice Task Force.” Among the duties of this group was to write “model bills” on crime and punishment. Among such “model bills” they helped draft include “mandatory minimum sentences,” “Three Strikes” laws, “truth in sentencing” and the like.
                – Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice

My emphasis. Those first two ‘model’ bills are directly responsible for most of the incarceration epidemic. Mandatory Minimum sentencing legislation is the most effective and most explicit engine of institutional racism in the enforcement regime. And the most hideous part of this picture is that the entire scheme is paid for by the taxpayer. The private prison contracts per prisoner with the government, at a price which yields a profit. They get to keep that profit, and then make considerably more money selling forced labour they have been paid thousands of taxpayer dollars to exploit. This is corporate welfare wrung from the ragged lives of America’s poor.

US law enforcement arrest someone for marijuana possession every 42 seconds. In 2011, 1,531,251 arrests (approximately half of all criminal arrests) were for drug abuse violations: the vast majority will have been for cannabis possession. In the same year, those arrested (across all crimes) were 69.2% white, 28.4% black: but marijuana possession incarcerations tell a very different story. Incarceration rates for white pot smokers run at 195 per 100,00 population: for black stoners it’s 598 per 100,000. The prison-industrial complex is a machinery for instituting the forced labour of black Americans, mediated through the political cover offered by the War on Drugs.

[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]

Perverse Incentives III: Alcohol, Tobacco and FUD

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

This is not, in fact, an essay about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; they fit neatly into the Beltway enforcement establishment I described two posts back. This is a post about the two of those things which do not provide evening news headlines for ATF bosses to make political hay out of. Representing industrial drug-merchants like Phillip Morris and AB Inbev, Big Booze and Big Tobacco lobbies are significant contributors to the propaganda campaign that underpins the War on Drugs, and just like Big Pharma, they’ve got skin in the game.

Profit Motive

Big Tobacco, 1994

I mentioned before that as early as 1972, the US Government’s own experts were reporting that were cannabis legal, alcohol use rates would fall by up to 25%. As far as the Big Booze lobby is concerned, I could end the article here: a 25% drop in market value would make even Inbev wince. Big Tobacco has a more complicated problem with marijuana; more or less every lie they told about tobacco back in the day is true of cannabis. The tobacco lobby used to claim tobacco was good for you, which it isn’t: but cannabis has well-understood health benefits. The tobacco lobby used to claim tobacco didn’t give you cancer; cannabis is believed to inhibit cancer formation. Basically, Big Tobacco have been pushing the wrong drug all this time, and the world has rolled on far enough that they’re getting called on it. But simultaneously, Big Tobacco care less, and spend less, than the beer brewers: if cannabis were widely legalised, no industrial superpowers are better placed to move into that market than tobacco companies. They already operate a vast industry based around a semi-tropical crop; and marijuana is much easier and cheaper to grow, harvest and package than tobacco, which is notoriously prone to horticultural misadventure and is tricky to store. To the beer giants, the competitive threat posed by the specter of cannabis legalisation is more direct, and it has kept the big booze concerns reaching for their cheque-books, year after year for decades.

Them and Us

Remember the Iron Law of Prohibitions? It should have occurred to the astute reader by now that there are three glaring exceptions to the Puritan prohibitions on personal intoxicants. Caffeine, from its early prohibition by the Vatican to its ubiquitous nature in modern urban living, enjoys a huge industrial market which is in no way threatened by legal cannabis. Tobacco and alcohol are only still legal because, by the time the neo-Puritans got their hands on the levers of power in Washington, there was no longer a Them or an Us. Everyone of all classes and colours drank, and mostly they drank beer. A very high percentage of people of all classes enjoyed tobacco. The epic, and failed, experiment of Alcohol Prohibition provided an object lesson: the two main effects of the 18th Amendment were to create large-scale American organised crime, and to drive a nation of weak beer drinkers to become a nation of hard spirits drinkers.

Bootlegging beer involves moving very large volumes of very heavy liquid around quickly and quietly. Back then, you needed to move it in extremely recognisable vessels which were very difficult to hide. It was hard and expensive, so bootleggers stopped doing it. Whiskey provided a good deal more drunk for your dollar, and a much higher profit from each ton smuggled. Hard liquor was thus a better economic proposition for smugglers. An identical effect exists with cannabis; street prices are obscenely high compared to the prices for much more potent drugs, because cannabis is bulky and smelly. It’s the easy target for a glory-hunting customs officer.

Broadly speaking, Big Booze and Big Tobacco got to be legitimate, while producers of cannabis got to go to jail, because both alcohol and tobacco were in systemic use among European Protestants in the Early Modern era. Marijuana use didn’t become common among white European Protestants in the US until after its prohibition. With alcohol and cigarettes, Them were already Us before American culture turned to the revival tent. With cannabis they were not, which fact has been used by the white, European establishment in Washington to arrest eight hundred and fifty thousand non-violent, mostly coloured, citizens each year.

Lobbies of Misrule

In a post-Enlightenment society which takes pride in valuing reason, this established social order is patently absurd. It is simply irrational; it fails the basic test of internal consistency. Confronted by two naturally occurring plants, western Europe and her exported religious zealots in the New World institutionalised the consumption of the one that has minimal health benefits if any, tars your teeth black and gives you cancer. Those same people chose, over and again, to pursue with penalties harsher than those for murder or rape, innocent users of the other plant, which has considerable health benefits and is a lot more fun.

Bill Hicks had a famous spot comparing alcohol and cannabis: “If you’re at a ball-game and there’s a guy shouting and acting all aggressive, is that guy stoned? Or drunk?” Alcohol causes literally hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. It can be used responsibly, but it is very likely to significantly impair judgment in even quite small quantities. It heavily impairs physical capacity, and it is intensely chemically addictive. It gives you a nasty hangover. It is also very closely bound to a variety of social problems, starting from domestic violence. Alcohol is legendary for its ability to start fights, and is directly implicated in a very high percentage of common and aggravated assaults that go to trial. Set against which you have cannabis, which stops rather than starts fights, does not cause deaths (or criminality, or insanity, thank you Mr. Anslinger) and is at most habit-forming, rather than addictive. It does not give you a nasty hangover, does not impair rational faculties in the way alcohol does, and is implicated in precisely no systemic social failures. Marijuana is not a noted trigger for domestic abuse. I say this as a government-licensed alcohol vendor: that’s nuts!

Professor Nutt thought so too. He took real, empirical data and presented a viable, logically constructed regulation system for recreational drugs and presented it to the UK government. They sacked him.

[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]

Perverse Incentives II: Prozac™ Nation

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

The modern pharmaceutical industry has evolved entirely during the era of marijuana prohibition. When Anslinger declared war on weed, pharmaceutical chemistry and, most particularly, psychiatric chemistry were barely in gear. Prior to 1937, a significant percentage of remedies in the AMA register made medicinal use of cannabis, and yet by the 1970s the medical establishment had declared marijuana to have no medical uses, in order to classify it as a Schedule I narcotic. How did the majority of the US medical establishment reverse their view on a drug in just two generations? Here, again, we see the power of Hearst propaganda, but we also see another perverse incentive at work; there’s money to be made in banning cannabis.

