While a majority still supports criminalization, more Americans than ever think marijuana should be legal, according the latest Gallup survey. Lydia Saad (a family friend) provides the analysis:

Gallup’s October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but acceptance jumped to 31% in 2000 and has continued to grow throughout this decade.

The question wording is interesting here.  It would be cleaner and less confusing to ask “Do you think the use of marijuana should be illegal?”  But, since marijuana use is and has been illegal, one can understand the negative wording.  Also, they’ve been asking the question the same way over time, which at least allows untainted comparison over time.  We’ve seen a thirty point drop in the number thinking it should be illegal over the past 40 years and a 32 point rise in those thinking it should be legal.  And, allowing for a +/-3 margin of error, the trend has been rather steady.

Saad continues:

The highest level of support for decriminalizing the use of marijuana today is seen with self-described liberals, among whom 78% are in favor. In contrast, 72% of conservatives are opposed. Moderates are about evenly divided on whether the use of marijuana should be legal, although they tilt against it (51% vs. 46%). Somewhat milder differences are seen according to political party, mainly because of the tempered support of Democrats relative to that of liberals. However, a solid 70% of Republicans — similar to the rate seen among conservatives — are opposed.

Essentially, virtually all Republicans self-identify as “conservative” whereas many Democrats think of themselves as “moderate” or even “conservative.”  While this is partly a function of the greater size and therefore diversity of the Democratic coalition at the moment, it’s also the power of branding.   Liberal has been a dirty word for decades, despite views considered ultra liberal in my boyhood now being moderate, if not conservative.

Saad adds:

Public mores on legalization of marijuana have been changing this decade, and are now at their most tolerant in at least 40 years. If public support were to continue growing at a rate of 1% to 2% per year, as it has since 2000, the majority of Americans could favor legalization of the drug in as little as four years.

Perhaps true.  But here’s the thing: A sizable percentage of those who will privately tell a pollster that they think marijuana should be legal would be unwilling to make that statement publicly, owing to pressure from their church group, social circle, and so forth.  Conversely, those who favor criminalization are likely to be quite vocal and highly organized. We’ll need more than a slight majority supporting decriminalization to actually achieve it.

Thoreau explains to a friend what will happen to him if he decides to grow a marijuana plant on his property:

• Masked men with guns would break down your door.
• They would confiscate your assets.
• They would drag you away in front of your family.
• They would lock you in a cage with violent criminal gangs.
• They would do these things because if you were allowed to grow and use that plant then something bad might happen.

The only thing neglected here, as one of Thoreau’s commenters points out, is that the masked men would also shoot your dog. Other than that, that about sums it up.

“However, I can state that as someone with an IQ over room temperature, the fact that we are debating whether it is appropriate for school authorities to strip search kids is a sure sign that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with this country and our sense of perspective, and I blame the war on drugs.”
– John Cole

See “Supreme Court to Hear Honor Student Strip Search Case” for background.

Radley Balko, responding to James Poulos, argues that criminalization of marijuana has been deadly:

Det. Jarrod Shivers is dead and Ryan Frederick’s life is ruined over the prohibition of pot. Officer Ron Jones is dead, and Cory Maye, once sentenced to be executed, now faces a life sentence because of marijuana prohibition. Cheryl Lynn Noel is dead because of pot prohibition. So are Jose Colon, Tony Martinez, 13-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, Willie Heard, Christie Green, Pedro Navarro, Barry Hodge, Salvador Hernandez, Donald Scott, Kenneth Baulch, Dep. John Bananola, Officer Tony Patterson, Vincent Hodgkiss, Anthony Diotaiuto, Clayton Helriggle, Jeffery Robinson, Troy Davis, Alexander “Rusty” Windle, John Hirko, Scott Bryant, Robert Lee Peters, Manuel Ramirez, and Bruce Lavoie. Deputies James Moulson and Phillip Anderson and suspect George Timothy Williams were all killed in a single marijuana raid in Idaho in 2001. Officer Arthur Parga and Manuel Ramirez (a different one) killed one another in another marijuana raid after a family friend suspected of dealing marijuana had incorrectly given police Ramirez’s address as his own.

These are just some of the deaths associated with marijuana raids (all summarized, with sources, here). Then there is the domestic black market violence that comes with marijuana prohibition. And the unnecessary deaths of sick people (like Peter McWilliams) who might have lived if they’d had access to medical marijuana.

Now, I don’t know about the last part.  While I support access to medical marijuana, I’ve never been under the impression that it was curative; rather, it allows people to cope with pain and improves appetite that’s suppressed by chemotherapy.

