Amateur Hour In D.C. - Part 2 - The Lost War On Drugs

Yesterday we introduced a concept and theme that we will run with for a few days, namely the fact that our politicians have been running this country for over two hundred years and they still seem to get nothing right, just like a bunch of amateurs trying a new skill. Try to list all of the functions that our political class runs efficiently and effectively. If you are honest, it is very difficult to do:

1. Social Security - going bankrupt
2. Medicare and Medicaid - going bankrupt and infested with fraud.
3. SEC - never saw the biggest economic disaster of our lifetimes coming until it hit them in the face and became the Great Recession. I will throw in the overlooking of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme as a bonus.
4. FHA, HUD, Congressional Housing and Banking Committees - see SEC.
5. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - see SEC above and also remember that it is costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars a month to keep these two entities solvent.
6. NASA - no long term strategy or goal but still with an annual budget.
7. The Nation's Infrastructure - falling apart
8. National Energy Policy and Strategy - noexistent
9. Federal Tax System - overly complicated and inefficient and also infested with fraud and tax dodging.
10. Border Patrol - given that there are over 10 million illegal aliens in this country, no need to go further.
11. Public Schools - overall failures relative to other nations' students in all areas of learning including Math, Reading and Science.
12. Financial Responsibility - heading for insolvency as a nation because the political class continues to pile up trillions of dollars of debt.
13. Management Of The Economy - rife with failed intitatives including the overall economic stimulus program, TARP, Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, Cash For Caulkers, First Time Home Buyer Rebate Program, Mortgage Adjustment Program, etc.

See, I told you it would be difficult to find a government program that does not appear as if the Keystone Kops are in charge. Again, one would think that after trying to do many of these things over the decades and centuries that the political class in this country would have acquired some of the skills necessary to execute their government functions professionally. The sad part is that we pay big bucks via our freedom and our taxes for these failures.

Today let's focus on one fo the biggest failures of all time from our political class, the failed "War On Drugs" that was inititated over four decades ago. Rather than go into details of how this is a failure, I have just listed below some of the news reports headlines in this area from the past six months or so, I think they speak for themselves:

"Seized Submarine Quantum Leap For Narcos" - Associated Press, 7/8/10

"Mexican Drug Cartel Hit List Of American Targets" - NY Daily News, 7/8/10

"Pot Tolerance Hits An All Time High" - Reason Magazine, 8/10

"Survey Shows It Is Easier For DC Teens To Get Pot Vs. Beer" - Cato Policy Report, 7/10

"Medical Pot To Be Okay In Some VA Clinics" - Associated Press, 7/24/10

"Gunmen Kill 17 At Party In Mexico" - Associated Press, 7/19/10

"Drug Wars See First Car Bombing" - Huffington Post, 7/17/10

"Mexican Journalists Stop Reporting On Drug Cartel Violence" - The Week Magazine, 8/10

"Mexico's Police Chief Killed" - Washington Post, 5/4/10

"Police Arrested In Mayor's Killing" - Associated Press, 8/20/10

"Drug War Sends Bullets Across Border" - Associated Press, 8/24/10

"Cartel Suspected In Massacre of 72 Migrants" - Associated Press, 8/26/10

"Mexico Fires 10% Of Its Police Force" - Associated Press, 8/30/10

"Huge Pot Haul In California" - The Week Magazine, 10/29/10

"Five U.S. Civilians Killed In Mexico" - St. Pete Times, 11/5/10

"Sophisticated U.S. - Mexico Drug Tunnel Found" - The Week Magazine, 11/5/10

"Police Officers, Doctor Killed In Mexico shootings" - Associated Press, 12/30/10

"Mayor Shot To Death In Southern Mexico" - Associated Press, 1/13/11

"Gang's Terror Felt Far From Drug War On U.S. Border - Associated Press, 1/16/11

You get the idea. After forty some years of fighting a war on drugs, here is where we stand:

• International drug cartels will go to any length to get illegal drugs into this country including building long, high tech smuggling tunnels under our borders and even very sophisticated, fully functional smuggling submarines.
• Drug cartels will go to any length, including unspeakable violence, to protect their illicit trade with untold millions of dollars in drug profits they reap from that trade, violence that seems to grow daily just below our southern border and violence which threatens to replace the exisiting government structure in Mexico with a narco state.
• The United States is a hodgepodge of conflicting laws and priorities with medical marijuana legal in over ten states and the District Of Columbia, a legality not recognized by the Federal government. But that same Federal government has allowed limited pot smoking to go on in some of the VA hospitals it operates. All this goes on while marijuana tolerance is at all time high.

