The War on Drugs

 Posted by  Judicial System, Legal Reform, U.S. Politics  No Responses »
Aug 192005
 

Drug use is a problem. I don’t need to run through the statistics or tell the stories of what drug addiction can do to people and to families. We’ve all seen enough sitcom “special episodes” as it is; I don’t need to rehash them. Let’s focus instead on public policy. Believe it or not, our drug policies have not been a complete failure. They have successfully held down the number of users and effectively ostracized those who do choose to do drugs.

The cost, however, has been high. We spend billions of dollars every year attempting to stem the flow of incoming drugs and arresting, housing, and releasing the same people for the same drug crimes over and over again. Drugs are still available to virtually anyone who wants them, at expensive but not insane prices, and most people, during their lifetimes, will at least try an illegal drug of some kind. And so, our society has become frustrated with the war on drugs, and we turn to the little things that we know how to do, in the futile hopes of seeing better results. We ratchet up the penalties for drug use, instituting ever more draconian “three-strikes” and “mandatory minimums” laws, that eliminate any chance for the criminal to get a lenient sentence. We produce an endless stream of public service announcements for kids and teenagers. And we keep moving to new areas, chasing the dream of an untainted, drug-free, “safe” community in which to raise our children.

But, personally, I think that there are better, and more efficient ways of “winning the war on drugs”. First of all, we need to rationalize our penal code. As it is currently written, the penalties for carrying crack are in many cases higher than the penalties for carrying the equivalent weight of cocaine, even though the cocaine contains the same drug in a higher concentration. A thief committing the same crime will get a significantly higher sentence if he has a joint in his pocket, because then that crime is labeled a “drug crime” and is automatically subject to a stricter set of penalties. These things aren’t rational. We should rethink our penal code and set it up to punish drug users based on the demand and dangers of the particular drug they possess.

Relatedly, we need to ease up our penalties on drug users. For one thing, lets start treating minor drug users, caught for simple possession, as patients and not criminals. These people need drug rehab, not jail time. Drugs are available in prison for those who want them, and once the jail time is up, the addict is simply going to go right back out onto the street and use again. Instead, let’s treat the addiction, get the addict off drugs, and try to give him the tools to fight his addiction when he is let back out onto the street. Maybe then he wouldn’t be returning so soon. Also, get rid of the mandatory minimum and three-strikes sentencing. Let lawyers, judges, and juries do their jobs and decide each case based on the merits of that case.

We also need to get serious about protecting our borders and package inspecting. This should help in our anti-terrorism efforts as well. The better job we can do inspecting packages and containers that come into the country, and controlling the flow of goods and people that move across our borders, the safer we will all be. I’m not advocating building walls or sending weekend warrior militia groups to the Mexican border; instead I mean actually putting our money where our mouth is and stopping some of the illicit material as it comes into the country, instead of waiting for it to show up on our street corners. It is easier to police a perimeter than it is to constantly monitor the entire area of the United States.

Finally, I’m beginning to believe that we need to rethink our attitudes towards marijuana. From what I can tell, marijuana is not all that much more dangerous than tobacco or alcohol. In fact, if marijuana were introduced onto the US market today, it could be easily marketed and sold as a dietary supplement, with the little US regulation that designation implies. Marijuana is a not especially addictive relaxant and hallucinogen. In fact, the DEA is more than happy to tell you about a synthetic, prescription drug that contains the same active ingredient. The primary arguments against Marijuana are that a) it is very unhealthy to smoke and b) it is a gateway drug. The former is a good argument for why marijuana should be regulated, but I’m not sure that it is an argument for why marijuana should be banned; unless you want to ban tobacco as well. (Personally, I’d be happy to regulate them both as prescription drugs…) As for marijuana being a “gateway drug”, I’m not sure I buy that argument. It is true that most people who use narcotics and other stronger drugs used marijuana first. But I think that probably has to do with the fact that these are people who are looking for chemical stimulants who don’t mind breaking the law, and marijuana is simply more widely available and cheaper than heroine or cocaine. In fact, I’d bet that the vast majority of them had gotten drunk before they used marijuana; in other words, that their “real” gateway drug was alcohol and not pot. So again, I’m not quite sure why that means marijuana ought to be completely illegal.