The pharmaceutical lobby, which I shall follow Ben Goldacre and refer to as Big Pharma, came into existence during the era of designer drugs which emerged after the Second World War. Chemists were, with remarkable speed, finding new and interesting ways to mess about with biochemistry, and many of these inventions were quite genuine medical miracles. But along the way, a bizarre incentive arose; important US institutions make more money if people have to go to a doctor and buy a pill than if people don’t. Health being too good is a problem for Big Pharma.

A parallel problem is people having access to effective remedies no-one owns a patent on. And that’s the problem Big Pharma have with cannabis. We’re all accustomed to scientists debunking natural remedies; this is because a great many such ‘remedies’ are pure hokum, like homeopathy. Others, however, work; willow bark does treat headaches, and quinine did cure malaria. But for the accident of Anslinger, the things we now know and can prove about cannabis as a valuable self-medication for pain, depression, insomnia, and muscular spasmodic conditions would have become common knowledge in the 1950s. Cannabis is a natural remedy for a number of basic ailments which you can make at home, and if it were accepted as such a great many less people would be taking depression medication or popping paracetomol. And that means big money wants cannabis to remain prohibited.

Follow the Money

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America is a typical pressure group. They were the vehicle for much of Nancy Reagan’s moralizing: it was the PDFA which produced the infamous, risible fried-egg videos. They have a long and fact-free history of saying anything they can think of which will shut down dissent from the manufactured consensus that drugs are bad, mmkay? And right from the start, they’ve been funded by Big Pharma, receiving generous grants from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation: that is, from the personal philanthropic organ of chemical giant Johnson and Johnson.

This connection between the drug warriors and the industrial lobbies threads together each installment in this series. Every special interest which benefits from marijuana prohibition donates to the PDFA. Alongside any Big Pharma conglomerate which sells pain medication or anti-depression pills are a laundry list of the major alcohol producers, the Big Tobacco roster of habitual villains, and most recently the private prison operators. Prohibition remains federal law in the US because large and well-funded interest groups make very considerable amounts of money from it staying that way.

…the Partnership is not a genuine anti-drug effort, but a corporate/media back-patting consortium designed to scapegoat unpopular groups for illegal drug use while protecting the interests of legal-drug industries (who also purchase billions of dollars in media promotions)

For a group fighting drug abuse, the Partnership has taken cash from some odd parties—including American Brands (Jim Beam whiskey), Philip Morris (Marlboro and Virginia Slims cigarettes, Miller beer), Anheuser Busch (Budweiser, Michelob, Busch beer), R.J. Reynolds (Camel, Salem, Winston cigarettes), as well as pharmaceutical firms Bristol Meyers-Squibb, Merck & Company and Proctor & Gamble (Marin Institute Backgrounder, 2/97).

The Partnership recently announced it will quit its alcohol and tobacco habit but will continue to mainline pharmaceutical checks (Village Voice, 3/12/97). And its silence continues on America’s deadliest drug problems: tobacco (400,000 annual deaths), alcohol (100,000, including 20,000 from drunken driving), and pharmaceuticals (6,000 to 9,000).
                – FAIR.org

I’m going to talk about the medical uses of cannabis more extensively later in the series, at which point the financial interests of Big Pharma will rear their heads again. But some of the basics of this discussion are now very obvious. The evidence on cannabis as a cancer inhibitor, and as a treatment for MS sufferers and any other chronic pain condition, is not disputed. These are conditions in which patients must buy and take multiple, patented pills every day. If a significant percentage of those customers could grow their own or pick it up at cigarette prices from the local dispensary, Big Pharma loses an enormous amount of money. Even at the most basic level, cannabis is legendary for relieving stress and thus preventing the symptoms of stress; a heavily medicated, and thus very lucrative, public health problem which has arisen over the last thirty years. Cannabis stays banned in part because the pharmaceutical lobby don’t want the competition.

Legal cannabis is a threat to entrenched financial interests. It is a threat because it cannot be effectively controlled: seventy years and trillions of dollars have been wasted proving that. If Big Pharma can’t patent it, then they don’t want it around. But they like chemical abstractions such as Sativex, and by creating and promoting such patented products, Big Pharma drives a stake through the heart of the primary argument for maintaining cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance: that it has no recognised medicinal value.

The taboo on discussing cannabis prohibition has begun to crack because too much data is in the hands of too many people, and because for a long time now cannabis has violated the Iron Law of Prohibitions. The law lags behind society, and in so doing condemns thousands to unpleasant lives of violence and crime, because powerful men get rich from keeping it that way.

[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]

Perverse Incentives I: The Beltway Bandits

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
                – Upton Sinclair (probably)

Empire-Builders

The INCB is one of several institutions which labours effectively on behalf of Orwell’s War. They are a UN institution, but they are American in nature, mission, and largely in personnel. I include them with the Beltway Bandits (the DEA, ATF, and company) because they are products of the same US domestic politics, and were originally staffed by US domestic operatives. Their governing mission is inherently bureaucratic: self-perpetuation. As long as the Drug War remains official international policy, they get to sound important and say nice things about a sickening list of human rights abuses around the world: “Time and again, the INCB has simply turned a blind eye to international standards, human rights, science and even basic decency.”

Bureaucracies are organisms which eat budgets and seek to survive. No such organism can admit it is wrong easily, let alone admit that the entire rationale for its existence is misguided. The INCB are the international arm of a Beltway empire-building exercise which would have stunned even Nixon had he seen what it would become. I covered the origins of this Napoleonic enterprise when I spoke of Harry Anslinger, but it only starts with him. What mattered is the institutional legacy his personal ambition left behind him, and the way US governmental incentives created a self-feeding war machine. To cover the DEA and its associated support troops I’ll need to go back into Anglinger’s methods.

The Guy with the Dogs…

Imagine yourself in New Deal Washington in 1937. The members of the committee considering Anslinger’s law are Democrats, and have been fighting against reactionaries like the AMA for years. The nation is in the midst of a tectonic realignment of the relationship between government and citizen, and here in the middle of it is a bill no-one cares about proposed by a major federal figure over the opposition of almost no-one. The bird-seed guys have other options: done. The rope guys have other options: done. The AMA, who’ve opposed lots of New Deal legislation for bad reasons, have a substantive problem; but no-one on the committee gives two hoots what the AMA think any more. And Federal Bureau chief Harry Anslinger has testimony that ‘marijuana causes insanity, criminality and death’. Why does he think these things?

Well, he has this guy with the dogs. The guy (a pharmacologist at Temple University) testified to Congress and, I quote:

… claimed that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of those dogs had died. When asked by the Congressmen, and I quote, “Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?” The answer of the pharmacologist was, “I wouldn’t know, I am not a dog psychologist.”

The guy with the dogs constituted the whole of the evidence that marijuana should be prohibited. If he’d injected nicotine into the brains of three hundred dogs, a whole lot more than two would have died; why he or anyone else thought that his work was a useful clinical investigation of marijuana use in humans is simply too surreal to contemplate. Since cannabinols would not be isolated in the laboratory until the 1950s, he was also lying, and knew it. Such was the power of Hearst-backed propaganda, and a Beltway bandit with a big budget. And the guy with the dogs didn’t stop there.

… who turned into a bat.

