Your piece was excellent, and very useful for me, and I appreciate you writing it, but tbh, my enjoyment of both the well reasoned anti-drug war articles over there was vaguely overshadowed by the the fact that it is exceptionally horrible to me that our side is clearly correct, and yet still losing. What the hell? I feel heartened when I see people who call out arguments like that decimated, but it appears to make very little difference in the real world. I’m kind of wondering at this point what we the people are going to have to do to get the ball really moving here.

But, as a physician, try writing for methamphetamine or morphine. If you treat more than a few patients, you set the radar off. Next thing you know there is a SWAT team in your office! You are a drug dealer and you can get a life sentence! And, those drugs are “legal” right now.

Even with drug were regulated, we still have to make it easier for them to be distributed. Otherwise , there will still be a black market, as there is for Oxycontin and meth, right now. I think if heroin was called diamorphine, (or maybe morphine:-D) instead, there would be much less market for it, as well. But, it would be, a very, cheap pain medication.

It is very hard to get treated for chronic pain with opiates, right now. How would we change this? I guess, if doctors were not afraid of going to jail for writing the scripts, the black market could also be eliminated for those “prescription” drugs. Fact is, though, too many doctors want to play cop. And, I think there might be a problem with them, in a legal regulated drug atmosphere. Many may, still, not want to write the drugs for the illness of “addiction”. Then we could get into the entire problem dealing with the difference between physical dependence and addiction! One requires daily medication for a, normally functioning, treated individual. While the addict would still be uncontrollable. His needs would be different. Good thing is addiction is not so high as the some opponents would say. (addicitionologists say 35%,but consider the source! Addicts are their paycheck!) True addicts make up, maybe 3%, at most, of drug users in this country, today. About the same as in 1937! Addicts are those that continue to use, despite the fact that the continued use is harming them. Sounds like cigarette smokers, does it not?!

Then we have to figure out who gets treated.The patient who takes amphetamine to be able to function normally, on a daily basis? When do doctors get retrained to listen to the patients’ pain, and illness complaints, again, instead of ignoring them as they do, nowadays?

And, my wife has ADD. She gets that stuff and it puts her to sleep! This guy was not real knowledgeable about the effects of this drug, as well. And claiming the Thompson machine gun was a reason for more deaths, falls back to the same old thing. If the guy with the machine gun, was not a criminal, in the first place, working for the mob, then people would not have been shot! Guns don’t kill people. They are machines! People (mobsters, narcos,dealers) kill people!

Lastly, many of the people that use drugs seem to be self medicating. What can we do to help them? We certainly need better access to mental health. Many can’t afford it and a lot of mental health care is denied by the government and private health care programs. Most, real, addicts have underlying mental problems. I remember a scientific study that actually dealt with that subject.

Re: Lawyer aphorisms: I’ve heard them all, but thanks!

Re: Political fundraising/donors. You are in error, I am afraid, regarding American politics. See, e.g., http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/21/nation/na-money21, http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1686613, http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/donordems.php?cycle=2008. The trend has long been in favor of large donors moving toward the Democratic party.

Re: Subsidies. Using the word “subsidy” was intended to carry a pejorative effect, not a descriptive one. Ignoring behavior on the left and criticizing the same behavior on the right would mark you as intellectually dishonest. For charity’s sake, I assume confirmation bias.

This is what drives me nuts about the gap between the what we can call “libertarian” civil libertarians and “progressive” libertarians. We don’t make common cause on things we agree with: the massive movement of government out of our personal choices and control over our own bodies and recreation. We tend to get caught up on our economic differences rather than joining forces against fools like Freddoso who are perfectly cool with the militarization of your society and the reduction of your freedoms.

Libertarians don’t make common cause with progressives because libertarians believe in individual liberty. So long as we are not harming anyone, we believe we should be able to contract on terms we find agreeable; to say what we want, free from government fetters; to behave as we would, free of the state’s control; to earn and spend money as we see fit; to order our lives as we desire. Whether knave, noble, minstrel or fool, we should be allowed to act as we would, and suffer the consequences as we must.

“Progressive Libertarian,” on the other hand, is a contradiction in terms. The progressive project is about expanding government power. Can’t convince people that global warming is a problem? Use government to force recycling, tax disfavored cars, and waste money on “green power.” Can’t convince people you are right about smoking? Pass a law outlawing it everywhere except in your home on Tuesday when the kids are away and there’s a full moon! Don’t like people’s decisions about what to eat? Pass a law taxing (or banning) disfavored foods! Don’t like how people choose to spend their money? Tax them and spend it on the things we progressives know are important! Don’t like that some people make more money than others? Take it away at the point of a gun! Don’t like the way the market allocates scarce resources? Nationalize them allocate them the way progressives know they should be. Don’t like that people aren’t doing what you think they should? Make national service mandatory, on pain of imprisonment.

Progressives are as against liberty as every dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who wants to mandate the pledge of allegience and jail those who burn the flag. I would no more make common cause with progressives than those reactionaries. None of you can be trusted.

If we divide liberty, as is sometimes done, on two axes of economic liberty and social liberty, if we truck with the right, we betray social liberty. If we consort with the left, we betray economic liberty. Both sides wish to expand the power of government, and consolidate that power as far away as possible, so that it is as unaccountable as possible. The left is no less tyrannical than the right; the only difference is what the crimes will be.

Speaking of which, the common rightwing trope that academics are biased towards the left cracks me up. Even if you grant that as true (and I don’t), what does it tell you? That people who spend their lives thoroughly studying a particular subject tend to reject the conservative take on it? So, the more closely and rigorously you study a subject, the more likely you are to realize that the right is wrong about it. Of course, you can reject that conclusion- IF you reject the premise of liberal bias in academia. I don’t see how you can have both.

Forgot to mention: I used to live in Texas. Oh-for-three, MikeT.

You were correct that some people are born into a “criminal lifestyle,” and the effects of that won’t go away overnight. But Freddoso’s assertion that criminals will just “find something else” after legalization doesn’t bolster his case in the least. Criminals are involved in theft rings, extortion, drunken idiocy and “other things” right now. But it is the mixing of these basically inevitable problems with illicit vice markets that leads to out of control crime rates. Anyway, good work, Radley.

But they are perfectly Ok with getting shit-faced drunk.
“It’s Ok boss. I have a prescription for these lortab 10s.”

Your knowledge re “Crown”, is also incorrrect. “Crowns” is Canadian legal shorthand for both government prosecuting attorneys at both federal and provincial superior courts*, and for the prosecution itself, and has always been so since I graduated from law school in the 1980s. e.g.s:
“I thought we could get a plea, but the Crown is a bit of a hardass.”
or
“The Crown appeals from the decision of Mr. Justice So-and-So…”**

* – See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_attorney.
** – See for example canlii.org, where “the crown appeals” produces over 2700 hits.

A Crown (what in America’d be an ADA) of my acquaintance told me of one judge in her region. A former tax specialist he’d led a remarkably sheltered life.. .and the Crowns HATED him. The more violent and sick the crime the more he’d tune out, absolutely certain that such things never happened.

That you are British (apparently) may go a long way toward explaining why your views on the American right sound more like they’re informed by the BBC than actual experience living in red or blue areas of the United States. No offense, or anything…