Now, I am not trying to argue that pot should be completely unregulated. In my own, ideal world, I would probably increase the regulations on tobacco, and then regulate marijuana in the same way. That means no advertising, no smoking in public places, no underage smoking, and all the rest. But that’s just what I think; how about you?

Oh, Give Me a Home…

 Posted by  Bush Administration, U.S. Politics  5 Responses »
Aug 172005
 

It’s August, which means three things. First, it signifies that summer is past its apex, and fall is quickly approaching. Football, cooler weather, and school for the kids are all right around the corner. Second, it means my birthday is rapidly approaching. And third, it means that President Bush is on vacation. Every year, the President spends the entire month of August at his ranch near Crawford, TX; returning to the White House sometime around Labor Day. And every year, he is ridiculed by liberals for taking such an extended vacation when he ought to be running the country. This year, with the Cindy Sheehan case, the President’s approval ratings going into the toilet, the Iraqi Constitution stalled, and no major policy initiatives passed this year, the criticism seems to be getting worse. The New York Times ran two separate editorials on the President’s vacation today. So, let’s try to separate out a little fact from fiction, before we rush into judgment on the President’s work ethic.

For those of you who don’t know, President Bush owns a ranch outside of Crawford that consists of about 160 acres. Crawford itself is a small town (less than 1,000 residents), that sits less than 25 miles west of Waco, TX (home of Baylor University, my parent’s alma mater, and more than 100,000 residents), about one hundred miles away from both Austin (to the south) and Dallas (to the north). Crawford is also less than 30 miles from Fort Hood, a large Army base. In other words, the ranch is certainly not urban, but neither is it in the middle-of-nowhere. Just in terms of the logistics of a president setting up shop, President Bush’s property is about the best that you could expect from a Texas ranch.

Also, keep in mind, that the President’s vacations look very different from yours or mine. When we go on vacation we go alone, we turn off the cell-phone and pager, and we do our best to forget that work even exists. When the President goes on vacation, he travels with his full staff and security entourage. They set up his location with security fencing and metal detectors to keep him safe, and with communications equipment to make sure that he can still do his job. And he is expected to work; yes, he spends some time every afternoon going on bike rides and clearing underbrush, but he also is still expected to get daily intelligence and security briefings, to orchestrate some amount of political maneuvering in preparation for the next Congressional term, and to deal with the daily emergencies that Presidents have to deal with. And if he ever needs to get back to Washington, he can be there within five hours. The president’s productivity is affected more by his own work ethic than his location in either Washington or Crawford, and there are legitimate questions about Mr. Bush’s work ethic. However, if spending some time in Texas once a year helps clear the man’s head, more power to him.

That isn’t to say that his annual trips to Crawford are wise. First of all, the trips send a bad message. President Bush was hired to do a tough job. He’s got perhaps the most difficult, but also the most powerful, position in the world, and he fought hard (twice) to get there. And it’s a short-term gig; two four year terms, followed by an early retirement into private life doing whatever you want to. As such, the public wants the President to be always working, or at least almost always working, during that time. Presidents give up their lives as private citizens during their time in the White House, and part of that sacrifice is to give up your personal time as well. The President is supposed to lead, and I don’t think it shows good leadership to allow your people to see you taking a five week vacation; especially not when most of them are lucky to get ten days, if any at all. Furthermore, I think it sends the wrong message to the troops, many of whom are being held in extended combat duty, to see their commander-in-chief taking such an extended vacation in the middle of a war.

Second of all, the extended vacations strike me as incredibly selfish. For the President and the First Lady, coming to Crawford is coming home. For everyone on his staff and security detail, and of course the phalanx of reporters assigned to cover the president, it means leaving behind their lives and families in Washington to go visit Texas in the middle of August. (And if you haven’t been to Texas in August before, let me assure you that it is extremely hot.) All so that Mr. Bush can do some posing for the camera as a good’ol Texas rancher.

So yeah, I have no problem with the President spending some time, periodically, at his ranch to clear his head and get away. And the summers, when Congress is out of session, is a perfectly fine time to do it. But spending a full-month away from the office is a luxury that few of us can afford, and certainly isn’t what we are paying the President for.

