Legalization of Drugs as a Boon to Developing Nations

John Tierney proposes that we legalize heroin and cocaine:

Drug prohibition in Bolivia and Afghanistan has done exactly what alcohol prohibition did in America: it has financed organized crime.

The only workable solution is to repeal prohibition. Give Afghan poppy growers a chance to sell opium for legal painkilling medicines; give Andean peasants a legal international market for their crops in products like gum, lozenges, tea and other drinks. As Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance proposes, “Put the coca back in Coca-Cola.”

While there is no real question but that prohibition has led to the development of organized crime networks and crime syndicates, both domestically and abroad, there are a few problems with the second quoted paragraph.

First, is he truly speaking only of repealing prohibition of heroin and cocaine as derived from plants? Because if we're speaking of a broader legalization, synthetic drugs enter the picture - drugs which can be significantly more potent (and significantly more pharmaceutically pure) than those derived from plants. If we include synthetics there will probably be no significant boost to the developing world, as synthetics will generally be cheaper and safer. For manufactured products like gum, it would likely be much easier to use a controlled amount of a synthetic drug than to import, process, and control the concentration of a "natural" drug.

Second, the coca is in Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola continues to use a "de-cocainized" extract of the coca leaf as a flavoring ingredient. It is a given that Coca-Cola, despite its massive scale, is not using much of the world's coca crops. With all due respect to the fact that a tea containing cocaine, even in small amounts, would have quite the kick as compared to a modern Coca-Cola, how much of a market does Tierney anticipate for coca tea and other drinks?

Third, is he proposing a free-for-all, with a return to patent medications containing perhaps inconsistent amounts of cocaine or an opiate extract? Absent significant regulation and control, you might end up with the same type of toxicity that is frequently found in street drugs, cut with whatever is cheap and available before being sold to addicts. (Besides - there's too much money involved. I'm quite confident that the major manufacturers of "adult beverages", pharmaceuticals, and tobacco would successfully lobby for enough regulation to create a significant barrier to entry for any smaller players.)

Synthetic drugs, particularly the class formerly referenced as "designer drugs", present a significant conundrum for legalization. It is conceivable that a company could design a drug that is technically not physically addictive, and arguably has minimum effect on performance, and is many senses much safer than "street drugs", but which turns out to be highly psychologically addictive. For that matter, if all bets are off and everything is made legal, why not design a drug that is highly physically addictive?

I agree with Tierney's sentiment, consistent through his articles on the war on drugs, that the war has proved to be a costly mistake. I agree with his suggestion that it's time to try something different. But I suspect that a true legalization would create at least as many problems, perhaps more, than the current drug war - at least domestically. This is an issue where you can think yourself in circles, and never come up with a good answer. Although I would feel more comfortable with Mr. Tierney's proposal if he would at least provide a 100% effective addiction treatment, and describe how it would be made universally available as part of his initiative.

(Do you have a solution? Please share....)

Tierney Spins in Cirles on "Honor"

Behind the NY Times firewall, John Tierney shares his opinions on honor, insisting that in the Middle East they follow a "traditional" concept of honor which is alien to us:

In the West we’ve redefined “honorable” as being virtuous, fair, truthful and sincere, but that’s not the traditional meaning. Honor meant simply the respect of the local “honor group” - the family, the extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy civilians. Telling the truth was secondary to saving face.

If the concepts are that far apart, at what point should we recognize that we are discussing two separate concepts, even if we classify both as "honor". If the West views an orange as a tasty piece of fruit, and the Middle East views it as the result of a combination of red and yellow pigments, the fact that we can agree that both are orange doesn't mean that we're discussing the same thing. It is far too simplistic to suggest that, even if in other cultures the ties are stronger, people in the West don't form intense bonds to friends and family, to the point of being willing to lie, steal, or kill to protect their "honor group". Isn't it more than a bit simplistic (and perhaps more than a bit bigoted) to suggest that honor in the Middle East is synonymous with lying to save face?

Tierney elaborates on Western "honor":

Instead of might-makes-right, Christianity preached turning the other cheek. Instead of according special honors to an elite class of men, it preached egalitarianism and love toward strangers. It emphasized inner virtue, not outward glory.

The result was a new honor system in the West, chivalry, that was an uneasy combination of Christian virtues and knightly violence. Eventually, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeois and democracy, the system evolved into what Bowman calls honor-by-merit, epitomized by the Victorian ideal of the gentleman who earns his reputation by working hard, playing fair, defending the weak and fighting for his country.

Another way of looking at this would be that the "honor group" became expanded to include a much larger population, and thus the requirement that to remain honorable you had to respect the rights of that larger population. A longer historical view might question what seems to be portrayed as a direct causal connection between Christianity and an interpretation of honor that arose in a small island nation some 18 centuries after Christ's birth. A more cynical view would be that this presentation of public virtue was not necessarily maintained behind closed doors. A more honest view would be that, whatever the Victorian reality may have been, we've not done a good job of living up to that ideal - and perhaps we never have.