It does not seem like the war is going very well, given  the above realities. Again, we get this kind of shoddy service at a very high price tag, with untold billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, having been ineffectively spent since the 1960s fighting this losing effort.

A recent Associated Press article from January 10, 2011 vividly illustrates how the lack of creativity, the inability to understand root causes of a problem, and the lack of foresight to see unintended consequences of their actions has probably made an existing illicit drug situation worse, the exact opposite of what our politicians intended.

The drug area we are talking about is the illegal drug trade in methamphetamine or Meth. I am not a Meth expert but until a few years ago, the AP article reports that those that were involved in the Meth trade would buy up non-prescription, over-the-counter pills at the local drug stores and then use the pills in the manufacture of Meth. Apparently an ingredient in the pills, pseudoephedrine, was critical to the production process.

To attack this problem, in 2005 Congress passed the Combat Meth Act which set limits on sales of the pills the Meth manufacturers and dealers need for their Meth production. The legislation also set up electronic tracking processes and limited the amount of drug store products that one person could buy over-the-counter.

What has been the result of this political class answer to the illegal Meth market? According to the article:

• By 2006, the number of Meth criminal busts had started climbing again.
• Meth-related criminal activity (arrests, drug seizures, and the discovery of abandoned Meth production sites) was up 34% in 2009, the last year for yearly results are available.
• Increased Meth-related activity was highest in the three states (Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma) that have electronically tracked sales of pseudoephedrine since at least 2008. Think about that for a minute. The three states that have the tracking have the highest increases in Meth-related activity.
• Worse of all, the new law created a new class of criminals, "mules" for the Meth labs. Since the Meth manufacturers can no longer go into any drug store to purchase what they need, given the new laws and tracking, they now recruit anybody who is willing to buy under their own name. These people then turn around and resell the pills to the Meth lab operators. The article gave an example of college students buying a small amount of bills, enough to keep them under the tracking limit, for about $7 and then immediately selling them to the Meth criminals for $40 or $50. Other mule candidates besides students include homeless people.
• Law enforcement officials call this "smurfing," previously non-criminal people buying small amounts for big Meth operations.

This last finding is really disturbing and is certainly an unintended consequence of our politicians passing the Combat Meth Act. According to a law enforcement official in the article: "Law enforcement was surprised. People that normally wouldn't cross the line are willing to do so because they think it's such a sweet deal and because of the economy."

As a result of our Washington amateurs:

• They have created a new criminal class of Americans through their actions with the cute name of "smurfs."
• They Meth trade apparently suffered a little slowdown as a result of the Combat Meth Law but quickly found ways around the law to continue to thrive.
• The inability of our political class to come up with an effective strategy in this area has also encouraged our friends the Mexican drug cartels to expand beyond pot and into meth, according to the article.

One new law, numerous new bad effects. Typical Washington amateurish behavior and thinking. Step 26 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is a more rational way to go about determining how to handle the drug problem in this country. It would create a panel of expert and very smart Americans, sans politicians and lobbyists, akin to the successful such panels in our past including the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the Grace Commission, and the Military Base Closing Commission.

This panel would do an in depth root cause analysis and provide the American people a set of comprehensive alternatives, each with an easy to understand list of pros and cons along with a cost, for this issue which we would then vote on. The most popular proposal would then become our national drug policy.

We can no longer wait for the political class to solve this problem. Forty years after they first addressed the issue we are further away from a rational and compassionate solution. The issue is now more widespread, more violent, and more out of control. Forty years is enough time, this Keystone Kops escapade needs to close down.



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