Fact-checking Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey
I appeared on the CNN program Lou Dobbs Tonight last Thursday (Oct. 22) to discuss the medical marijuana issue and the drug war in general. There were two other guests: Peter Moskos from John Jay College and the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and Barry McCaffrey, retired General of the U.S. Army and former “Drug Czar” under President Bill Clinton.
I was really astonished by the doubletalk coming from McCaffrey. Watch the clip below and then I’ll explain two of the worst examples so you can come to your own conclusions about this guy.
Doubletalk: Example One:
Tim Lynch: “Some states have changed their marijuana laws to allow patients who are suffering from cancer and AIDS–people who want to use marijuana for medical reasons–they’re exempt from the law. But there’s a clash between the laws of the state governments and the federal government. The federal government has come in and said, ‘We’re going to threaten people with federal prosecution, bring them into federal court.’ And what the [new memo from the Obama Justice Department] does this week is change federal policy. Basically, Attorney General Eric Holder is saying, ‘Look, for people, genuine patients–people suffering from cancer, people suffering from AIDS–these people are now off limits to federal prosecutors.’ It’s a very small step in the direction of reform.”
Now comes Barry McCaffrey: “There is zero truth to the fact that the Drug Enforcement Administration or any other federal law enforcement ever threatened care-givers or individual patients. That’s fantasy!”
Zero truth? Fantasy? This report from USA Today tells the story of several patients who were harassed and threatened by federal agents. Excerpt: ”In August 2002, federal agents seized six plants from [Diane] Monson’s home and destroyed them.”
This report from the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of Bryan Epis and Ed Rosenthal. Both men, in separate incidents, were raided, arrested, and prosecuted by federal officials. The feds called them “drug dealers.” When the cases came to trial, both men were eager to inform their juries about the actual circumstances surrounding their cases–but they were not allowed to convey those circumstances to jurors. Federal prosecutors insisted that information concerning the medical aspect of marijuana was “irrelevant.” Both men were convicted and jailed.
This report from the New York Times tells readers about the death of Peter McWilliams. The feds said he was a “drug dealer.” McWilliams also wanted to tell his story to a jury, but pled guilty when the judge told him he would not be allowed to inform the jury of his medical condition. Excerpt: “At his death, Mr. McWilliams was waiting to be sentenced in federal court after being convicted of having conspired to possess, manufacture and sell marijuana…. They pleaded guilty to the charge last year after United States District Judge George H. King ruled that they could not use California’s medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, as a defense, or even tell the jury of the initiative’s existence and their own medical conditions.” The late William F. Buckley wrote about McWilliams’ case here.
Imagine what Diane Monson, Bryan Epis, Ed Rosenthal, and Peter McWilliams (and others) would have thought had they seen a former top official claim that federal officials never threatened patients or caregivers?!
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
‘Reefer Sanity’
Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post:
Arguments for and against decriminalization of some or all drugs are familiar by now. Distilled to the basics, the drug war has empowered criminals while criminalizing otherwise law-abiding citizens and wasted billions that could have been better spent on education and rehabilitation.
By ever-greater numbers, Americans support decriminalizing at least marijuana, which millions admit to having used, including a couple of presidents and a Supreme Court justice. A recent Gallup poll found that 44 percent of Americans favor legalization for any purpose, not just medical, up from 31 percent in 2000.
Read the whole thing. For more Cato work, go here.
Monday Links
- Under new policy guidelines from the Obama administration, federal drug agents won’t pursue medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they follow state laws. Cato scholars have long called for drug policy reform, and have examined other drug decriminalization program that have shown tangible, positive results.
- Ignored by the media: Antarctic ice melt lowest ever measured.
- Obama visiting China in November to discuss expanding military agreements. Here’s what’s at stake.
- Video: Why American health care kills.
- Podcast: “Coerced into Medicare“
Drug War Insanity Goes Up in Smoke
As my colleague David Rittgers notes below, the announcement by the Department of Justice that it will no longer seek to arrest medical marijuana users is a breakthrough for common sense in federal drug policy.
It is bizarre that it takes a major policy announcement to spell out what a waste of police and court time it is to investigate the ill people who use medical marijuana. Historians will surely look back on this period and ponder how our government could have seriously embraced the opposite policy, in the same way we look back at the strange days of alcohol prohibition.