Let Her Be

 Posted by  Bush Administration, Foreign Policy, Middle East, U.S. Politics, War in Iraq  3 Responses »
Aug 162005
 

In case you haven’t been counting, we are entering Day 10 of Cindy Sheehan’s vigil to meet with the President. To refresh your memory, Ms. Sheehan is the mother of a marine who was killed in Iraq. She has actually met with the President before; Mr. Bush has, on a number of occasions, met with family members of soldiers killed in Iraq. Ms. Sheehan claims that the president acted inappropriately, by attempting to chum around with the families, and treated the event like a photo-op, instead of actually listening to her concerns. She feels, apparently, that her son’s life was thrown away for no good reason; that the President lied about the war to the American public, and that lie led directly to her son’s death; and that the President owes it to the families of those who have died to look them in the face and clearly explain why we went to war, why we are still there, and when the rest of the troops can come home. And so, she’s camped out in front of Mr. Bush’s Crawford, TX ranch (the President spends every August at his ranch; sort of a working vacation), and has since been the beneficiary of substantial media attention, and the rallying point of groups of protesters and war supporters.

She’s also been treated unfairly, by both sides. The Right has been taking no small amount in slandering her. David Horowitz, a prominent conservative columnist and author, has called her unpatriotic. Fred Barnes, a conservative columnist and FOX News contributor, has said that she’s crazy. Conservative political blogs have said that she’s dishonoring her son, and all the other soldiers and families who have fought, or are fighting, in the war. They’ve called her a liar and a tool of the political left. They’ve begun parsing her various interviews, looking for inconsistencies which they can use to attack her.

The left, meanwhile, has been rallying around her as the latest cause celebre. She’s been getting prominent support from all of those liberals that conservatives love to hate, most notably Michael Moore and moveon.org. And the conservative critics do have a point; many of those rallying to her cause are simply attaching to her as a way to get their political message across, without any real concern for her own plight or her own son’s death.

Look, this is a lady who lost her son. I’ve never even had children, much less had them die. I cannot begin to imagine her sense of loss, her anger, or her confusion. And I don’t blame her for feeling misled and frustrated by the war in Iraq, and by the necessity of her son’s death. President Bush never has given an adequate explanation for why our sons and daughters need to go die in Iraq, nor has he given any adequate explanation for what our goals in Iraq are now (much less how those goals will actually be met). So, if I were in Ms. Sheehan’s shoes, I would be feeling pretty angry and confused too. And if she wants to channel that anger into her own crusade to actually sit down with the President and have a frank conversation about the war, more power to her.

But to personally attack her, or anyone else who simply exercises their rights to speak out against the war, is just wrong. Being an American means that you have to allow those who disagree with you to speak their minds, just like they have to let you speak yours. To call someone unpatriotic or accuse them of undermining the war effort is sad, pathetic, and flat-out un-American. On the other side, those who oppose the war need to give this lady some space. Let her say what she wants, give her own message and her own story, and come to her own conclusions. It isn’t right to try to co-opt someone else’s message because they become the hot story, if you are only planning on dropping them the next day for the next “popular cause”.

Just everyone, let this woman be. Let her grieve in her own way, and pursue her cause in her own way. And let’s all pray that she finds the answers, and the comfort, that she is looking for.

Cautious Optimism

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, Israel and Palestine, Middle East  2 Responses »
Aug 152005
 

Today’s big news, as I’m sure you have all heard by now, is that Israel is in the process of unilaterally dismantling its settlements inside the Gaza strip, functionally ceding all territory in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. Prime Minister Sharon has been pushing for this for well over a year. Security was difficult and costly and their existence in Gaza caused significant resentment among the Palestinians. The settlements held thousands of Israelis and were surrounded by millions of Palestinians. Most of the settlements were not even close to the Israeli border; they are spread along the coast, and the majority of them are actually nearer to Egypt than to Israel proper. In order to protect the settlements and ensure adequate access to them from Israel, the Israeli army was forced to maintain a large presence within Gaza, which then undermined Palestinian sovereignty. In other words, from a diplomatic and military perspective, withdrawing from Gaza is absolutely the right thing to do.