The problem today, as Bowman sees it, is that the whole concept of defending one’s honor has been devalued in the West — mocked as an archaic bit of male vanity or childish macho chest-thumping. But if you don’t create a civilized honor culture, you risk ending up with the primitive variety.

“The honor system in Arab culture is the default honor system, the one you see in street gangs in America — you dis me, I shoot you,” says Bowman, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “We need a better system that makes it honorable to be protective of those who are weaker instead of lording it over them.”

If by honor we're talking about multi-generational honor-based blood feuds, well, yes... we of the West do tend to look down on that. But our culture is immersed in what Tierney contends is the "traditional" form of honor. We espouse a business culture which favors deception, if not outright lying, in order to maintain market advantage. We root for our local sports team, simply by virtue of its proximity. Our blood-soaked action heroes bring in hundreds of millions at the box office, and have even been known to ride their popularity into political office. We increasingly follow a concept of the meritocracy where the rich deserve to be wealthy beyond imagination, and the poor deserve penury. As a nation, we essentially shrug when the President demonstrates no particular concern about the loss of civilian life in a nation with which we are at war or which we don't deem to be of strategic importance, or with the secret detention and mistreatment of people our nation holds prisoner. When was the last national election where Victorian notions of honor were put ahead of winning?

Tierney's adopting a comparison of Arab honor to that of the inner city gang member? Is it that Tierney sees Arabs as being violent thugs, supporting themselves through crime, and who would kill a complete stranger over a pair of sneakers? Or is the parallel drawn exclusively in relation to taking revenge on someone for "dissing" you, in which case a less inflammatory example may have been G.W. Bush's five consecutive years of declining to attend the NAACP's annual convention? Perhaps instead, Tierney presents the parallel so that we can be drawn into his perspective - Arab culture, like street gang culture, is something to be eliminated without regret.

As for how you might transform the proposed Arab "primitive variety" of honor into a civilized honor culture, mabye Tierney would endorse attempting to introduce such concepts such as egalitarianism, and treating others as you want to be treated? He doesn't state what he has in mind, probably because the only things he could propose would undercut his thesis. As, for that matter, would any effort to examine the history of conflict in the Middle East through his prism of street gang philosophy. It's too easy to stand Tierney's arguments on their head: if Hezbollah hadn't "dissed" Israel by kidnapping its soldiers, and Israel weren't concerned about "looking weak" by negotiating a prisoner exchange, would we be seeing this massive military assault on Lebanon, or hearing Alan Dershowitz argue that "Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others"?

Your Next Promotion... Courtesy of Immigration

John Tierney is good enough to explain, using manicurists as his paradigm, how immigration leads to better jobs for English-speaking Americans:

Some Americans gave up their licenses, but the turnover wasn't much higher than it had been before the Vietnamese arrived. The chief effect of the competition was to discourage young Americans from entering the business, so over time the number of American manicurists dwindled.

"The Vietnamese didn't so much displace Americans as gradually replace them," Krynski says. "Some Americans stayed in the business in upscale salons, and others probably went into other occupations offering higher wages, like being a hairdresser."

Tierney himself prefers the upscale spas, comparing his experience getting a manicure from a Vietnamese immigrant who charged him $8, and a Beverly Hills manicurist who charges $150 for a house call.

Nguyen couldn't compete with Harris in ambience or conversation - I barely got her to utter her name. Harris spent half an hour working on my right hand, gently using compresses infused with tangerine and peppermint as well as a hazelnut and menthol scrub. Nguyen did my left hand in 10 minutes without explaining what she was doing.

(I understand in his next column he shares his experience test driving a Lincoln Navigator and a Toyota Yaris, and how surprised he is that the Navigator was more luxurious.)

A few days ago, Tierney suggested that we need immigrants to staff the assisted living centers and nursing homes of the future - "As the population ages, it’s going to get harder to find young people to do those jobs unless the Republicans in the House go along with the Senate’s plan to add legal immigrants". Not a peep, though, about how many people who would otherwise have become nursing home aides have upgraded their career plans to nurse, doctor, or administrator.

I'm not going to argue that workers in relatively low-skill, low-wage service jobs can't find alternatives, and perhaps can even take an extra semester or two at beauty school (or the equivalent) to become licensed to both do nails and cut hair. I also think Tierney's argument is a red herring, as the real risk to workers is not so much the loss of jobs or increased competition for jobs which must be performed by local workers, but the loss of jobs which can now be performed in other nations. When a worker who is supporting her family on a middle class income has her position eliminated, or when he is told that his wages are being slashed as part of his employer's reorganization, the possibility of "retraining" as a hairdresser or computer technician has limited appeal - they would become entry level workers competing with a pool of much younger, equally qualified job candidates.

These aren't issues that we can easily address, nor are they trends we can easily reverse. The more reactionary proposals, such as retreating from globalization or closing the borders to immigration, would likely do more harm than good. But to the extent that we can do something, I don't think it is particularly helpful to pretend that the well-documented divergence of wealth in this country does not result, at least in part, from the loss of job and income opportunity for ordinary workers. Or, for that matter, to pretend that there is not a problem because California manicurists seem to have done okay for themselves.