Mimsy Were the Borogoves
The Price of Prohibition
Jerry Stratton
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Heading into the downhill side of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, I already hear news reporters and co-workers calling them “the price of freedom”, suggesting that we’ll need to give up some of our freedoms because of these attacks. But freedom did not fund these terrorist activities. Where these terrorists make their money is from prohibition. Prohibition provides a ready source of massive funding for organizations such as Osama bin Laden’s. He may have made his fortune in oil, but his Al-Qaeda organization maintains it with opium. And they can do so only because prohibition drives the price of opium up to hundreds of times what it would sell were we to end prohibition. The more successfully we enforce prohibition, the more money these terrorists make. According to Jane's Transport aviation expert Chris Yates, such an effort “takes a logistics operation from the terror group involved that is second to none.” Whether we discover that these terrorists are foreigners or Americans, the chances are they funded their efforts through prohibition.
Freedom did not let these acts go undetected. Law enforcement follows the priorities we set, and we currently put a greater priority on catching drug users than on catching real criminals. Prohibition diverts law enforcement attention away from real crimes and towards pot smokers and heroin junkies. One of the questions being asked is “how could such a coordinated effort go completely undetected?” The answer, of course, is that law enforcement was focusing on pot smokers, inner-city junkies, and DWB’s. At least one third of all Americans have broken our prohibition laws at least once. The law enforcement effort that currently goes into trying to catch those Americans is effort that isn’t being used to catch murderers, thieves, and, yes, terrorists.
Those thousands injured and hundreds dead in New York and DC are not the price of freedom, they are the price of prohibition. We know that prohibition funds crime. We’ve known it ever since alcohol prohibition nurtured the expansion of the mafia. Today prohibition is funding and nurturing international criminal and terrorist organizations far more deadly than the mafia. How much more violence do we need to see before we realize how dangerous prohibition is?
End prohibition and we cut their funding. End prohibition and we can quickly bear massive law enforcement effort--effort that is currently bearing down on pot smokers and other recreational drug users--on finding and catching these real criminals. End prohibition and we’ll have more than enough jail space to place the criminals we catch.
Maintain prohibition, and we continue funding terrorism. Maintain prohibition, and we continue to let terrorists go in favor of jailing pot smokers. If we support prohibition, we support terrorism.
Followups:
President Bush compares Al Qaeda to the mafia, without apparently realizing that, as during alcohol prohibition, it is our prohibition laws that fund criminals.
President Bush’s address to the joint houses of congress tonight was eerily reminiscent of my own words above. He talked about how “Al Qaeda is to terrorism what the mafia is to crime” and that we must “cut the funding of terrorists at their source”. Strong words, but I doubt that he has the will, nor that we as a country have the desire, to end the divisive and profitable drug war. The prison industry is too powerful; law enforcement prefers the relatively easy job of busting pot smokers to the more dangerous job of tracking down terrorists; politicians will want to keep the easily-used election rhetoric of the drug war.
Bush said that “we are in a fight for our principles. We should live by them,” and that this is “the fight of all those who believe in plurality, tolerance, and freedom.” It would be strong symbolism and an important strike in the war against terrorism to show this tolerance and this plurality by ending prohibition of marijuana, coca, and opium in the same way that we ended the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco. At the same time that we show support for religious plurality (marijuana, for example, is used by practitioners of a mostly-Black religion, and marijuana prohibition is used to allow law enforcement to crack down on Blacks), for personal freedom, we would also end an easy source of terrorist funding.
“Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime.” Like the mafia and alcohol prohibition, modern prohibition not only funds but nurtures and protects terror around the world. If we truly mean the rhetoric about tolerance, freedom, and living by our principles, if we truly want to cut funding to terror, if we truly want to divert our law enforcement might to terrorists, we will end prohibition once and for all.
In 1996, Peter McWilliams pointed out that the law enforcement effort dedicated to enforcing laws against plants would be better put to use tracking terrorists.
I was recently re-reading Peter McWilliams’ wonderful “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do” and ran across this prescient piece. McWilliams wrote this in 1996, five years before 9/11:
We don’t hear much about terrorism in this country because if we really knew what was going on, we'd all be, well, terrorized. The car bomb (or, more accurately, the mini-van bomb) explosion at the base of the World Trade Center in March 1993 was not only an act of terrorism--it was a warning....
Meanwhile, what are the FBI, CIA, and United States Customs--our only realistic defense against terrorism--up to? You guessed it: defending us against consensual crimes. Drugs, of course, head the list. Terrorism is a footnote.
...on September 28, 1992, the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed “a truly unique joint effort involving the participation of law enforcement agencies on three continents.” Was this “truly unique” two-year international effort designed to track down and uncover terrorism? No. Known as Operation Green Ice, its purpose was to terrorize drug dealers. “Operation Green Ice has a message for drug dealers everywhere: the world is mobilized against you. U.S. law enforcement will continue with our colleagues around the world to defeat these purveyors of human misery.”
Couldn’t all of this intelligence be used more intelligently?
And today, eight years later and three years after September 11, not much has changed.