Of course, when one weighs the consequences of a public policy, both costs and benefits need to be factored in. And, as Poulos notes in an update to his post, the answer to drug raids that kill innocents may simply be to end stupid drug raids, not legalize the thing being raided.

Given that at least our last three presidents, some members of the Supreme Court, a goodly number of Congressmen and other officials all admittedly tried marijuana, however, it’s hard to argue that prohibition has been particularly effective.

Cartoon: Green Change

In a rare bit of sanity from a California politician, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has begun to argue for the legalization of marijuana in California.

Buoyed by the widely held belief that cannabis is California’s biggest cash crop, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano contends it is time to reap some state revenue from that harvest while putting a damper on drug use by teens, cutting police costs and even helping Mother Nature.

[...]

Ammiano’s measure, AB 390, would essentially replicate the regulatory structure used for beer, wine and hard liquor, with taxed sales barred to anyone under 21.

He said it would actually boost public safety, keeping law enforcement focused on more serious crimes while keeping marijuana away from teenagers who can readily purchase black-market pot from peers.

The natural world would benefit, too, from the uprooting of environmentally destructive backcountry pot plantations that denude fragile ecosystems, Ammiano said.

But the biggest boon might be to the bottom line. By some estimates, California’s pot crop is a $14-billion industry, putting it above vegetables ($5.7 billion) and grapes ($2.6 billion). If so, that could mean upward of $1 billion in tax revenue for the state each year.

He’ll get no argument from me–the current criminalization of marijuana is beyond ridiculous, and causes suffering and injustice well beyond any rational justification. Of course, there’s no way this bill will pass, but I’m glad that somebody is putting the idea out there.

A New Scientist editorial titled “Drugs drive politicians out of their minds” begins with an interesting thought experiment:

IMAGINE you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?

You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.

Robin Hanson, Alex Massie, and Ronald Bailey all have some interesting thoughts on the piece, which is itself worth reading in full.

I hasten to point out, however, that the safest course of action when a stranger walks up to you and you have bowls of peanuts and illegal psychoactive drugs is to say, “Would you like some peanuts?”

If they’re old enough to be at your party, they’ve presumably ascertained whether they’re allergic to peanuts and will decline if they are.  Or if they don’t like peanuts.  Or aren’t hungry.

In no case should you offer strangers illegal psychoactive drugs.  For one thing, doing so is, well, illegal and could land you in jail.  For another, many people would prefer not to have their brain chemistry unexpectedly altered when in the company of strangers.

With that out of the way, I agree with the substantive point of the article and with the points raised by Alex and Ron about the tendency of politicians to act as if they’re taking some bad drugs when making policy decisions about drugs.  As regular readers know, I’m generally in favor of it being legal for adults to put whatever they want into their bodies so long as they’re not endangering others.

Even peanuts.

Steven Taylor takes us on “Yet Another Foray into Drug War Logic” in which we learn that, no matter the outcome, it’s evidence that we’re winning the war on drugs. Which we’ve been just this close to winning for decades now.

The juxtaposition of these two stories at YahooNews this morning is a tad odd:   Michael Phelps acknowledges photo using marijuana pipe and Santonio Holmes goes from drug dealer to Super Bowl MVP.

Are we to conclude that illicit drugs are the route to athletic achievement?

UPDATE: Radley Balko pens a “Letter From Michael Phelps” arguing that great athletes deserve to get high after all they’ve sacrificed for us.

UPDATE II: In the comments, Radley explains that he’s merely saying Phelps should be “left the hell alone.”  I’d agree, except that Phelps is engaged in illegal conduct.  Granted, conduct that shouldn’t be illegal, but still.

Commenter JimT counters that this is “exactly the same” as Babe Ruth “holding a beer can in 1922.”

Update (Steve Verdon): Just thought I’d chime here because unlike the other OTB writers I have a son who swims competively. Our whole family watched with excitement as the men’s 400×100 relay team beat the French team making it possible for Michael Phelps to go on to earn a record breaking 8 gold medals. I’m sure if one were to ask him who he looks up to in swimming that Michael Phelps would be in the top three if not number one. Do I find the idea of Michael Phelps smoking marijuana a big deal? No. For one thing I don’t think anyone, let alone my son, is going to do what Michael Phelps does with mindless devotion. Another, is that people often make mistakes or do things that are not very smart. And last, the important aspects of Michael Phelps has accomplished are through dedication, hard work, and hard work. If anyone wants to come even close to accomplishing what Phelps has accomplished, those are the things they will need to emulate. Emulating him on the pot smoking alone will get you nowhere in swimming. Still if my son tries to get cute with me on this, I’ll be sure to use this stand by argument, “Look, when you win 8 gold medals at the Olympics, 7 of them in world record time, then you can smoke pot. Until then and so long as you live in my house you wont.”

