Fisking Giordano on Chile, Marijuana and the Free Market

I will offer a worthy fact-check and response to Baylen's critique of my Reporter's Notebook entry shortly.

In the meantime, this is just to say that I welcome the debate, with a worthy adversary, with whom we both agree on the pressing need to end drug prohibition, and that I personally bumped Baylen's comments to the center-column here because I think this debate is long overdue in the drug policy reform movement, and I'm thrilled that finally at least one person on the "economic libertarian" side of the spectrum has risen to the challenge to debate the role of "free market" politics in drug prohibition.

So, all ye co-publishers, play nice with Baylen! This is not personal... It's politics... and he's doing a great service by his willingness to debate.

I personally intend to teach him a few things that, it's obvious, he doesn't know!

Like Jack the Ripper, I will cut up Baylen's arguments into parts, one at a time.

This will give him, and everyone, a chance to analyze the real facts and truths one at a time, so that they can't be swept under the rug of a religion wrapped as an ideology.

I will start with unmasking his "ideological" bias, and demonstrate how it creates an inaccurate prejudice and assumption in his own mind, in that he can't see who, historically, have done all the heavy lifting in the movement to legalize drugs, towering over the marginal contributions of the Libertarian Party and its acolytes.

It is important to begin here, because Baylen makes a very self-serving statement for his ideology: He says that his group, "libertarians," has been the "one" group that has carried the fight "consistently" and "always."

Baylen, please don't break your arm patting yourself and your ideology on the back. By taking credit for the hard work of others (a common "economic libertarian" trait, to ignore the delicate question of who really does the work, and "makes wealth," in our society), you are dishonoring the contributions, sacrifices, and, most importantly, the victories of another much larger tendency in American and world politics that has not only been as consistent as your misnamed "libertarians" but has been more effective and won us our only battles throughout the 90-year history of drug prohibition… and throughout the 2,000 year battle against authoritarianism and theocracy (religion being a major underpinning of the drug war says my old economic libertarian pal Thomas Szasz, according to his seminal book Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers… yes, Baylen, some of my best friends call themselves "libertarians!")

Baylen writes:

Al Giordano erroneously targets the one ideological group that has always consistently defended and fought for drug legalization: libertarians.

It is demonstrably false that this small, marginal, male-dominated with a few token Virgina Postrels always placed on stage, mercantile group of "economic libertarians" is the "one" group that has carried the legalization water.

Here's one important example to the contrary:

In 1987, two years before "economic libertarians" Milton Friedman or George Schultz had said squat in public about legalizing drugs, my best friend and mentor, the late Abbie Hoffman, wrote an entire book against the drug war, Steal This Urine Test (1987, Penguin Press), in which he called for legalization of all drugs. In fact, he had said it back in 1967 in his seminal work Revolution for the Hell of It, and in his 1971 bestseller Steal This Book, recently republished by Four Walls Eight Windows press, with, full disclosure, an introduction by yours truly.

Now, unless Baylen is including Abbie - who in one of whose final letters, penned to Dave Dellinger three months before Abbie's death, asserted, "I am of the Left" - in his so-called "one ideological group" of "libertarians" who have been consistent fighters for drug legalization, the existence of Abbie Hoffman - and millions of Americans who are closer to his political legacy than to that of the Libertarian Party - immediately disproves the first myth that Baylen has swallowed whole.

I'll agree that most "economic liberatarians," by and large, have consistently said that they favor drug legalization. But have they been the "one" group, or even the most effective?

What about the "social justice libertarians" of the American Civil Liberties Union who have fought against the drug war in Court and elsewhere since the Nixon years?

What about the decades-old National Organization for Reform of the Marijuana Laws (NORML) and its counter-cultural bases of support? Or the equally veteran High Times magazine?

Were these projects - consistent over decades in having "defended and fought for drug legalization" - created and supported by economic libertarians? Hell no! They came out of a distinct ideological tendency: Abbie's.

If Baylen doesn't acknowledge Abbie's as a real "ideology," well, that's because it was part of a much longer current for human freedom that was and is an "anti-ideology ideology."