At Anslinger’s national conference on marijuana in 1938, thirty-nine out of forty-seven delegates recused themselves on the grounds that they had no idea why they’d been invited in the first place. That left Harry Anslinger, the American Medical Association counsel, and the guy with the dogs. Of those two options it is no surprise that Anslinger appointed the guy with the dogs as the FBN’s official expert on marijuana. That led to him being called as an expert witness by defense lawyers in a murder trial who wanted to plead an insanity defense by virtue of marijuana causing insanity, criminality, and death. At that trial, the guy with the dogs passed from obliging falsehoods to outright fantasy in defense of Anslinger’s nascent Beltway empire:

he said, and I quote, “I’ve experimented with the dogs, I have written something about it and” — are you ready — “I have used the drug myself.” What do you ask him next? “Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?”

With all the press present at this flamboyant murder trial in Newark New Jersey, in 1938, the pharmacologist said, and I quote, in response to the question “When you used the drug, what happened?”, his exact response was: “After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat.” He wasn’t done yet. He testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well.

Well, friends, that sells a lot of papers.

On such shifting sands is the US war on weed founded.

Naked Emperors

The New Deal was a prime era for building federal fiefs. The grand example of the era is J. Edgar Hoover, but there were many others, and Harry Anslinger was one of them. The politics of bureaucracy is that budget is king. Elected officers have to worry about public opinion, voters, and interest groups which provide diverse incentives and accountabilities. The career bureaucrat is not so distracted; his job depends on the government not changing it’s mind.

Anslinger knew the game and he played it very well. Like the FBI and Al Capone, Anslinger needed a newsworthy enemy, so he allied with a newsman and invented one. As Hoover adroitly moved the FBI’s eternal war from the Mob in Chicago to Reds under the bed during the McCarthy era, so Anslinger shifted his ground from the guy with the dogs in the 1930s to the gateway drug argument in the 1950s. What mattered wasn’t the battles but the war: so long as the war kept going, the appropriations kept flowing.

The institutional culture thus established grew with the expansion of the enforcement industry and its consolidation into the DEA. Anslinger’s culture of ignorance regarding evidence, and dismissal of any need for rational justifications, metastasized with the agency into a grand scale federal enterprise with enormous budgets to protect and serve. That every aspect of their work is counter-productive and that the government’s own experts have been saying this since the 1970s cannot change the first law of bureaucracy: if you’re hired to wage a paper war, the last thing you can do is win. If you do that, everyone loses their job.

[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]

Daily Trawl

Bunch of things going past, of which I’m only including a few.

1. Run, run, run
The ECB have apparently decided that Cyprus needs a bank run. I don’t understand this, and neither, as far as I can tell, does anyone else. WonkBlog has a nice round-up.

2. Wars and Rumours of Wars
As we went past the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq a few people have been talking about it. Peter Beinart has a good piece putting a context to that war, but one which needs some examination. He recognises that Clinton first established regime change as a doctrine of US foreign policy without mentioning that it was the Project for a New American Century who wrote the language and applied the pressure when Clinton (this is ’98) had limited political capital to fight it. Signatories to the PNAC document include Wolfowitz and Rumsfeldt. Beinart correctly identifies US military hubris in the post-Soviet era, but does not cover the reason so many interventions worked well for the US in the ’90s; broad international support and UN legal cover, which the Iraq War did not have. And while he references 9/11, he doesn’t talk about what it really meant.

No-one had landed a punch on America since the war of 1812. For the first time in over a hundred and fifty years foreign warriors had killed a bunch of people in the lower forty-eight. Compare the reaction of the UK after the July bombings in London. There was a bit of authoritarian hysteria from Labour and some duff laws got through, but nothing like the Patriot Act. That difference is about experience. Living people in the UK remember the Blitz. Even people my age remember the IRA bombing mainland Britain. The US had for far too long suffered its only losses in far-away places, affecting mostly the children of the poor. America reacted to its real and unaccustomed pain by going berserk.

3. Meanwhile, back in the Sahara…
Bridges from Bamako has an excellent post on what the country needs, beyond the suppression of AQIM and a return to the generally strong political climate Mali has taken justified pride in for a long time.

4. Droning on.
Two interesting pieces about the shadow war. CiF has Glen Greenwald calling out Charles Krauthammer for talking total rubbish about the Constitution. And Princess Smartypants has a good piece about the actuality versus the rhetoric of the drone wars. I’m not entirely convinced by the argument that President Obama is being that subtle, but the underlying account seems to be solid and makes interesting reading.

5. Truth to Power.
Prospect have a very good (very long!) Sam Tanenhaus review of the works of Garry Wills. He’s a very interesting character in the US political drama, and stands out as a principled conservative writer in an era of culture warriors and snake-oil salesmen. He’s a Catholic who has taken on the Vatican and a US conservative who was very rude to George W. Bush. He’s one of those advocating that the GOP needs to recover its intellectual honesty and its sense of proportion: well worth a read.

Seth Masket is also talking about party re-alignments. I’m not as confident as he is that out-party effects will moderate the modern GOP. Three problems I see: firstly, they’re not out enough (they still control one house of Congress and can effectively hobble the other, as they proved while the 112th was in session). Secondly, they have an insulating narrative, false for a long time, which says that they hold the majority view in the country even if most of the actual people vote against them. This myth of silent conservative majorities, which has measurable legislative consequences, is pernicious and hard to shift when you operate in the Fox News echo-chamber.

Thirdly, the modern GOP has stopped operating as a normal political party. Jonathan Bernstein has written on it several times, but the short form is that informal party actors (e.g. talk radio) have incentives that conflict with GOP electoral success. Basically, talk radio and Fox affiliates make more money when the religious right and TEA-Party types have something to get really mad about. Nothing agitates that base like watching Democrats govern. Equally, John Stewart and his ilk have a financial incentive to see the GOP in power, serving up easy softballs to the satirists as the Bush regime did so reliably. But John Stewart’s incentives have zero effect on Democratic party operations, whereas Fox and friends could drive the GOP into oblivion if they’re not careful.

Predict a Riot

To anyone who lived in North London a year or so ago, this story looks eerily familiar. A gateway city, with a long history as a multi-cultural melting-pot. Check. Institutionalised poverty in ghettos deliberately created during the 70s and 80s. Check. A decade or so of zero-tolerance for crimes such as walking while black, using the mechanisms of anti-terror and anti-drug hysteria for political cover. Check. A largely white police force with a very long history of violence and abuse against the poor and the coloured. Check. And a dumbass white cop kills an unarmed black teenager, leading to days of mass rioting. Check.

Now, I could swear that when something like this happened in London, the global reaction was vindictive to say the least. The world had some fun at the expense of a British government who had mis-managed the economy and race relations in their capital so badly that actual riots were happening in the streets of a major metropolis. Scandalous! Now, the Americans, in particular, had a lot of fun talking about what they would do. Which is, apparently, invade:

The mysterious reference to a numbered military plan generated a flurry of interest on Twitter as NPR host Michele Norris shot back:”I want to know more about the military’s plan to suppress any potential ‘insurrection.’– CONPLAN 3501 and 3502????”