Amsterdam Red Light district

Amsterdam is closing most of its brothels and marijuana shops.

My wife and I spent a week in Amsterdam two years ago and found it to be incredibly clean and safe. Certainly, it was pristine in comparison to major American cities, including New York and Washington, given the virtual absence of panhandlers and street people. The coffee shops were well marked and easily avoidable. The smattering of rather unattractive prostitutes peddling their wares were somewhat disconcerting but not enough so to detract from the city’s charm.

Photo by Flickr user Stuck in Customs under Creative Commons license.

Jonah Goldberg argues that conservatives should have embraced “The Wire” more than we did.

This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals. While many of the problems most prominently on display can certainly be traced back to racism, racism itself is not a central issue in The Wire (nor is racism an inherently or historically conservative phenomena). These drug gangs and the poor souls in their orbit, are not trapped by racism so much as by a dysfunctional culture. That’s certainly the lesson of much of season four. The stoop kids do okay. The Corner Boys are destined for a life of misery. For every main character who is a murderer or dope dealer (but I repeat myself), there’s a representative of the black middle class who rejects the criminal culture of the street. For every Marlo, there’s a Bunk. Race relations between the actual characters are remarkably healthy, and nearly every mention of race as a salient issue is in the context of the political nonsense inherent to Baltimore, or rather urban, Democratic politics. To the extent many liberals try to explain all of the problems of poor blacks on racism, the show was a powerful rebuttal.

Some liberals (including some of the show’s creators) might look at the manifest failures of the schools in The Wire as evidence that we don’t “invest” enough in urban education, which is itself a symptom of racism. Okay, fine. But as a conservative, I don’t look at the schools in the Wire and say, “gosh, if only they had more money.”

Alex Massie, sensibly I believe, wonders, “have we really reached the stage where even TV programmes have to be apportioned between conservatives and liberals so that watching television becomes a dreary act by which one demonstrates ones political allegiance?”   Nonetheless, he wades in fearlessly:

In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire’s politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local politics, rather than  conservative or liberal perspective. No wonder it’s such a trendy show to like… The evidence is there: manifest failure of a crippling and immoral war on drugs? Check. Manifest failure of a school system resistant to reform and implicitly ripe, therefore, for real school choice? Check. Desperate consequences of the criminalisation of prostitution? For sure. Ghastly consequences of local government and planning regulations held hostage by rent-seeking?

Which just goes to show that programs with a heavy dose of social drama can be read in ways that conform to one’s own preexisting ideological bent.  In any event, we should refrain from drawing too many political lessons from fictional television shows, however “realistic” they seem.

Only in America.

Former Representative Bob Barr has won the Libertarian Party nomination for President, narrowly defeating longtime Party activist Mary Ruwart. This is a rather welcome change for the LP, who have taken to nominating more radical, but relatively unknown candidates in past election cycles. As I’ve said before, Barr is their best candidate since Paul in 1988, and is someone I think has a real chance of spoiling McCain in a few states if he’s able to build any kind of campaign momentum at all. Time’s going to tell on that one, though, since he’s only raised about $127,000 as of the time of this writing) for his campaign in the two weeks since its inception. One thing he is guaranteed to do, though, is to have a higher media profile than any recent Libertarian candidate.

Here’s a roundup of other takes from around the Blogosphere:

Will Wilkinson yawns at the news:

I am not excited. Nor would I have been excited had Mary Ruwart taken. Mike Gravel? Now that would have excited me. I just like that guy, and I think he has a much better claim to being libertarian that Bob Barr, who voted for the PATRIOT Act oh so many years ago. And Wayne Allyn Root struck me as a first-class tool at the Reason event. So my LP enthusiasm meter remains, as always, pegged close to zero.

Tim Lee sees this as a bad idea.

Ultimately, I wish the LP would just go away. The structure of American elections dooms third parties to perpetual failure and obscurity, and that, in turn, creates a vicious cycle where the most talented activists and potential candidates go elsewhere, causing the party to be even more out of touch and politically tone-deaf in the next election. But given that the party is going to nominate somebody, Barr was probably the best choice. He’s a reasonably credible candidate, he’s got decent media skills, and so far, at least, I haven’t seen him take any positions that I strongly disagree with (since his road-to-damascus conversion in 2006, anyway). But I don’t plan to support his candidacy because while he may be the least-bad option on this November’s ballot, he certainly isn’t the kind of person I want associated with libertarianism. And every vote he gets will mean more visibility for the embarrassing candidate the party is likely to nominate in 2012.