The Obama administration should be taking much bolder steps to stop the criminalization of drug use more generally. More and more people have come to recognize that the drug war has been given a fair chance to work, but it has proved to be a grand failure.
Why Is Marijuana Still Illegal?
According to Rasmussen Reports, a majority of Americans believe that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana:
Pot or not, that is the question.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.
But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.
Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.
Fifty-three percent (53%) of women say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, compared to 48% of men. Men by a two-to-one margin over women say pot is riskier, but women are more inclined to say both are dangerous.
Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.
So why are pot users still being tossed into jail?
There are lots of good reasons why people shouldn’t use drugs. But making drug use illegal only compounds the social consequences, turning a moral and health problem into a legal and criminal problem. The result is the worst of both worlds: all of the problems of drug use plus all of the problems of prohibition. Unfortunately, those consequences flow overseas, further undermining fragile societies such as Afghanistan, Colombia, and Mexico and ultimately American security objectives as well.
It’s time to call off the Drug War.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Argentina Decriminalizes Personal Drug Consumption
Following in Mexico’s footsteps last week, the Supreme Court of Argentina has unanimously ruled today on decriminalizing the possession of drugs for personal consumption.
For those who might be concerned with the idea of an “activist judiciary,” the Court’s decision was based on a case brought by a 19 year-old who was arrested in the street for possession of two grams of marijuana. He was convicted and sentenced to a month and a half in prison, but challenged the constitutionality of the drug law based on Article 19 of the Argentine Constitution:
The private actions of men which in no way offend public order or morality, nor injure a third party, are only reserved to God and are exempted from the authority of judges. No inhabitant of the Nation shall be obliged to perform what the law does not demand nor deprived of what it does not prohibit.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled that personal drug consumption is covered by that privacy clause stipulated in Article 19 of the Constitution since it doesn’t affect third parties. Questions still remain, though, on the extent of the ruling. However, the government of President Cristina Fernández has fully endorsed the Court’s decision and has vowed to promptly submit a bill to Congress that would define the details of the decriminalization policies.
According to some reports, Brazil and Ecuador are considering similar steps. They would be wise to follow suit.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties
Tax Marijuana to Pay for Teachers?
On my way into work this morning, I heard a report on the radio about a proposal in California to tax marijuana in order to alleviate the state’s budget meltdown. With the money the state could raise, said one supporter, California “could hire 20,000 teachers.”
Now, I have nothing insightful to say about the likely revenue or anything along those lines that would come from taxation of wacky tabacky – it’s not my issue. I can tell you, though, that the addiction that has largely brought California to its knees, ironically, is the very one that the would-be weed taxer in the story held up as a terrific target for resulting funds: state education spending, especially on teachers.
For starters, by law at least 40 percent of California’s budget must be spent on education, and considering that most education spending goes to employee salaries, by default that makes teachers one of the biggest drains on state coffers. But that’s just by default – as the quote above suggests, teachers themselves seem to have a powerful grip on the state and the minds of its people.
One bunch of teachers that almost literally has a kung-fu grip on the minds – or is it the throats? – of Californians is the California Teachers Association, a 340,000-member behemoth of a teacher union, which really says something when you consider that teachers unions are themselves the behemoths of labor unions. Little gets done affecting education without the CTA’s approval.
Then there is class-size reduction. Despite dubious evidence of the value of class-size reduction, in the mid-1990s – when the state felt flush with cash – California undertook a massive effort to bring K-3 class sizes down from an average of 29 students, to an average of 20. The undertaking required a leap from 62,226 K-3 teachers in the 1995-96 school year to 91,902 in 1998-99. According to the 2002 “capstone” report from the CSR Research Consortium, it was an expensive effort that produced at best minor improvements. Despite costing a billion dollars or more each year of implementation, researchers could find “only limited evidence linking [test score] gains to CSR.”
To be fair to the beleaguered Golden State, it’s not the only place where politicians, and often the public, seem to be constantly jonesing for more teachers and education spending. As I have laid out before, nationwide we have gone from 22.3 pupils per teacher in 1970 to 15.7 in 2005, and real per-pupil expenditures have more than doubled. Meanwhile, academic outcomes have been pretty much flat.