Interestingly, the CONPLAN (which stands for an “operation plan in concept format” at the Pentagon) Ambinder referenced is a popular subject among conspiracy theorists and critics of martial law. According to the public policy organization GlobalSecurity.org, CONPLAN 3502 is the U.S. military’s plan for assisting state and local authorities in the event of a riot or major civil disturbance: “Tasks performed by military forces may include joint patrolling with law enforcement officers; securing key buildings, memorials, intersections and bridges; and acting as a quick reaction force.”

Remember that Ambinder, who referenced the plan as a real government response, is employed as a spokesperson for a Democrat administration, the closest thing to liberals the US has on offer. Put this in context with the astonishing street violence unleashed on the unarmed heads of Occupy, and the wanton destruction of legal medical marijuana in California with backhoes and bailiffs.

Much was made out of how swiftly organised criminals moved under the cover of mass unrest caused by the death of an innocent boy in London. Cameron did over-react, partly because the Met has been itching for another good chance to break black heads en masse since Brixton in the 70s. But sending in the full might of the military with live rounds?

New York is now re-engaging with the unrest of the poor for the first time in really quite a while, and I’m not seeing the kind of sanctimonious bullshit in the US press that they spewed over London’s problems. Instead, we’re seeing fairly serious and realistic reporting, in quotes like this:

Dozens chanted “NYPD, KKK, how many kids did you kill today” and “No justice, no peace”as they marched west on Church Ave. toward the 67th Precinct stationhouse, on Snyder Ave. near Nostrand Ave.

But things quickly got out of hand as some protesters tried to climb on police motorcycles and tossed bottles. Men and women were pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground and handcuffed One officer smashed a teenage girl across her shins with a baton, toppling her to the ground.

How things change when it’s your guys doing it.

Friday Giant 3: … and Babbage.

Back in the mists of Internet pre-history, there was such a thing as a Sharp PC-500. Ever heard of bubble memory? If you’re any younger than me, you almost certainly haven’t. Be glad. That screen? 80 char x 8 ln can be a little weird to work on. A printer built into the back of a laptop? Actually, a great idea in principle but the resultant luggable was rather heavy and vulnerable to failures. But my first steps as an 8-year old proto-geek were taken using this computer, on which my father taught me how to first create a font for Tolkein’s Angerthas, and then do the necessary hackery to teach the computer how to use that font in WYSIWYG and print display. While doing so, he also told me about this Friday’s giant.

Child of one of the greatest celebrities of the day, a mathematical prodigy and a person of remarkable moral fibre and agile intellect, they have a programming language named for them, and are remembered as the genius who realised in mathematical language the potential a collaborator had recognised in Jacquard’s Loom. Their paradigm for symbolic general computing was, eventually, proved in practice to work as designed. But eventually was over a hundred and fifty years later, and the engine in question is remembered under the name of the man who thought he could build one (he couldn’t) rather than the woman who thought she could program one (who could).

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace.

Ada Lovelace would have been a truly extraordinary person in any era, and she happened to be born at a nexus point in European intellectual history. As Mary Wollestonecroft and George Eliot stand within the literary world, so Lovelace stands within the history of mathematics. The co-incidence of birth certainly affected her career, though. Had she not been the daughter of Lord Byron, she might have had more fun in life and would probably not have been driven by her mother into the sciences and mathematics as an armour against poetry. That accident of history led her to develop one of the most creative intellects England has ever seen.

Quoting from here:

In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.

Ada called herself “an Analyst (& Metaphysician),” and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for “developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.” Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.

I am just a year younger than Lovelace was when she died. In her short life she ignored or overcame so many restraints and obstacles to her pursuit of beautiful logic: but she is to this day a giant of the Enlightenment who is far too often overlooked. There are a great many interesting things that are entirely true about Ada Lovelace, but I would strongly suggest that the reader discovers them via the end-notes attached to each installment of this work of historical and comedic genius. 2D Goggles: Babbage and Lovelace (Fight Crime!), created by Sydney Padua and apparently far advanced from when I last checked it, is brilliant, funny, warped, beautifully drawn, historically accurate except when it isn’t, and annotated with all sorts of wonderfully interesting things and tempestuous people from the high age of Victorian engineering. The comic features, among other attractions: The Difference Engine! Queen Victoria! Steam Trains! A runaway Economic Model! Wellington’s horse! And Isambard Kingdom Brunel with an unfeasibly large cigar! Read it. You’ll laugh, frequently. You’ll know a great deal more about the real Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, and her pet buffoon Charles Babbage. And you’ll never again listen to any self-entitled basement bandit who tries to tell you girls don’t do math.

I have to say as a personal note that while Babbage needed a business manager more desperately than anyone else in history, and few people besides Lovelace would have had enough obsession with the Engines to see the project through the inevitable calamities, Lovelace had problems of her own which would have hampered the achievement of the steam-powered information age. To the ‘Byron Devil’ I believe we can give the name of ‘manic-depression’, and immediately after the Notes thing she turned her attention with personal urgency to the field of brain chemistry. I have to say, respect to Ada for recognizing it as a neurological problem; one, however, that she really needed to be born 150 years later to study.
                — Sydney Padua

Daily Trawl: money, party, pope and taboo

Yesterday was filled with many things that weren’t blogging, so a large link dump into which I’ll fold concise versions of the thinking I was doing about some items. Below the jump: macro, deficits, austerians, popes, racists, political parties and the terrible price of Anglo hypocrisy.

Daniel Hernandez Favero: innocent, beaten and left for dead by prohibition.

1. Money that matters.
David Andolfatto has a nice piece on who pays the costs to insulate Germany. VoxEU has a long and wonkish piece on global macroeconomics in an era without a hegemon. Krugman has some more austerian myths to bust, or rather the same zombie myths yet again. Ezra Klein has a good view on why deficits matter to politicians more than they actually matter. And Felix Salmon reviews Cameron vs. Wolf and concludes, along with most observers, that the UK Prime Minister is not only talking rubbish but knows it, and is scrambling for any smoke screens he can find.

2. Partisans.
Jonathan Bernstein writes about parties a good deal. This post is looking at incentives, how to measure and analyse what parties ‘want’, and the risks of doing so in an era of extremely strong informal party networks. This is more of a thing there than here, where a significant informal party actor (the Sun) has changed parties twice in the last twenty years. That’s equivalent in their system to Fox News becoming a Democrat attack-dog a few days before the inevitable Obama win.

3. The Dish of the Day.
Andrew Sullivan and his readers at the Dish have been engaged in some very interesting discussions, including one which started from TNC and Jamelle Bouie about the construction of racism among European whites. A number of good points come up, including one I referred to before: that the triangle trade was operated by Africans selling other Africans to Europeans. White people created a new scale of demand, but the enslavement of other Africans was an established institution in Africa long before we showed up. However, the interesting part is about the difference between medieval and modern racism.

Bouie is correct that medieval Europe cared a lot more about your religion than your skin colour. The infidel were inferior, regardless of which tribal fidelity you subscribed to. That is extremely important, because one can (and many did) change religion. The state of being less-than was by definition impermanent, a matter of choice, and thus not innate. There simply was no structured theory of race. Compare with contemporary theories of wealth and class (nobility). That was innate, was blood-bound, and was extremely difficult to change: it required a deliberate act by an annointed prince of God.