It is the current of Giordano Bruno, Galileo and the original heretics who said the world was round in violation of religious doctrine.

It is the current of Proudhoun breaking with Marx, in the 1800s, against the bureaucratic tendencies of communism, who in his seminal work, "What Is Property?" opened his book by answering, "Property Is Theft."

It is the current of Nestor Makhno - see his The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays - the peasant leader of the Ukraine, who won that vast region for the Russian revolution only to be betrayed, persecuted, and exiled by Lenin after Makhno led the organization of the Ukraine into a stateless federation of workers' councils with no centralized government and no private property ownership.

It is the current of Emma Goldman who said "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution."

It is the current of Mohandas K. Gandhi - the greatest strategic leader of the 20th century! - who understood that "free" means you don't have to pay for basic human necessities…

This current in favor of human freedom from imposition has never embraced the silly idea that "the market" is inherently "good" or even positive. It recognizes that "the market" is itself a form of State Power over human beings and our freedom… and fights against both those impositions as one and the same…

It is not the devotees of a pro-market ideology that have carried the heavy water buckets for the antiprohibitionist cause (it wasn't in the 1920s and early 30s struggle against alcohol prohibition either, but, rather, the rough-and-tumble immigrant worker groups and women's organizations that carried the spear that forced that democratic socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt to enact its repeal in January 1933)…

And I, for one, am sick and tired of a grouposcule of privileged individuals taking credit for my tendency's labors and sacrifices, or, worse, trying to impose their ideological label upon it by claiming to be the "one" true antiprohibitionist religion. They sound like Christian and Islamic fundamentalists to me.

Before the 1980s, really, the word "libertarian," in most of the world, meant "libertarian communist" - the anarchists (more accurately the anarchosyndicalists)… We who have been persecuted by the centralized bureaucracies of the right and of the left, who have been marginalized and massacred by both the traditional State of governments and the new global state known as the Market and its occupying army that is the Commercial Media, because we have always done the hard work, and paid the greatest price, in the fight for human freedom.

Today's "economic libertarians" are imposters. The Authentic Libertarians are those who fight against all forms of State Power, and see through the snake-oil sales pitch that dishonestly claims that the only form of State Power comes from governments, or that the Market - top-down, hierarchical, un-elected, un-democratic, lifeless, cruel, inhuman, dictatorial and responsible for more death, carnage, starvation, illness, and human suffering than all governments combined throughout history - is like some benevolent god or "perfect order of nature."

To successfully remove the War on Drugs, we must remove its underpinnings, and that means that the un-elected "Market" that buys governments like commodities futures must be neutralized in this battle.

So, I'll begin with that: a reminder that there is a working class to all successful political struggles throughout history, and to rob us of credit for our labor and sacrifices on behalf of another damn "one true religion" merely replicates the same injustice inherent in the top-down prohibition of drugs.

Although speaking to the issues of racism and black power at the time (1966), Stokely Carmichael is relevant on this topic as well. You can't talk about libertarianism, free markets or any form of political system based on economics -- in the United States at least -- without considering Carmichael's thesis.

From "What We Want"

Ultimately, the economic foundation of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States -- and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south -- must be liberated. For a century this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same -- a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born.

Seems to me that a "free market" is a form of rationalized exploitation; it's a system where there are always going to be far more losers than winners, where the civil rights of not only people of color, but of all people of conscience, are laid to waste by the greedy aspirations of the few -- typically those born with the most poker chips.

Libertarianism (or capitalism lite) seems to assume that everyone in the game is playing fair, that the invisible hand of the market is doing more than jacking itself off.

Libertarianism fails to account, in any substantive way, at least as I see it, for the deeper problem we have in this country, USA.

From Carmichel's essay:

The reality is that this nation, from top to bottom, is rascist; that racism is not primarily a problem of "human relations" but of an exploitation maintained -- either actively or through silence -- by the society as a whole. Camus and Sarte have asked, can a man condemn himself? Can they stop blaming us, and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion?

Is libertarianism truly an expression of a "revolutionary emotion?" I don't think so. I think it is just another way to rationalize our ghettoes, (the hearbeat of our "war on drugs"), to avoid honestly confronting the shame.