What explains this slavish addiction? It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems to come down to this: people feel that education is important; that the more teachers we have, the better; and that you can never spend too much on the children. But it clearly isn’t that simple. Government failure is very, very real – especially with a government monopoly as monstrous as public schooling – and sooner or later you have to pay the price for constantly doing the same crippling thing just to make yourself feel good.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
End War–At Least the Drug War
War is an awful thing. Yet, to show they are serious, politicians constantly use the “war” analogy. A “war on poverty.” An “energy war.” The “drug war.”
Yet militarizing these and other issues is precisely the wrong way to deal with them. So it is with the drug war, which has come most to resemble a real war. Indeed, more Mexicans have been dying in their “drug war” than Americans have been dying in Iraq.
It’s time to call a truce. Writes Sherwood Ross:
Gil Kerlikowske, Obama’s new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has renounced even the use of the phrase “War on Drugs” on grounds it favors incarceration of offenders rather than treatment. But talk is no substitute for action.
To his credit, Obama has long appeared to be open to a fresh approach. In an address at Howard University on Sept. 28, 2007, then Sen. Obama said, “I think it’s time we took a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first time nonviolent drug users for decades.”
“We will give first-time, non-violent drug offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior,” he added. “So let’s reform this system. Let’s do what’s smart. Let’s do what’s just.”
And as prison overcrowding worsens and governors currently whine they can’t balance budgets, the public might get some real relief.Last year, more than 700,000 of the country’s 20-million pot smokers were arrested for marijuana possession, according to NORML, an advocacy lobby that works for decriminalization. Over the past decade, 5-million folks got arrested on marijuana charges, 90% of which were for “simple possession, not trafficking or sale,” NORML says.
“Regardless of whether one is a ‘drug warrior’ or a ‘drug legalizer,” writes Bob Barr in the May 25 Atlanta Journal Constitution, “it is difficult if not impossible to defend the 38-year old war on drugs as a success.”
Drug abuse is a serious social problem. But so is alcoholism. And many other social (mis)behaviors. We should start treating it as a social, health, and moral problem, not as a matter for the criminal law.
President Obama: End this war!
Former President Fox: “Legalize Drugs”
Mexico’s former President, Vicente Fox, joins the growing chorus of Latin American ex-presidents calling for an end on the war on drugs. He’s proposing an open debate on drug legalization.
It’s a shame, though, that these leaders wait until they are out of office to voice their opposition to Washington’s prohibitionist drug strategy. While it’s true, as Fox points out, that any step towards legalization in the region must be supported by the United States, Latin American presidents skeptical of the status quo could use the pulpits at the United Nations, Organization of American States, or the Summits of the Americas to denounce the war on drugs and call for different approaches.
Still, Fox’s opinion on the matter is welcome.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties
Drop the Soda, or Else!
Government is busy trying to protect us from ourselves. It tosses nearly a million people in jail every year for marijuana offenses. City councils, state legislators, and Congress all add ever more restrictions on cigarette smoking. Legislators demand action to stop steroid use by athletes. And the Senate Finance Committee is considering a “fat tax” on sugared drinks.
This isn’t the first time legislators have considered trying to squeeze a little money out of us while micro-managing our lives. Editorializes the Boston Herald:
Earlier this year Gov. Deval Patrick proposed a 5 percent tax (more if the sales tax is raised) on sweetened drinks and candy bars under the pretext of battling obesity (while thinning out our wallets). Happily we haven’t heard much about it lately. But yesterday on Capitol Hill the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony about helping to fund President Barack Obama’s massive health care expansion in part with a similar tax.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 3-cent tax per 12-ounce sweetened drink – including sports drinks and iced teas – would bring in $24 billion over four years.
“Soda is one of the most harmful products in the food supply,” said Michael Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which gives you some idea of the mindset here. Jacobson would also like to raise taxes on alcoholic beverages.
If the American people don’t start saying no, there won’t be much liberty left to preserve.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy
Time to End the War on Drugs
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for a large-scale study on the question of whether to legalize marijuana. Arnold wants the study to include international comparisons to show the possible impact of such a change. Cato just released such a study concerning Portugal.
Our friends at NORML are running ads like this in some markets.
Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum takes a look at national Zogby poll numbers, which shows that a majority of voters support marijuana legalization.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here
- The new edition of Regulation examines the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the legal drinking age and climate change policies.
- In The Week, Will Wilkinson argues that the Obama administration should rethink its drug policy and that prominent marijuana users should “come out of the closet.”
- Gene Healy points out in the Washington Examiner why the Serve America Act (SAA) is no friend to freedom.
- The Cato Weekly Video features Rep. Paul Ryan discussing the Obama administration’s budget.
- In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Patri Friedman discusses seasteading and the prospects for liberty on the high seas.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
Who’s Blogging about Cato
On April 3, Cato hosted a special blogger briefing with Glenn Greenwald, who was here to speak about his new paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.
Here are a few highlights from bloggers who wrote about it:
- Dan Bernath from the Marijuana Policy Project
- Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org
- Jesse Singal, associate editor of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress
Also, a few links to bloggers who are writing about Cato:
- Citing new research that shows that the DC school choice pilot program was highly successful, Betsy Newmark linked to Andrew J. Coulson’s commentary on the study results.
- Ilya Somin discussed Patri Friedman’s new essay at Cato Unbound about the Seasteading Institute and the history of libertarian activism.
- Blogger Connie Carr wrote about William Niskanen’s essay in the new Cato Policy Report, “How to turn a Recession into a Depression.”
If you are blogging about Cato, let us know by emailing cmoody@cato.org or catch us on Twitter @catoinstitute.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Law and Civil Liberties
Former Prosecutor, Judge Calls for Drug Legalization
Many of those most involved in the drug war both at home and abroad recognize that it is an expensive failure, having had little impact of drug consumption while fostering crime and undermining civil liberties. In fact, many former cops, prosecutors, and judges have joined together in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
A former Orange County, California prosecutor and judge who once locked up drug offenders now advocates relaxing the drug laws. The Los Angeles Times has just published Steve Lopez’s interview with Jim Gray:
All right, tell me this doesn’t sound a little strange:
I’m sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He’s begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America.
“Please quote me,” says Jim Gray, insisting the war on drugs is hopeless. “What we are doing has failed.”
As far as I can tell, Gray is not off his rocker. He’s not promoting drug use, he says for clarification. Anything but. If he had his way, half the revenue we would generate from taxing and regulating drugs would be plowed back into drug prevention education, and there’d be rehab on demand.
So here he is in coat and tie — with a U.S. flag lapel pin — eating his oatmeal and making perfect sense, even when talking about the way President Obama flippantly dismissed a question about legalizing marijuana last week during a White House news conference.
“Politicians get reelected talking tough regarding the war on drugs,” says Gray. “Do you want to hear the speech? Vote for Gray. I will put drug dealers in jail and save your children.”
I had gone to visit Gray in part to discuss his support for a bill introduced last month by Democratic San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who is calling for marijuana to be regulated and taxed much like alcohol.
There’s no good answer to drug abuse. But turning a health problem into a criminal law problem certainly is not the answer. It’s time to take the immense profit out of the drug market as have other countries, such as Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use.
Monday Podcast ‘The Politics of Medical Marijuana’
As of this writing, 13 states have passed legislation legalizing medical marijuana. President Obama’s pledge to stop raiding medical marijuana facilities was met with praise from opponents of the drug war, but what does it mean for the future of drug policy?
In Monday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, explains his organization’s goals and strategies for ending marijuana prohibition in the United States.
Our society is not quite ready yet to completely end marijuana prohibition. So what we want to do is keep as many people from being arrested and put in jail as possible in the short run. One way of doing that is to legalize medical marijuana state by state.
Kampia spoke at a policy forum on medical marijuana at the Cato Institute in March.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s the latest round-up of bloggers who are writing about, citing and linking to Cato research and commentary:
- Blogging about Real ID, AxXiom for Liberty posted Jim Harper’s piece about DHS officials who skirted open meeting laws to promote the program.
- The Club for Growth’s Andrew Roth interviewed Cato Chairman Bob Levy about his book, The Dirty Dozen.
- No Land Grab, a blog covering eminent domain abuse, posted the latest Cato video on the Susette Kelo case. Jason Pye, who wrote a commentary on the case for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, linked to it as well.