What changed when the vigorous doctrines of Calvin interbred with economic and military expediency in the New World to create the dogma of white supremacy is that we redefined the infidel as irredeemable. Early Modern Europe, in parallel with the Enlightenment, invented and institutionalised a theory of innate and irrevocable skin-colour hierarchy which simply didn’t exist in medieval Europe. Cui bono? The aristocrats of Tidewater and the Deep South.

And while we’re talking about medieval religions, we also have a new pope. Another very conservative one, this time with a documented personal history as a direct and active agent of fascism. That’s not an encouraging sign.

4. Liam Fox nails his trousers to the mast.
The title of Alex Massie’s Spectator column is “Liam Fox shows David Cameron how to lead the Tories to a historic defeat”. Choice quotes include:

[…] the kind of man, frankly, that helps explain why the Conservative party has not won a general election majority since 1992.

It’s not the actual toffs who are the problem; it’s the grasping and thrusting self-made Tories who sneer that the rest of the country could be just like them if only they were prepared to bloody work hard enough. This, of course, is meretricious twaddle. These are the Tories who make Mitt Romney look like a political genius.

Strivers vs shirkers? Give me a break

5. Harm reduction
And for anyone following the Prohibition story, here’s a few more people breaking the taboo. Intersectionality between the War on Drugs and the religious right’s War on Women, in the NYT. Scientific American are talking about routine screening programs, which have an alarming false positive rate for something that is now a fact of life for 45% of US workers. Josh Marshall of TPM has a very interesting look at how gay marriage, cannabis prohibition and small-c conservatism triangulated for him over the last few years. And then there’s this. If you want to understand the price paid by poor people of colour to mollify the petty prejudices and cheap moral indignation of aging Anglos, read this article and look at the pictures. Without prohibition, none of this happens.

Courtesy is Complicated

Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic is one of the best writers I read. He has a talent for illustration and a skill with presenting complex issues in effective plain language. His most recent piece is about the conflict between courtesy and entitlement; how to move in a world the considerate have to share with those who feel the right to trample. TNC grew up in West Baltimore, and as an articulate and passionate escapee from the crab bucket he writes with power about race politics in America. The self-entitled (or as he rightly calls them, assholes) are, in our culture, probably male. They may be wealthy and arrogant or poor and shameless. But they are very likely to be white.

My recent discussion with Kit Whitfield about the Four Horsemen of anti-theism included a wide-ranging consideration of courtesy on the internet, or it’s lack. I came up via Usenet, and have observed the ways in which a long-standing culture of differentiation between signal (conversations conducted courteously and within fairly well-understood standards of evidence and behaviour) and noise (idiots, AOL users and trolls) has broken down in the blogging era. The people in CiF and Daily Mail comment threads are often not brave enough to act entitled in real life, so they spew that aggression from behind their keyboards. In effect, the internet has given one category of assholes the opportunity to enjoy discourtesy without getting punched in the nose.

In a footnote, TNC hits a big nail squarely on the head:

Every once in a while we’ll be at a bar and someone (they are invariably white*) will stumble over drunkenly and decide that we should be engaged in conversation with them.

*I am pretty sure this is because of how violence influences black communities. There’s a whole choreography (especially among black men) around avoiding it. It’s fairly easy to see and broadcast. If you’ve been acculturated to people being shot/stabbed/beat up over minor shit, you tend to be a little more careful in your interactions. You never know who you’re talking to. And if you are black person of a certain age, you are intensely aware of that.

I was recently reading the Metro and read a US poplet I’d never heard of saying she liked British men; less chivalrous than their American counterparts but more interesting. My first thought was that this word probably doesn’t mean what she thinks it means. Chivalry involved a whole bunch of different things, but is commonly used today to refer to just one aspect; elaborate courtesy rituals governing the actions of men towards women and towards one another. Now, she’s right; there is a very strong culture of courtesy in some parts of the US. One reason Mal Reynolds of Firefly is so popular is that his character is an archetype of cowboy courtesy, a trope of the Appalachians and the Midwest that is one of the finest things in their cultural tradition.

What is often ignored about chivalry, and its concomitant elaborate courtesies, is that it was effectively a desperation move in a society tearing itself apart through systemic violence, to curb the more wasteful expressions of wrath and pride in its professional warrior caste. The same forces are at work in the ritualised respect and social order of Imperial China or Tokugawan Japan. Formality in society falls in proportion to the liklihood of lethal violence. Cowboy country in America is decades closer to genuinely endemic violence than most of the rest of the country, and retains the vestiges of that courtesy which keeps people alive.

The corner is a world of status conflict that would be entirely recognisable to a Despenser-era baron. Fight to gain (man up): fight to hold (represent); defend your name (keep your cred). And while the rituals are completely different in form and poetry, they are identical in function. I was often struck, while watching The Wire and Treme, by the skill with which David Simon wove motifs and sometimes images from Marlowe and Shakespeare and Dickens into his street tragedies, but it works because the social needs are so similar, and the kinds of men and women they produce. Mistress Quickly would recognise Khandi Alexander’s ghetto mom and over-worked barkeep as kindred spirits across time. Half of Dickens’ urchins can be seen reflected in man-child Antoine Baptiste, and Harry Hotspur would have well understood what drove Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell.

I don’t have an answer. I suspect Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t either. And althought they might think they do, the social conservatives don’t have an answer, nor do the libertarians. For an historian, the link between the strength of social courtesy conventions and the immanence of violence is unavoidable. How do we build a social order in which courtesy is sought for its power as a gift of respect, rather than its utility as an armour against the brutality of pride?

Daily Trawl

Morning coffee reading.

1. Politics

Gallup are worried.
One for the poli-sci geeks, Mark Blumenthal has a long and technical but very interesting HuffPo article about how and why America’s best known pollster called the 2012 election badly wrong, and what they’re trying to do about it.
Ideas vs. Ideologies.
Henry Farrell is at the Monkey Cage talking about political ideas and how we can study them. A key point is that there is a difference between ideas as they are had, as they are communicated, and as they are received, and that we need a better language for examining the results of those differences.
Lifetime and expectations.
Jared Bernstein examines some recent numbers on life expectancy for the poor and the rich, and discusses the impact that should have, but doesn’t, on the austerity debate.

2. Economics

Austerians again.
On CiF, Aditya Chakrabortty has a history lesson for Cameron and Osbourne. The basic point that the struggle to retain the gold standard, resulting in what today we would call austerity, directly contributed to WWII is familiar to anyone who has read any post-Keynesian macro or, frankly, any A-level student to studied the causes of WWII or the Great Dictators. The key point here, which is referenced but not explored much, is that when austerity measures have worked, it has always been in a specific context; one country exercising austerity while their economic environment in general was booming. Ireland 87-85 is a classic exmple. Austerity becomes dangerous when you try it during a global economic downturn of any scale. Oh wait…
Owned or Rented?
Mike Bryan and Nick Parker of the Atlanta Fed are talking about owner’s equivalent rent and its impact on CPI. This post is a bit wonkish, and it covers one reason why many homeowners don’t own what they think, but it leaves out a more politically sensitive angle. Unless you own your own home outright, you are still renting it; or more accurately you continue to rent the money you used to buy it with, from a mortgage lender. The active encouragement by policy incentives of rent-seeking (as opposed to productive) economic behaviour is a significant contributor to the rise of our new Gilded Age.

