Moving to Hamsterdam
I am, by an interesting coincidence, deep in Season 3 of The Wire, in which Colvin’s “Hamsterdam” experiment – the creation, in a stretch of abandoned homes, of an enforcement-free zone where drug sales and use are tolerated in exchange for getting the dealers out of the neighborhoods they’re destroying – is currently playing out, just as I am also seeing a growing number of headlines about powerful and murderous drug mobs on both sides of the Mexican Border. This morning, I see a story about the cocaine fueling the resurgence of the lunatic Shining Path guerillas in Peru. And, of course, there are the ongoing stories of poppy production in Afghanistan funding the Taliban – along with other stories about eradication efforts turning poor farmers against the Karzai government and the U.S. presence.
My instincts are pretty libertarian when it comes to drugs. Law enforcement has little to show for its drug-war exertions except the exertions themselves, which should be pretty disturbing to anyone with a shred of constitutional liberalism in his makeup. The deeper unstated attachment to drug prohibition – that it provides a sort of perpetual dragnet for more serious crime – is at least as disturbing.
But of course ending prohibition would have its substantial costs. The uptick in the direct effects – addiction etc. – is a matter of debate, but one thing The Wire shows pretty convincingly is that an end to drug prohibition would almost certainly lead to a huge expansion what James likes to call the pink police state. The Wire shows teams of public health types moving in to Hamsterdam to distribute needles and condoms and find as many takers for rehab as they can. What starts out as a threat to the experiment – people, inconveniently, pointing out how appalling are its tableaux – becomes the suggestion of a therapeutic utopia: The pleasure and the treatment and the policing of pleasure and treatment are all in one place, happening simultaneously. In real life, these public health types would be agents of the state. Drug legalization surely would lead to a spreading police power attached to the state’s therapeutic capacities.
Of course, some people like the idea of a therapeutic utopia. They would count the expansion of the government’s therapeutic authority as a good thing. Some people, on the other hand, would simply prefer the option in which the fewest people are killed, and the fewest people face the threat of unreasonable imprisonment, and the fewest instances occur in which violent police power is projected into the homes of innocent citizens as part of an ironically broader display of the real impotence of legitimate sovereignty in this area, and would view a concomitant expansion in the pink police state as another lamentable but perhaps tolerable cost, given the alternatives.
Health and human services types are always preferable to the heavily armed arm twisters we have now. Plus, mandatory therapy won’t attach to any but the most serious drugs, if that.
In return society gets a lot, not least a new tax revenue stream from a product with proven (ineradicable) demand.
The drug war is insane as policy, and highly suspect even as moral stance. End it.
— JA · Mar 18, 11:49 PM · #
Still others would glance at the obvious parallels to alcohol and wonder where the ‘pink police state’ version of AA is, and in not seeing anything like it, wonder whether the adrenaline rush of police state paranoia ever gets tiring, especially in the face of actual police state behavior, like no-knock raids.
— sidereal · Mar 19, 12:00 AM · #
Yeah, I’m with sidereal. Why would the people handing out needles and ushering addicts into rehab be from the state? I don’t follow your logic here. Can you help?
— LeighH · Mar 19, 12:57 AM · #
You don’t understand. We are talking about LIBERTY here. Sweet, sweet LIBERTY. You can’t experience LIBERTY in a pink mommy state. You can only experience it in a navy blue daddy state, where men free to engage in the manly struggle against their fellow men, large animals, and the elements. Sure there isa fair amount of death and destruction and hunger and dispair, but that is the price sweet LIBERTY asks in exchange for a chance at glory (along with a satisfyingly simple legislative schema). Succeed in the navy blue daddy state and they will sing of your deeds in the mead-soaked halls of Vallhalla for all eternity.
— cw · Mar 19, 01:23 AM · #
I always thought it odd that this opinion by William F. Buckley didn’t change more minds among the conservative elite.
This Youtube interview with WFB is worth watching.
— JA · Mar 19, 02:14 AM · #
I am reminded of my Barry Goldwater Republican physician father, who near the end of 40 something years of doctoring, said, with regard to socialized medicine (in whatever form/degree it might take,) “What we have now is so completely fucked up we might as well try something different.”
— Tony Comstock · Mar 19, 02:23 AM · #
This is entirely hypothetical, LeighH (and Sidereal), because the same drug-panic that would send legions of state therapists onto the post-legalization landscape would have prevented drugs from being legalized in the first place. The comparison with alcohol is fairly inapt because, despite the higher costs exacted by alcohol abuse, alcohol does not cause the same kind of social and political anxiety that drugs do. Hence it’s legality (hence the odd self-negating character of this whole line of argument). But think about it: nobody who’s in spitting distance of actual political office will mention loosening prohibition without also invoking a corresponding increase in treatment, much of it mandatory. This treatment would in all likelihood be carried out or overseen by the state. I’m not saying that this would be some kind apocalypse, but it does seem obvious to me. But then again, I do spend a lot of time alone at my desk, stoking my adrenaline rush of police state paranoia, just to remind myself I’m alive.
— Matt Feeney · Mar 19, 05:47 AM · #
Call me another who doesn’t see how the prospect of government clean-needle dispensers in crack houses heralds the “pink police state.”
Those fucking facists! Offering voluntary rehabilitation of all things! The very idea! So, when the nice lady at the Post Office asks “how can I help you?” you shoot her in the face immediately, right?
— Chet · Mar 23, 05:26 AM · #