Radley Balko is more optimistic:

Barr has the potential to win more votes than any LP nominee in history. If he helps the GOP learn that it’s time to boot the neocons and pay more attention to its limited government wing, all the better.

This is a good thing.

Jesse Walker likes Bob Barr, but sees Wayne Allyn Root as a disappointing VP choice.

But given the number of party activists who are wary of the former congressman, and given Barr’s deficiencies on several issues, it would have made sense to round off the ticket with a more hardcore libertarian. The ideal choice was Steve Kubby, a medical marijuana activist whose signature issue could have balanced Barr’s past support for the drug war. Instead the delegates opted for another member of the party’s conservative wing. Worse yet, the conservative they picked was Wayne Allyn Root, a man with the deportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants.

It might not matter in the long run. No one pays much attention to the fellow at the bottom of the ticket. But it’s a tone-deaf, disappointing decision.

Jim Henley sees hope that Barr on the ticket will mean the GOP will return to mouthing small government platitudes while ignoring small government principles.

I don’t expect Barr’s candidacy to really get Republicans to, in Radley’s words, “learn that it’s time to boot the neocons and pay more attention to its limited government wing,” because I don’t think the GOP’s limited-government wing is either very large or very popular. What might happen is, over the last few years, Republican leaders and para-intellectuals have stopped paying even lip-service to the Party’s libertarianish wing, even expressing open contempt – if Barr/Root cost McCain the election the GOP might return to the era of mouthing limited-government platitudes while reifying the corporate state.

Via the LAT: Peru sees cocaine making a comeback

Peru’s cocaine industry, the world’s largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is again on the upswing. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.

And this time, the traffickers may be more difficult to combat because the flashy kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.

Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighboring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90% of the U.S. market, according to the State Department. Moreover, President Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.

[...]

But Peru, the world’s No. 2 supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, East Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertilizer-nourished leaf now yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.

And the basic narrative on coca production continues:

During the 1990s, U.S.-backed enforcement efforts chased much of the coca trade to Colombia. Now, some say, the wheel is turning: Pressure in Colombia is shifting production here.

The new twist (although not as new as the story makes it out to be) is that instead of large drug organization like the Medellin or Cali cartels being the main managerial components of the trade, there are now a large number of small, basically independent operators who much be combated.

Of course, the basic story will remain the same: as long as there are a mounds of money to be made trafficking in cocaine, the US government can spend as much as it likes trying to stop it, the effort will be in vain. So instead of actually diminishing the amount of coca under cultivation, all the US essentially does is move the cultivation around (even incentivizing cultivators to grow in new areas).

I’m not sure what to make of the NYT feature “Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part for Obama.”

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

Vinai Thummalapally, a former California State University student who became friendly with Mr. Obama in college, remembered him as a model of moderation — jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing.

“If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We’d smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus,” recounted Mr. Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. “He was not even close to being a party animal.”

Are there really a significant number of people out there — let alone among the subset of the population that reads the New York Times — who were worried that Barack Obama was a dope fiend?

To the extent Obama has admitted to holding any policy views, I’ve been against them. And I don’t think he’s got the experience I’d like to see in a president. But he’s obviously a bright, organized, motivated fellow with a sterling record of academic achievement. It never really occurred to me that he’d gotten the top of his class at Harvard Law while stoned.

Megan McCardle has an excellent little post defending needle exchanges. Along the way, though, she does point out an interesting little incongruity in the policy:

Okay, a conservative or libertarian might argue, but drug users bring this trouble on themselves; why should I a) pay for clean syringes and b) implicitly sanction their irresponsible and self-destructive behavior? Well, okay, leave aside the morality of forcing people to use dirty syringes (really forcing, since as I pointed out in the last post, junkies use dirty works partly because the government won’t let them buy clean ones legally). The problem is, needles are cheap, and treating AIDS isn’t. Given that we’re not going to let them die, it makes much more fiscal sense just to give them the needles.

The libertarian answer is to eliminate both the restrictions on needle purchase, and the government program to distribute them, and I’d support that. But given that we are clearly not going to eliminate the syringe restrictions any time soon, we might as well save money by giving junkies some clean needles.

Personally, I find it strange that needle exchange programs are growing in number, while as Megan rightly points out, “we are clearly not going to eliminate the syringe restrictions any time soon.” That’s the kind of absurdity that only government policies can create.