3. Science is…

Awesome!
Trees! Underwater off Alabama, from 50k years ago, which are sixty feet closer to the surface than they should be. Continents are interesting.
Intriguing!
Hannah Cheng has a series on the 52Hertz Whale; what we know, what people guess, and why finding stuff out about a place as big as the Pacific is very expensive.
And sometimes rather scary.
The Boston Globe talk to Admiral Lockyear about China, North Korea and climate change. The basic scenario that is worrying the Admiral is familiar to anyone who reads speculative fiction or hangs out with hippies, but this isn’t a climate geek or a Whole Earth customer; this is a guy who commands a very large budget, four hundred thousand personnel and a whole lot of boom.

Daily Trawl

Mostly macro today.

1. Robust debates.
There’s been a bit of a tussle of late, which started with Olli Rehn at the EU taking offence at people disagreeing with him. As one might expect, Prof. Krugman is in the middle of all this, and the action has moved to Jeffrey Sachs. DeLong and EconoSpeak have the latest installments. Krugman himself, meanwhile, has responded to a fairly epic straw-man attack by providing a clear statement of what he actually thinks, based on what the evidence actually is.

2. Austerians still at it.
The IMF have been disagreeing with Osborne again. Jonathan Portes catches David Cameron misrepresenting the IFS and and NIESR, as well as the OBR, making the recent speech quite the plum for active mendacity from the Prime Minister. Portes goes on to take apart Cameron’s view in detail. And Chris Dillow has a first-class look at the reasons we need, not a small stimulus, but actually a really large one, if unemployment is to come down enough to make a real difference to aggregate demand and social insurance spending.

3. Meta-points from Ezra Klein.
The world of freelance writing has had its own recent controversy, centred around The Atlantic and the economics of writing for exposure. WonkBlog has a first-class discussion of the impact of online content on journalism and issues writing, and goes straight to the source (as it were).

Us and Them IV: Tipping Point

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

Anyone who’s been reading along at home should now have some idea of how we got here, and why. Cannabis was criminalised by racist sentiment and lies on the floor of Congress. A twenty-year campaign of misinformation was waged in support of the petty ambitions of a Beltway Napoleon. Via the UN, in 1961, the USA strong-armed much of the world into a war they didn’t want. The relevant authorities have known since 1972 that cannabis is not dangerous and that the War on Drugs as a whole is miguided, and they have deliberately ignored all evidence to that effect. This pernicious attitude has proved durable and persistent. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed, tens of thousands have been murdered, and the bald economics of demand creates supply have carried on regardless. Vast criminal enterprises have been spawned by prohibition, and the costs to society of this ugly and vindictive conflict have been born, overwhelmingly, by the poor and by people of colour.

The alert reader will have noticed by now that I am writing a series investigating the geo-politics of the War on Drugs and yet I’m mostly talking about marijuana prohibition in the US. You’re right, but I’m not trying to indulge in rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the chronicle and socio-politics of US marijuana prohibition completely changed the way the non-medical use of drugs is perceived and discussed, let alone treated, in the post-Enlightenment West. From Anslinger’s ambition has grown the dominance of a moralistic doctrine on self-medication which prior to that point had not controlled a major polity since the Puritans banned Christmas [1] in the 1650s. The war on drugs (excepting only those which have a powerful, pre-established lobby, of course) starts with marijuana.

In general, my reasons for focussing on cannabis fall into three categories: polemics, politics and practicalities. Treating those in reverse order, practically speaking cannabis is the most vulnerable target in the prohibitionists’ defensive cordon. Its recreational and medicinal uses are widely-known and very easy to defend empirically. It’s been in human use as long as alcohol and possibly longer while doing much less harm [2]. It is substantially more widely used around the globe than heroin and cocaine. The prohibition on cannabis makes less sense than any other drug, and now that we can debate the issue honestly and in public, that makes it the low-hanging fruit we should pick first.

Politically, the process of releasing cannabis from the prison of Anslinger’s lies and starting an empirically-sound public debate is very considerably further on than any other drug. Between the Portuguese and Polish experiments, the ballot legalisations and medical marijuana laws on the books of half the US states, the forthcoming regulation regimes being planned or enacted in Latin and Central America, and the UN GCDP report, the battleground for common sense on cannabis is well-prepared. Even if you take the libertarian view that all drugs should be legal for personal use, defending heroin, crack cocaine or crystal meth is quite difficult; defending cannbis really isn’t.

The third reason is that the travesty of marijuana prohibition simply overwhelms that of any other drug but LSD. The legions of black young men sentenced to the brutality of the corner and the super-max, the hordes of murdered Mexicans, the beheadings in Saudi Arabia and floggings in Singapore, all for a plant which in most of these places grows locally and has a long history of use there. The creation of the INCB in 1961 was an American project, intended to draft the rest of the world into America’s domestic war on minorities, musicians and political dissenters. Cannabis has very considerable medical benefits, virtually no side-effects, and isn’t addictive. Its only social harms are 100% products of prohibition, not the drug: which is not true of any of the other popular recreational drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. Cannabis prohibition is senseless, counter-productive and systematically cruel, and it should end. And if that doesn’t count as polemic enough, maybe I should use more swear-words.

A majority of US citizens now oppose cannabis prohibition. A majority of British subjects do, as well. The tipping-point in public, popular support has now been reached. The ‘public’ part is important: all kinds of people have opposed prohibition for a long time, but now people feel free to say so. Something is changing, but there is resistance.

The next few essays in this series will examine the forces which maintain prohibition against all logic, common sense and popular pressure, under the title Perverse Incentives. I’ll then go on to look at some recent publications in the nascent debate, and investigate the arguments against the WoD, and look at some of the unlikely figures who support cannabis legalisation. That final part of this series will be under the title Orwell’s War.

[1] Yes, I know that’s not quite precise, but it’s a good catch-all. They did ban drinking, dancing, the lighting of bonfires on holy days, the decoration of the house for Christmas or May Day, May Day parades and many other things.

[2] Read ‘none at all’.

[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]

Back to the Cavalry

Kit Whitfield made an excellent comment on my post about the anti-theist cavalry of the humanist apocalypse. My reply turned out to be some 1300 words long, which is a post not a comment, so I moved it here. It’s still quite long, so here’s a link to the TL;DR paragraph.

In summary, Kit made the point that anti-theist zealots are overwhelmingly white, male, Western and wealthy, and that this makes their frequent internet claims of victimhood somewhat suspicious. It’s worth reading the context, but that’s the broad thrust of it. She also cited this very good article by Natalie Reed, which discussed in passing the problematic nature of people who have such a powerful megaphone choosing to focus on one problem which, by comparison with many other social justice issues, simply isn’t that important except as a method of keeping the spotlight on the concerns of rich white men.

I then started a comment saying: I’m not in a position to address Kit’s main points directly. Firstly, I’m not really on any side here; I may be an atheist (though it’s hard to tell), I subscribe to a religion, and I have the privilege of being white and male. Secondly, Kit makes pretty good points: e.g. the one about theological ignorance, which is covered in the Appleyard article. He specifically pans Grayling for using false equivalence to protect the anti-theists from the charge of writing in a field they don’t understand. The logic being that if theism is a childish delusion like believing in Care Bears or biting chameleons, there is no need to engage with it on its own terms at all.

