Even though I\u2019ve lived west of the Mississippi for half my life, the native New Yorker in me has always been dismissive of reports that my tax dollars are being used to fund black helicopters that are hassling Americans in defense of foreigners, or the UN, or something.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a Constitution,\u201d was my standard tavern line to tipsy ranchers in places like Deming, New Mexico. No Americans are getting invaded by men jumping out of helicopters, I argued. Then I spent a year on the front lines of the war on drugs.<\/p>\n
While researching what a post-drug war economy might look like from the producer standpoint — a project spurred in part by the 2011 arrest of the town mayor near my New Mexico ranch on charges that he was a member of a Mexican cartel — I quickly learned to sleep through the roar of helicopter blades that essentially provides the summer soundtrack in American cannabis production country. These choppers are used to seize something like 1% of the domestic cannabis crop. Oh, and sometimes they\u2019re black.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s loud and nearly constant, but 40 years of such expensive, constitutionally questionable, cartel-ignoring nonsense has hardly put a dent in supply or demand. How do we know this? Let\u2019s quote the U.S. Department of Justice\u2019s 2009 Domestic Cannabis Cultivation assessment: \u201cThe amount of marijuana available for distribution in the United States is unknown\u2026Despite record-setting eradication efforts in the United States, the availability of marijuana remains relatively high, with limited disruption in supply or price.\u201d<\/p>\n
Regardless, your tax dollars and mine, by the billions, in a time of fiscal crisis, are going to arrest otherwise law-abiding Americans north of the border. As former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, Ronald Reagan\u2019s Secretary of State George Shultz and even Albert Einstein have pointed out (in 1921 during that early bout of nonsensical Prohibition) this further enriches the murderers south of the border by sustaining a prohibition economy. I don\u2019t know how my neighboring cattle ranchers in the desert knew it, but they\u2019re right: the war on drugs really is being fought for the benefit of foreigners.<\/p>\n
Want an example? Just before he and his wife had their Mendocino County, California farm and medical cannabis cooperative destroyed by heavily armed and chainsaw-wielding Drug Enforcement Administration agents last October, a locally permitted, non-profit cannabis farmer and chamber of commerce member named Matt Cohen told me he was confident that he and his fellow American farmers (of America\u2019s far and away number-one cash crop) were on the right side of history.<\/p>\n
As we toured the field where his 99 man-sized plants wavered fragrantly in the breeze, the 33-year-old Cohen told me, \u201cBy the time alcohol Prohibition ended, on December 5, 1933, 23 states had already enacted laws regulating the alcohol industry.\u201d Yep, he really knew the date. It was kind of his mantra.<\/p>\n
In other words, before Congress was forced to wake up 80 years ago, enough states first decided that hysterical zealots telling people what they could or could not ingest was not the way to go, policy-wise. It was no way to run an economy (alcohol taxes at times had provided 70% of federal revenue prior to Prohibition). It was not even a good way to “think of the children,” as the screed still goes. When gangsters control an industry, they don\u2019t ask to see ID. One hundred million Americans have used cannabis, including the last three presidents. \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t have to be federal criminals,\u201d Cohen told me last August.<\/p>\n
Cohen was not a local criminal. Every plant on his farm wore an expensive, bright-yellow, local permitting \u201czip-tie\u201d bracelet around its stalk. These represented participation in a new county program started because, in the words of Nobel Laureate free-market economist Milton Friedman in 1991, \u201cIllegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords.\u201d<\/p>\n