I'll stay tuned for more debate on this topic.

Bill is definitely right that its impossible to talk seriously about the power dynamics of drug prohibition without addressing the power structure of white supremacy.  Certainly in U.S. history, the prohibition of specific drugs has been linked to racism from the outlawing of the ceremonial use of peyote, to the anti-Chinese racism linked to the prohibition of opium, to the demonization of African-Americans and Chicanos that drove marijuana prohibition.  And racism in this country has always been linked to economic issues -- the control of land and the exploitation of cheap or free labor.

 The persecution of the counter-culture was linked to the fact that these predominantly white young people were seen as race and class traitors, rejecting the culture of affluence and exploitation they were born into.  

Certainly, the drug war today can't be understood without looking at the reality of the prison-industrial complex.  And Angela Davis has demonstrated convincingly in her work in recent years that the contemporary prison system, which had its origins in the post-Civil War south where it was used as a means of controling the recently "emancipated" Black population, represents a continuation of slavery.

We also have to take into account the role of the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies in introducing heroin and crack into poor communities of color in the U.S. as a means of control and as a means of criminalizing poverty.  As Ani DiFranco says, "The old dog's got a new trick, its called criminalize the symptoms while you spread the disease."

My friend John Schuchardt, one of the founders of the radical Catholic Plowshares movement, has said that it is impossible to understand any power structures in this country without acknowledging that this country's wealth was built primarily through the forced labor of kidnapped African slaves and through genocide against the Native American population.  Certainly the prohibition of some drugs and the introduction and promotion of others is linked to this same history.

Going back further, we can see that drug prohibition has always been about the destruction of indigenous, land based cultures.  In medieval and early modern Europe drug prohibition took the form of witch burnings -- the execution of people, mostly women, who performed rituals linked to the cycle of the seasons using consciousness-altering plants.   This represented a genocide against the tribal peoples whose cultures and religions pre-dated the forced imposition of creativity by the Roman empire and its successors. (See Terrence McKenna's Food of the Gods)   Modern western anarchism traces its roots back to some of those who resisted the religious, economic, and technological impositions of empires.   Alchemy represented the last publicly practiced strain of European traditional magick (though in much of Europe the old ways have been maintained through secretive matrilineal oral traditions,) and in the seventeenth century the defense of alchemy, along with the defense of common lands, spiritual autonomy, and local sovereignty, gave rise to radical movements such as the Diggers and the Levelers who influenced later Left libertarian movements.

Byron, Shelly, and other British Romantics who later championed both nature-based spirituality and Left politics were all opium enthusiaists.

Its no mistake that the Greenwich Village intellectual culture of the 1920's and 1930's that gave rise to the emergence of contemporary North American anarchism was also fascinated by mescaline and peyote.

Of course we can also link the persecution of drug users to the central ideology of monotheism which posits a single truth, a single true consciousness, a single totalizing reality -- all of which are undermined by the ritual use of psychedellics.  Gary Snyder and Ed Abbey, both heirs to the Kropotkin-Prudhon-Goldman anarchist tradition both made compelling cases that the imposition of monotheism represented the beginning of totalitarianism.

Aright, enough disjointed rambing for now . . .

I'm taking this point by point, Jackie R. style, and some points are smaller than others. This is small, but I think terms and words are important, especially as we're setting up the language of the debate, and it has to do with Baylen's use of the term "fisking."

Baylen writes:

I offer up now a point-by-point rebuttal of the arguments made by Giordano, an otherwise fine person, using a blogging tactic known as “fisking.”

In fact, the term "fisking" is used only by a certain neoconservative sliver of the blogosphere that favors the Iraq war. The term comes from point-by-point critiques of journalistic work by Iraq war critic Robert Fisk of the Independent of London. And because these neocon bloggers (mainly Instapundit and his fellow pro-war cheerleaders) are often in a kind of Beavis & Butthead boy's club narcissistic self-obsession, they giggle that it sounds like "fisting," and think they invented the concept of point-by-point rebuttals, which, I'm old enough to remember, existed before blogs did.