Where I disagree is with the implication that to the Horsemen specifically, rather than internet anti-theists generally, this is an insidious and ugly type of victim-claiming. Natalie Reed refers to it as one out of many civil rights issues: it is a civil rights issue, in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia, in Texas or Alabama or Louisiana, in Turkey or Egypt. But that’s not the war the anti-theist cavalry want, or the one they are waging. They only seem to care about that kind of civil rights when the misfortunes of poor, female or coloured people around the world provide cheap-shot ammunition for a CNN sound-bite.

Aggressive anti-theisism is, as both Kit and Natalie Reed observe, overwhelmingly white, European / Western, male, wealthy, and very highly educated. The academe, in English at least, treats ‘theology’ as the study, not of gods, or of the concept of deity, but of “our” God specifically. The Horsemen are on a revenge trip. Whatever they may think, claim and fulminate about, they’re not fighting against religion, or even the concept of deity. They’re fighting the Christian God, YHWH, who is also the Jewish God and the Muslim God. They’re battling his egregious servants in the Vatican and the Madrassas; they’re attacking the US televangelist snake-oil shills. They perceive European history as having been dominated by atrocity, oppression and torture solely because of the dominance of organised Christianity, and they’re wrong.

Christianity is only responsible for some of the atrocities, not all of them; one might argue for ‘most’, but I wouldn’t. The Horsemen are anti-theists, in my reading, with three main motivations:

1. They are genuinely appalled at the way the JCI religious behemoth permits spectacular abuses against human decency, and actively encourages those abuses wherever possible for the benefit of the clerical establishment. Think the Blood Libel of Norwich, or the paedophile priests scandal today, or the systmatic rapes of Egyptian women who protested in Tarir Square, or the stoning of nine-year old girls in Israel by men with curly sideburns. The Horsemen perceive themselves, by virtue of being white men, as inheritors of a legacy of horror and shame that is even greater (by its historical breadth and scale) than the shame of slavery in the US. Like US abolitionists and their descendents, they see fighting back as a moral duty, but along the way they conflate the monotheistic triad with all religion. Which is, to be frank, fucking stupid. Daoism, Zen, and Lakotah Nation religions bear no resemblence at all, theologically or historically, to the JCI triad. Virtually no other religions in the recorded history of the concept resemble the religions of the Book as a class. They are genuinely different, which is one reason they became so dominant.

2. The Horsemen have been educated in an academic establishment in which for a very high percentage of elite actors, intelligence == atheism. Cf. the Grayling book, the god delusion (or as some might call it, the god experience) is a pure superstition, or an actual deliberate fraud, depending on whether you’re looking at the laity or the priests. As academicians and journalists, they therefore perceive a duty to educate. The logical error is in conflating spiritual experience with organised religion. Neal Stephenson discussed this in Snow Crash; the fact that in time, smart people notice that 90% of what happens in the modern Christian Church is bullshit, means a lot of Western smart people are atheists. It doesn’t mean that the other 10% is bullshit, or that the only possible response to being smart is to be non-spiritual.

3. They genuinely, as far as I can tell, believe that virtually every human evil, from the oppression of women to global poverty to nuclear warfare to AIDS in Africa, would disappear tomorrow if no-one in the world was stupid enough to be religious. And irritatingly, there’s kernels of truth in that; a great deal of oppression of women is directly enforced by the JCI religions. AIDS in Africa is a massively greater problem than it would have been without Dubya’s attempt at Christian moralism. Pharaonic levels of wealth inequality are permitted, excused and actively enhanced by government policy because Christian puritans developed a moralistic attitude to wealth as God’s reward for virtue, and those Christian elites enjoy punishing the ‘undeserving’ poor. Nuclear warfare remains a major threat in large part because a hefty percentage of America and many other lunatics around the globe really believe that someone pressing the button would result in a good outcome for them personally: and they believe this because of their apocalyptic interpretations of Christianity and Islam.

The Horsemen are also blatantly wrong, in that if you took away organised JCI religion people would still find excuses to be assholes to each other.

The Horsemen view the struggle against organised religion, by which they largely if not exclusively mean Christianity and Islam, as one of the most significant battles around. They think (for good reasons, even if they’re in part wrong) that ending organised religion is how you fix more or less all of the other problems of mankind. They see the removal of the pernicious influence of YHWH (and, as collateral damage, all other spiritual paradigms) as a magic bullet. There are no magic bullets, anyone with a bare grasp of history should know that. To me, that kind of wishful thinking, with no empirical grounding at all, is much less intellectually rigorous than recognising that humans experience gnosis and that they need a language to engage with it.

Hopefully it is by now clear that I neither agree with the Horsemen, nor am I defending them as correct. They’re not; though I am prepared to admit that I would have much less problem with them if they were prepared to confine their indictments to the guilty parties. Specific religions have perpetrated two thousand years of savagery, colonialism, torture, child abuse, oppression and cruelty, but I would argue the Horsemen are unwise to extrapolate from that truth the case that all spiritual experience is fraudulent and evil.

Natalie Reed’s description of internet anti-theism is, I think, largely accurate. As such, it bears a remarkable resemblence to internet racism from the EDL, internet misogyny from UniLad, and GOP assaults on reproductive freedom from the hysterical religious right. But I strongly disagree that the Horsemen themselves are fighting out of an attempt to acquire victim status. They’re fighting because, misguided or not, they are at heart Manicheans; they genuinely seem to believe that the entity Jews, Christians and Muslims worship as ‘God’ is the root of all evil.

Daily Trawl

Mostly economics today, though some of it is also about the interent.

1. Noah Smith on Shinzo Abe.
Noahpinion present a summary report card on the Abenomics ‘revolution’ in Japan.

2. Understanding Society: Detroit edition
US cities have a habit of being autophagic; strong, thriving metropoli which get into self-amplifying feedback loops of white flight, educational failure, corruption and despair. Given that systemic racism and deliberate policies of white flight and ghettoization predate the death of the auto industry by some 40 years, one might suspect that what really broke Detroit was WASP paranoia and segregationist sentiment, not economics or gobal competition.

3. Slap Cameron week
EconoSpeak gets in on the fun of pointing out that the UK Prime Minister is either a) incompetent or b) dishonest, and has painted himself into such a corner that his own Office of Budget Responsibility had to publicly call him out for lying about their findings.

4. Values issue
The Economist are having an essay forum looking at how one can study and assess the consumer surplus generated by the internet, or in more normal language, what is it actualy worth?

Us and Them III: After Anslinger

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

When Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, Anslinger had been gone from the FBN for nearly ten years, but his legacy was alive and well. The Iron Law still held, though by that time the category of Them had been broadened to include anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, hippies, teenagers and anyone else who troubled right-wing America. One of Nixon’s first acts in prosecuting his new war was to recruit the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Typical of Nixon, he did the thing Anslinger had always had the sense not to do; he got some guys together who knew some stuff and instructed them to look at the evidence and tell him what it said. The result rather surprised him.