- Sights on Pennsylvania blogged about international health care systems, citing Michael D. Tanner’s January article on health care reform and a 2008 Hill Briefing that compared various systems around the world.
- Wes Messamore, AKA The Humble Libertarian, is compiling a list of 100 libertarian blogs/Web sites, and looking for recommendations. Last week, Wes penned his thoughts on the role of the U.S. in foreign policy, making heavy use of a recent Cato article by Benjamin Friedman and a 1998 foreign policy brief by Ivan Eland, citing military intervention overseas as a cause of terrorist activity against Americans.
- David Kirkpatrick shared an excerpt from the Cato Weekly Dispatch with his readers about Obama’s marijuana policy.
If you’re blogging about Cato, contact Chris Moody at cmoody@cato.org.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
The Price of the Drug War
Critics of the drug war long have pointed out how criminalizing drug use creates crime. America has been through this experience before, with Prohibition. Just look at Prohibition-era Chicago with pervasive corruption and mob warfare.
Unfortunately, the experience is being repeated in Mexico. And the violence is spilling over the border into the U.S. Reports the New York Times:
Sgt. David Azuelo stepped gingerly over the specks of blood on the floor, took note of the bullet hole through the bedroom skylight, raised an eyebrow at the lack of furniture in the ranch-style house and turned to his squad of detectives investigating one of the latest home invasions in this southern Arizona city.
A 21-year-old man had been pistol-whipped throughout the house, the gun discharging at one point, as the attackers demanded money, the victim reported. His wife had been bathing their 3-month-old son when the intruders arrived.
“At least they didn’t put the gun in the baby’s mouth like we’ve seen before,” Sergeant Azuelo said. That same afternoon this month, his squad was called to the scene of another home invasion, one involving the abduction of a 14-year-old boy.
This city, an hour’s drive north of the Mexican border, is coping with a wave of drug crime the police suspect is tied to the bloody battles between Mexico’s drug cartels and the efforts to stamp them out.
Since officials here formed a special squad last year to deal with home invasions, they have counted more than 200 of them, with more than three-quarters linked to the drug trade. In one case, the intruders burst into the wrong house, shooting and injuring a woman watching television on her couch. In another, in a nearby suburb, a man the police described as a drug dealer was taken from his home at gunpoint and is still missing.
Tucson is hardly alone in feeling the impact of Mexico’s drug cartels and their trade. In the past few years, the cartels and other drug trafficking organizations have extended their reach across the United States and into Canada. Law enforcement authorities say they believe traffickers distributing the cartels’ marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs are responsible for a rash of shootings in Vancouver, British Columbia, kidnappings in Phoenix, brutal assaults in Birmingham, Ala., and much more.
United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities, including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston and Billings, Mont., where Mexican cartels and their affiliates “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors,” as a Justice Department report put it in December. The figure rose from 100 cities reported three years earlier, though Justice Department officials said that may be because of better data collection methods as well as the spread of the organizations.
Washington officials want to believe that throwing more money at the Mexican government will solve the problem. But there’s nothing in the experience of Afghanistan, Colombia, or many other drug production and smuggling centers to suggest that more enforcement, especially by a government as weak as that in Mexico City, will end the drug trade.
Only taking money out of drug production and sales will end the violence. And that means no longer treating what is fundamentally a health and moral problem as a criminal problem. Legalizing adult drug use may not be a great solution, but it would be a vast improvement over drug prohibition, which promotes violent crime while tens of millions of Americans still use illicit substances.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Week in Review: Bailout Bonuses, Marijuana and Eminent Domain Abuse
House Approves 90 Percent ‘Bonus Tax’
Sparked by outrage over the bonus checks paid out to AIG executives, the House approved a measure Thursday that would impose a 90 percent tax on employee bonuses for companies that receive more than $5 billion in federal bailout funds.
Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax policy studies, says the outrage over AIG is misplaced:
While Congress has been busy with this particular inquisition, the Federal Reserve is moving ahead with a new plan to shower the economy with a massive $1.2 trillion cash infusion — an amount 7,200 times greater than the $165 million of AIG retention bonuses.
So members of Congress should be grabbing their pitchforks and heading down to the Fed building, not lynching AIG financial managers, most of whom were not the ones behind the company’s failures.