Let’s also hope that this is a step towards a lasting peace. On the one hand, the pull-out should be a boon for the Palestinian Authority, and President Abbas. This gives the Palestinian Authority the chance to exercise sovereignty over a substantial, unified piece of territory with very little interference from the Israeli army. It eliminates one hurdle to a peace deal; dismantling of those particular settlements no longer needs to be negotiated because its happened already. And it is a great symbolic gesture.

On the other hand, however, this could actually harm the short-run prospects for peace and stability. First of all, the Palestinian Authority suddenly has no more excuses. Their viability as a legitimate Palestinian government now rests on nothing except for their ability to govern a peace of pure-Palestinian territory. And if they fail to consolidate authority within the Gaza, the Palestinian government will collapse entirely. Furthermore, Hamas and other militant groups will be fighting hard to take credit for the withdrawal; if they are successful the pull-out might actually legitimize extremist groups who are pushing for violent solutions in the West Bank.

The political situation within Israel is equally dicey. The settler movement is putting all of its cards on the table, in an attempt to show their political strength, to delay or sabotage the pull-out, and to scare any future Israel government from withdrawing any further from occupied territories. Sharon has thus far managed to weather these attacks, although it has cost him substantial support from within his own cabinet and even within his own party. This issue is splitting Israeli conservatives right down the middle; if Sharon doesn’t come out on top in these battles, the hard-liners will be vindicated and further conciliatory steps could become politically impossible.

Finally, remember that Sharon is not exactly a peace-loving, why can’t we all just get along, kind of guy. He built his career on the support of Israeli expansion and has engineered a campaign of brutal retaliation against any terrorist attack. Also, notice that throughout this whole process he has not given up Israel’s claim to have full sovereignty over all of its citizens living within the occupied territory. He could have just pulled the army out, set a deadline, and said that any Israelis left behind would be subject to Palestinian sovereignty; what usually happens when territory is ceded from one country to another. Instead, he’s forcibly evicting the Israeli settlers, while maintaining Israel’s rights over these people and their territory up until the point that they actually leave.

To be blunt, I have no idea what all of this adds up to. I don’t know what Sharon’s motives in pushing for the withdrawal really are. Nor do I know how this will affect the internal political dynamics within either the Israeli or Palestinian governments. So be optimistic, but also keep in mind that recent history is full of false-starts and false-steps when it comes to Middle East peace.

Abortion, Legality, and Real Choice

 Posted by  Abortion, Education, Healthcare, Issues, U.S. Politics  17 Responses »
Aug 052005
 

For the last two decades, the abortion debate in the United States has focused almost exclusively on issues of legality and direct regulation. The big debates have been about partial-birth abortion, parental consent laws, third-trimester abortions, waiting periods, Medicare coverage, etc. In other words, about how easy or difficult we want to make it for parents who want to have an abortion to actually have one. The pro-choice, pro-life debate largely spans these issues, with conservative groups wanting to do everything possible to make abortions difficult to get, and liberal groups doing everything possible to make them easy. My wife and I both think that this debate misses the point.

We would like to see the actual number of abortions performed decline; to be honest neither of us really care whether or not abortion is illegal. If mothers want abortions, doctors will give them abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal. We would rather see the debate focus on the social, political, and economic factors that drive women to want to have abortions in the first place. This means confronting tough issues like unwanted pregnancy, adequate medical care for pregnant women and young families, streamlining adoption procedures and providing reasonable abortion alternatives, and ensuring jobs that pay a living wage with decent medical leave so that women feel comfortable actually being pregnant.

To be honest, these issues don’t originate with us. On the left there are groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights. On the right they look more like Feminists for Life, a group that has become prominent recently because of the active participation of the wife of our most recent Supreme Court nominee. Sojourners, a Christian magazine that pushes for progressive political changes, has often spoken about these issues. In fact, Jim Wallis, one of their founders, just published an editorial in the New York Times in which he explicitly mentions the need to move beyond the traditional pro-life vs. pro-choice debate.