The use of drugs is not in itself an irresponsible act. Medical and scientific uses serve important individual and social needs and are often essential to our physical and mental well-being. Further, the use of drugs for pleasure or other non-medical purposes is not inherently irresponsible.

A variety of other key findings from the report confounded the orthodoxy Anslinger had invented. Marijuana is not dangerous, and its use is very rarely debilitating. Marijuana is not addictive, but can be habit-forming. If marijuana were legal and regulated, alcohol addiction and its associated social traumas could fall by as much as 25% [1]. Marijuana prohibition might not withstand honest Constitutional scrutiny. The report concluded that:

[Anslinger’s] policy grew out of a distorted and greatly exaggerated concept of the drug’s ordinary effects upon the individual and the society. On the basis of information then available, marihuana was not adequately distinguished from other problem drugs and was assumed to be as harmful as the others.

The increased incidence of use, intensive scientific reevaluation, and the spread of use to the middle and upper socioeconomic groups have brought about the informal adoption of a modified social policy. On the basis of our opinion surveys and our empirical studies of law enforcement behavior, we are convinced that officialdom and the public are no longer as punitive toward marihuana use as they once were.

[…]

Law enforcement policy, both at the Federal and State levels, implicitly recognizes that elimination is impossible at this time. The active attempt to suppress all marihuana use has been replaced by an effort to keep it within reasonable bounds. Yet because this policy still reflects a view that marihuana smoking is itself destructive enough to justify punitive action against the user, we believe it is an inappropriate social response.

Let that one fester a while. The US government has known since year one of the War on Drugs that the whole shooting match is a waste of time.

What If Nobody Came?

As it turns out, Nixon had a lot on his mind in 1972, and pretty much continued to be distracted all the way through the Watergate scandal. He did find time to reorganise Federal jurisdiction, folding various smaller agencies into the FBN and renaming the result the DEA. When Ford arrived he had pre-occupations of his own, and no better idea what to do with the NCMDA report than Nixon had, so he stuck it in a drawer and ignored it. The newly-minted war rambled on ineffectively through the ’70s.

Finally a Democrat got into the White House. By 1978 a number of states had passed laws decriminalising, legalising, or establishing medical uses for cannabis. Carter supported the push towards liberalising Federal laws, and that turned out to be a tragic decision. The Carter Presidency was one of the worst ever, incompetent, ineffective and woefully unpopular. His association with drug liberalisation ended serious attempts by the Democratic party to engage with the issue at all for twenty years. His disastrous term led to the resurgence of the right and Nancy Reagan’s escalation of the War on Drugs.

The First Lady’s flagship campaigns, Just Say No and D.A.R.E., are matched only by ‘Stranger Danger’ in the annals of spectacularly effective and equally misguided public information campaigns. The zero tolerance policies that accompanied them cemented for another two decades the popular canards that cannabis was a gateway drug, which it isn’t, and that it fries your brain, which it doesn’t. Like the Hearst campaigns for Harry Anslinger, the Reagans’ approach to cannabis was pure FUD, but they were clever enough to treat the fear and uncertainty as givens. That allowed them to concentrate on socially legitimizing and sponsoring the doubt [2]. The campaigns didn’t work (in that usage didn’t decrease below long-term trends), but they did effectively end any chance at a balanced public discourse for an entire generation. In the early ’90s the culture wars were re-ignited by the zealots of the Gingrich Revolution, and the stage was set for the grotesque geo-political disaster that attended America’s confrontation with the Colombian cartels and all of the sequels we have lived through since.

Marking Time

But, as the NCMDA predicted in 1972, marijuana wasn’t going anywhere. Quietly, steadily, privately, during the two decades since 1990, the world has changed under the prohibitionists feet. One of the most significant factors in that steady and progressive change in public opinion was the advent of the Internet. Above all else, and from its earliest days, the effect of the Internet has been to put hard information, previously accessible only by elites, into the hands of the commons. For the first time, thousands of young people raised in a culture of inquiry had access to actual data about cannabis, and what they found was that their parents and grand-parents had been lying to them.

The last few years have seen by far the most significant progress since the late 1970s. Eighteen US states have legalised medical marijuana, and another five are likely to join them during this electoral term. A hundred and forty-nine dignitaries concluded on behalf of the United Nations that the War on Drugs is a failure and should be replaced by rational policy. Sitting Heads of State in three Latin American countries, Switzerland, Portugal and Poland have called for or enacted decriminalisation policies. Two US States have legalised recreational use of cannabis. And at last, Hearst’s dead hand has lifted from the muzzles of the media, and we’re just begining to see an informed and rational public debate about the issue.

We’re still caught in the trap of Us and Them, but the law is lagging behind society. They have become Us, and the Iron Law says that presages the end of prohibition. I’ll leave you with this glorious passage from the conclusion of the NCMDA report:

This nation tries very had to instill in its children independence, curiosity and a healthy self-assurance. These qualities guarantee a dynamic, progressive society. Where drugs are concerned, however, we have relied generally on authoritarianism and on obedience. Drug education has generally been characterized by overemphasis of scare tactics. Some segments of the population have been reluctant to inform for fear of arousing curiosity in young minds. Where drugs are concerned, young people are simply supposed to nod and obey. […] The Commission feels that the criminalization of possession of marihuana for personal use is socially self-defeating.

[1] This is a finding which has been reproduced recently, in work by Professor Nutt at Imperial College, London.
[2] I possibly need to unpack that a bit. Remember the infamous commercial? “This is your brain…” As Bill Hicks points out, that’s FUD. There is no data here, no information; no content, in fact, at all. It’s just fear, uncertainty and doubt. Compare and contrast with public awareness campaigns about actual dangerous things: the Green Cross Code, AIDS in the late 80s in the UK, or the unpleasant images on cigatette packets today. The Reagan-era campaigns were very, very clever in simply assuming marijuana was damaging. They presented no arguments which could be disputed or disproved, or even engaged with. They used very powerful, very simple imagery and then painted doubt (Dare to be different…) as a social good. This is enormously clever because it disguises something false (cannabis is bad) behind something true (thinking for yourself is good). Never mind that any kid who D.A.R.E.’d to be different was actually letting Nancy Reagan think for them.

[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]

Trawling On

Another gap in keyboard-time, so here’s what stuck out:

1. Science is awesome
The Guardian have a useful column debunking some common folk psychology. Also Scientific American have a good article on temperature trends. The article does a good job of highlighting that it’s not the absolute numbers which are so unusual about recent warming trends, but the speed; last time we warmed up that far, it took over three thousand years to happen. This time it took less than a hundred.

2. Economics is hard sums (for Dave and George, anyway)
Simon Wren-Lewis breaks down Cameron’s speech on the economy and points out that it’s fatally flawed, assuming it’s not deliberately mendacious. Stephanie Flanders notes that Cameron’s loose approach to the facts earned him a public slap-down from the OBR for misrepresenting them. That’s really very unusual indeed, as Wren-Lewis discusses in his follow-up post.

3. TNC on fine form in the NYT.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the best writers around on several topics. He’s particularly good at issues like this one. He cobmines the lived experience of the West Baltimore streets during the Crack Wars with a sharp analytical mind, an extensive self-education and a real touch for beautiful prose. He follows up the Times article with a further discussion in his regular Atlantic berth.