Cato executive vice president David Boaz says this type of selective taxation is a form of tyranny:
The rule of law requires that like people be treated alike and that people know what the law is so that they can plan their lives in accord with the law. In this case, a law is being passed to impose taxes on a particular, politically unpopular group. That is a tyrannical abuse of Congress’s powers.
On a related note, Cato senior fellow Richard W. Rahn defended the use of tax havens in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, saying the practice will only become more prevalent as taxes increase in the United States:
U.S. companies are being forced to move elsewhere to remain internationally competitive because we have one of the world’s highest corporate tax rates. And many economists, including Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas, have argued that the single best thing we can do to improve economic performance and job creation is to eliminate multiple taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends. Income is already taxed once, before it is invested, whether here or abroad; taxing it a second time as a capital gain only discourages investment and growth.
Obama to Stop Raids on State Marijuana Distributors
Attorney General Eric Holder announced this week that the president would end federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries that were common under the Bush administration.
It’s about time, says Tim Lynch, director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice:
The Bush administration’s scorched-earth approach to the enforcement of federal marijuana laws was a grotesque misallocation of law enforcement resources. The U.S. government has a limited number of law enforcement personnel, and when a unit is assigned to conduct surveillance on a California hospice, that unit is necessarily neglecting leads in other cases that possibly involve more violent criminal elements.
The Cato Institute hosted a forum Tuesday in which panelists debated the politics and science of medical marijuana. In a Cato daily podcast, Dr. Donald Abrams explains the promise of marijuana as medicine.
Cato Links
• A new video tells the troubling story of Susette Kelo, whose legal battle with the city of New London, Conn., brought about one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings in many years. The court ruled that Kelo’s home and the homes of her neighbors could be taken by the government and given over to a private developer based on the mere prospect that the new use for her property could generate more tax revenue or jobs. As it happens, the space where Kelo’s house and others once stood is still an empty dustbowl generating zero economic impact for the town.
• Daniel J. Ikenson, associate director of Cato’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, explains why the recent news about increasing protectionism will be short-lived.
• Writing in the Huffington Post, Cato foreign plicy analyst Malou Innocent says Americans should ignore Dick Cheney’s recent attempt to burnish the Bush administration’s tarnished legacy.
• Reserve your spot at Cato University 2009: “Economic Crisis, War, and the Rise of the State.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy
Republicans Rediscover Their Big-Government Principles
Sen. Chuck Grassley, who can always be counted on to stick the federal government’s nose where it doesn’t belong, is criticizing Attorney General Eric Holder’s teeny-tiny steps toward a less oppressive enforcement of drug prohibition. Holder said on Wednesday “that federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law. This is a departure from policy under the Bush administration, which targeted dispensaries under federal law even if they complied with the state’s law allowing sales of medical marijuana.”
Grassley says that marijuana is a “gateway” drug to the use of harder drugs and that Holder “is not doing health care reform any good.”
As Tim Lynch and I wrote in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers:
President Bush . . . has spoken of the importance of the constitutional principle of federalism. Shortly after his inauguration, Bush said, “I’m going to make respect for federalism a priority in this administration.” Unfortunately, the president’s actions have not matched his words. Federal police agents and prosecutors continue to raid medical marijuana clubs in California and Arizona.
And as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the power of the federal government to regulate medical marijuana:
If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything — and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
That’s the principle that Chuck Grassley defends. Republicans claim to be the small-government party — and President Obama’s policies on taxes, spending, and regulation certainly justify a view that the GOP is, if not a small-government party, at least the smaller-government party — but they forget those principles when it comes to imposing their social values through federal force.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Federal Enforcement Policy Is Up in Smoke
Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the federal government will end raids on medical marijuana distributors is terrific news.
The Bush administration’s scorched-earth approach to the enforcement of federal marijuana laws was a grotesque misallocation of law enforcement resources. The U.S. government has a limited number of law enforcement personnel, and when a unit is assigned to conduct surveillance on a California hospice, that unit is necessarily neglecting leads in other cases that possibly involve more violent criminal elements.
This shift in policy is also more mindful of the constitutional principle of federalism by allowing the states to try different policy approaches, and it is more respectful of the division of opinion within the medical community about the benefits of marijuana for certain patients. This de-escalation of the drug war is good policy and is long overdue.
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