But despite all of these groups, this framing of the debate has received very little national attention. Pro-choice and women’s groups still do not attempt to associate these sorts of issues with abortion, even though they are generally sympathetic with the goals of giving women more resources to make better choices with their lives. They keep the issues separate, and then focus on reproductive rights to the detriment of other women’s issues, which prevents them from potentially building the coalitions necessary to actually make a difference. On the other side, pro-life groups have allied themselves with small-government conservatives who are likely to oppose any expansion of taxes or regulation of small-business; even though those kinds of regulations and taxes might very well make a huge impact in the abortion rate.

So, if their are both liberal and conservative groups pushing for an expansion of the abortion discussion beyond simple matters of legality, why has the debate remained stagnate? Why haven’t the main agenda-setting groups on either side of the aisle picked up this debate in an attempt to affect real change? The cynical answer, of course, is that the groups see more power for themselves in the current stagnated debate; power that they would lose if the abortion rate actually declined substantially due to other means. While there is almost certainly an element of truth here, I don’t believe that solution fully answers the question; there are too many people on both sides who honestly think that they are doing the right thing.

Going deeper than that, I think we first need to consider the difficulty of forging such an alliance in the face of the most obvious, and controversial, non-legal solution: sex-education and birth control. The most logical, obvious answer to “how do we lower the abortion rate?” is to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies. For many liberals, the most direct and obvious way to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies is to provide better, more thorough, sex-education and expanded access to birth-control. That means supporting sex-ed in schools, increasing the ease with which women can gain access to both the Pill and the Morning-After Pill, and increased condom distribution at high-schools and universities. And of course, most conservative Christians will look at that plan of attack and immediately balk due to both moral and practical concerns. They will talk about the immorality of sex before marriage and that we shouldn’t be encouraging it. They will talk about the lack of fail-safe alternatives to abstinence, and the problems with condemn and other contraceptive use. This is an issue that has scuttled foreign aid and AIDS relief to Africa for years; it will easily scuttle any potential compromise between liberal feminists and conservative Christians over abortion alternatives. Which means that in order for this potential compromise to emerge, and I feel it can emerge, contraception and sex-education have to be put on the back-burner.

And this brings us to the point of disagreement between my wife and I. My wife thinks that it is possible to bring both sides together, openly and honestly, to compromise on these positions. That it is possible to use the same language, write the same op-ed piece, and hand out the same brochures to convince both sides that the abortion rate in this country is too high. After all, she says, both sides should fundamentally want the same things, so it should be possible to convince them at the same time.

Except, personally, I think that this is the other primary reason that the aforementioned groups have so far failed to shift the debate. Pro-life and pro-choice groups speak completely different languages, and the approach the same policy for completely different reasons. If I called into Dr. James Dobson’s radio program and told him that we ought to be lowering the abortion rate, he would absolutely agree with me. And then he would proceed to tell me about how we are accomplishing our goal by limiting access to third trimester abortions, changing the faces on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and striving to create a “culture of life”. Instead, to approach the Religious Right, the first words have to be “We can lower the abortion rate by X amount by changing Y policy”, where Y may have to do with healthcare, maternity leave, or any other of a variety of issues. And, you need to stress that supporting these causes does not necessitate altering support for traditional pro-life causes, which are near and dear to their hearts.

On the other side, if I were to talk to the president for the National Organization for Women about lowering the abortion rate, she would probably just look at me funny. For a hard-core pro-choice group, the number of abortions don’t matter; what matters is the why women chose to have an abortion and then how they go about doing it in a safe and legal manner. So, to approach this kind of group, you have to talk about empowering women to make better choices. You have to focus on supporting women to make the reproductive choice that they want to make, without being driven by dire economic need or social pressure. And again, you have to stress that an alliance with hard-core religious right groups to pass particular pieces of legislation does not necessitate giving up the fight on traditional pro-choice issues.

And personally, I don’t think that its possible to hold both of these conversations simultaneously to both groups. Policy proposals will have to be very narrow and both groups will have to be utterly convinced to stay on focus and to not allow their points of difference to weigh down the legislation. My wife calls this a great conspiracy and sounds a little skeptical about it; I just think it is sound politics. What do you think?

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