You won't find the term "fisking" used outside of that little slice of blogdom. For example, over at the Daily Kos, which has beaten Instapundit for the crown of most-read blog, and has 5,000 more bloggers than Instapundit, you never see the term used, although you'll see many point-by-point rebuttals. Why? Those folks are against the war. They don't feel it necessary to take a cheap shot at Robert Fisk every time they debate a text!

I am a little bit surprised to see Baylen use this pro-war term because as I understood it he was against the war. He implies as much above when he cheers Mexican President Vicente Fox:

But when Fox did choose to take a stand against the policies of the U.S., it was to oppose the unjust American attack on Iraq. For this, Fox was sent to the doghouse, with former ally George W. Bush holding up the approval of Mexican truckers who sought permission –previously denied – to bring their goods into the U.S.

Thus, Bush imposed restrictions on free trade with Mexico – breaking the rules and spirit of NAFTA – in order to punish Fox. For Fox to push for legalization of drugs at a time when the edgy U.S. is launching willy-nilly attacks half-way around the world would be courageous, true, but foolhardy.

Now, I read the Mexican news daily, in Spanish, and I wonder if Baylen would be willing to make a wager and part with yet another $100 dollars. When did Fox "take a stand against" the Iraq war? Show me the quote, the date, the cite. The fact is that Fox never took such a stand.

What Baylen is confusing here is the fact that the Mexican Congress - controlled by opposition parties to Fox - took a stand against Mexico participating in the so-called Iraq coalition, and for this Mexico was "punished" by the U.S.... and that Fox, unable to speak for his nation on the issue, his hands tied, never spoke up in favor of the war... that is quite different from "taking a stand" against the war!

Finally, on this point of Mexico and drug policy, Baylen writes:

Is it far-fetched that Bush might invade a Mexico that has legalized drugs? Of course not. Remember that Bush’s father – by far the more sane of the two – invaded former ally Panama after that country’s leader was publicly revealed to be involved in the drugs trade.

In fact, I have long argued that it is impossible for the United States to militarily invade Mexico - or even place an economic embargo upon it - without causing conditions that would fast lead a rebellion by United States citizens against their own government at home, and that Mexico enjoys a unique power in this sense.

Mexico, a nation of about 100 million people, that shares a gigantic border with four United States, including the big electoral voting ones California and Texas, has great power in this equation.

The reason is simple: Every time the peso drops in value, another million Mexicans cross the border into the U.S. to seek the lost opportunity (for this reason the United States spends a fortune each year propping up the Mexican peso). Immigrants flooding over the border causes many more political problems than drugs crossing over the border in terms of public reaction, especially in the Southwest.

A military invasion would be even worse (let's not forget that Mexico has a proud history of beating back U.S. incursions into its territory, and winning some of those battles militarily)! It would lead to a dissolving border, along thousands of kilometers, impossible to patrol, and a huge exodus of Mexicans into the United States. Think that the U.S. public is going to tolerate its government's causing of that for an El Paso Minute? It is an impossible, pie in the sky, scenario.

Sure, the U.S. can invade Panama or place an economic embargo on Cuba or Haiti... small countries, with less impact (although, in the case of Cuba and Haiti tightening of embargoes has historically lead to waves of immigrants into Florida that, although very much smaller than what would come from Mexico, have had profound political consequences inside the United States).

Mexico, yes, does have the unique power to reform drug laws without the U.S. being able to invade or harm it economically. It has even more power than Canada in this regard. It has the weapon of an exodus that heads North at the slightest provocation or recession down South.

There are other reasons why Fox has not done anything to reform drug laws. They have more to do with his own administration's vulnerability as having been corrupted by drug trafficking, and the constant blackmail by the U.S. of charging Mexican officials with drug crimes. But it's not, and it never has been, fear of "invasion," another not-very-well-thought-out scenario offered by my esteemed colleage on the right side of the screen!

      This seems to be a pretty good debate.  Libertarians (the few I've read or met) seem to be long on ideology, short on the reality and recent history of the world.  The especially don't seem to be able to account for past injustices and just assume the "market" will take care of everything.
      Like I said about business students here at UT, "such men are dangerous."  Especially since they'll be running America (and thus, the world).