News (RSS) Feeds
For more information:
- Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do
- Well before he died, Peter McWilliams placed the entire text of his work on-line for general viewing.
http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/ - Buy Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do at Amazon
- Enforcing laws against consensual activities is un-American, says McWilliams. This book is mostly about American crimes and American freedom. He starts at the beginning: the enlightenment and John Locke’s writings about “the purpose of government”. Locke’s ideas about natural rights were to directly influence Thomas Jefferson’s writings a hundred years later. “No man can be forced to be rich or healthful; God Himself will not save men against their wills.”
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=192976717X/negativespaceA/
Related prohibition articles:
- Drug cops on tape (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=228)
- Drug cops were caught on tape torturing a man for hours, beating a fake confession out of him. How many times does this happen and not get caught on tape?
- Has welfare failed us? (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=117)
- Has welfare failed us, or have we overwhelmed the welfare system through other policies that encourage dependance and discourage economic development?
- Another victim of prohibition (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=652)
- “Chalk it up as collateral damage, and add Hoffman’s name to that of Isaac Singletary and Anthony Diotaiuto, three deaths of non-violent, non-threatening Floridians in just the last few years, thanks to the drug war.”
- Put safety first: end prohibition (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=628)
- Prohibition increases crime and it reduces the ability of law enforcement to fight those crimes.
- Medical marijuana returns to Congress (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=577)
- Congress is considering a states’ rights amendment to the Science-State-Justice appropriations bill forbidding the federal government from overriding state laws allowing patients to use marijuana on a doctor’s orders.
- Prisoner of the war on drugs (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=524)
- A blog by someone between conviction and sentencing, describing how they (hope to) reduce their sentence by re-entering the black market underworld.
- Project Safe Neighborhoods (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=495)
- A typical drug war euphemism kills Kathryn Johnston, 92.
- Georgia drug war unfairly targets Indian immigrants (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=341)
- Federal law enforcement in Georgia has decided to crack-down on Indian-owned convenience stores.
- Cops Say Legalize Drugs: Ask Me Why (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=310)
- Why do you oppose the drug war? Tell me in fifteen seconds or less!
- Drug war undermining Afghan, Iraqi peace (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=250)
- Prohibition continues to fund terrorist organizations, and we continue to pour money into maintaining prohibition. Prohibition is, as it has always been, one of the best and easiest means for criminal organizations to grow.
- Fuck everything except marijuana (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=233)
- That marijuana does not lend itself to the black market forces that make coca, beer, and poppies dangerous should not blind us to the fact that it is their illegality that makes the latter dangerous, not something inherent in the plants they come from.
- Silencing opposition in the war on drugs (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=234)
- Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced fast-track legislation to make witnessing or learning of certain drug offenses, without reporting them within 24 hours, a federal crime, punishable by two to twenty years in jail.
- Support the Dope (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=7)
- Some narcotics officers group is cold-calling for fundraising, and they’re actually prepared for marijuana supporters.
- Throwing Gas on the Fire (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=29)
- If any incident hilights the violence of prohibition and the futility of gun control, the six-year-old killing in Mt. Morris Township, Michigan, is it.
- Will prohibition destroy the Iraq turnaround? (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=630)
- World prohibition threatens to turn the Iraq turnaround back towards violence and gang warfare.
- Bad laws cause crime (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=573)
- “Honestly, the level of apathy I’m dealing with is maddening.” Bad laws make it easy to get away with breaking them.
- Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=347)
- The federal government has the power to keep effective doses of pain reduction medication from patients, but not lethal doses of medication.
- Supreme Court rules against patients and states (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=198)
- During the early years of the Internet, I heard someone say that the drug war is the root key to the bill of rights. That seems to be all the more true this week as the Supreme Court chose to ignore the federalist arguments in Gonzales v. Raich in order to acquiesce to the drug war.
- Raising Peter McWilliams (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=3)
- The United States government killed an author over a book. Buy that book now.
- Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=140)
- Peter McWilliams died in defense of freedom: this book, an incredibly well-written and well-researched book about “the absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society” was probably his death warrant.
- Tianamen Square and the Drug War (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=4)
- Peter McWilliams, outspoken critic of the war on drugs, became a casualty in that war on June 14, 2000.
- Misplaced compassion: more deaths, less dignity (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=155)
- I fear that a successful “death with dignity” movement will only exacerbate the bad laws and choices that result in excessive pain, and will result in a slippery slope towards more and more assisted suicides.
- The Great Gatsby (http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=331)
- A Lost Generation novel set in the twenties in posh New York, peopled by several Lost Generation characters, the Great Gatsby tells a story of trust, class, and desire on Long Island.
http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=22
Copyright 2001, 2005 Jerry Stratton.
“Mimsy Were the Borogoves” is a trademark of Jerry Stratton.
http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/
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Jerry Stratton is the author of It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees. “Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you’ve depleted the lake.”
“Let’s be truthful, most of the bright people don’t work for you--no matter who you are. You need a strategy that allows for innovation occurring elsewhere.”--Bill Joy