There’s recently been a lot of buzz on IMF and in the blogosphere about drug criminalisation, or the War on Drugs. There seems to be some confused argumentation coming from the anti-side. “Banning them will discourage our folk from using them!” Or “That legalising them brings usage under the control of the nanny state!“- while ignoring the fact that they are doing the same thing when outlawing drugs! Usage is not only restricted and controlled by the State, but also they determine how many years you’ll be sent to ass-rape academy for breaching the nanny stater, anarcho-tyrannical system.

The Noble Experiment

The primary piece of empirical data for anyone making a case against prohibition of drugs is easily the Noble Experiment; the American Alcohol Prohibition of 1919 to 1933.

As we can see here from this shoddily drawn graph from the US Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on National Prohibition, 1926, which details the number of alcohol-related deaths (which spiked during prohibition) in the USA during the first quarter of the 1900s, ignoring the amount of murders, vehicular manslaughter cases, and so on. Additionally, the homicide rate almost doubled in the period of 1919 until 1933, until it sharply then steadily declined until 1965 (just before the initiation of the War on Drugs). This indicates a strong correlation between prohibition and murder rate increases. Not only that, crime in general increased greatly, and even underage drinking was not immune from these degenerative trends.

The following piece from Jeffrey Alan Miron, a Bostonian economist, summarises the undeniable trend between prohibition and violence:

Roughly speaking, therefore, there have been two periods with high homicide rates in U.S. history, the 1920-1934 period and the 1970-1990 period (Friedman 1991). Both before the first episode and between these two episodes, homicide rates were relatively low or clearly declining. Prima facie, this pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that alcohol prohibition increased violent crime: homicide rates are high in the 1920-1933 period, when constitutional prohibition of alcohol was in effect; the homicide rate drops quickly after 1933, when Prohibition was repealed; and the homicide rate remains low for a substantial period thereafter. Further, the homicide rate is low during the 1950s and early 1960s, when drug prohibition was in existence but not vigorously enforced, but high in the 1970-1990 period, when drug prohibition was enforced to a relatively stringent degree (Miron 1999).

It’s an uncanny correlation, isn’t it?

Alcohol prohibition was a godsend for the Italian, Jewish and Irish gangsters of 1920s and 1930s America. They were able to consolidate their powers as organised criminal entities, establish alliances, and liquidate foes (or the occasional civilian in the way of stray bullets). Worst yet, since alcohol was more or less still socially acceptable in the happy-go-lucky circles, a lot of these bootleggers were romanticised in the eyes of the naive public, made into antiheroes fighting an unenforceable law.

The Economics of Prohibition

One of the main components that brings a lot of crime and trouble with prohibition is the exponential costs associated with it. Dealers, distributors and smugglers can afford to inflate the price artificially to accommodate the illegal risks associated with creation of or procurement, smuggling and distribution of the drugs. This inflated cost of the drugs in question can result in something of a multiplier effect at first; more property (robbery, mugging, burglary) crimes are committed by addicts who cannot afford this astronomical black market price, which then pushes people in an area to compel politicians and law enforcement to up their game, leading on to harder efforts by police and customs officials to intercept drugs crossing the border (depending on how much public support or funds to divert to it) or dealers, making their job harder and pushing the costs back up. (This scenario is ceteris paribus. For instance, if a newer, cheaper supply arrives in town or a more efficient process of harvesting/manufacturing/smuggling the drugs is implemented, or a gang war ensues, the outcome will be different in relation to price.).

Like anything, there seems to be something reminiscent of a Pareto principle with drug markets and consumption. That is to say: 20% of a group result in 80% of the effects. It may be that around 20% of drug dealers transport and distribute 80% of the drugs, or that a minority of hardcore, determined addicts consume the majority of the physical quantities of drugs. Since it is very difficult to back this up with publicly accessible data, I can only offer it as a hypothesis at present for drug usage rates. But given the high set up cost of setting up complex drug smuggling networks and large-scale drug crop fields/labs and the prevalence of mafia’s/gangs/drug cartels, it seems to mesh with the established trends of drug market conflicts and sales; It’s a zero-sum game.

Being in an illegal market, there are no incentives for dealers to conform to ethical or legal principles, or laws for the dealers to follow. What’s good for business is good for business. And since there is no age limit foisted on the selling of black market goods by the system, this gives children unprecedented access to illicit or unscheduled drugs sales. Indeed, underage teens can more easily get access to weed than to alcohol. Another example of this is an unscheduled drug sweeping Australasia called Kronic, a synthetic form of weed sold in a lot of corner stores and diaries. The interesting thing about Kronic is that since it is not an actual prohibited or scheduled chemical, it can be sold to anyone at any age. Law makers, enforcers and influencers are tripping over themselves in order to get enough public support behind its banning, as was done with legal party pills containing a stimulant called BZP back in 2007.

The Effects of Prohibition

Another issue the arises with drug prohibition is that it increases unnecessary harm. Dealers are notorious for wanting their product to go as far as possible, so naturally this is where “cuts” or impurities are added to stretch them out further. Unless the drug user has a trusted supplier, a drug testing kit, or knows how to purify his stuff, he doesn’t know he’s really putting in his body, causing potential undue harm.

The same is true of the method of administration. Drug users, upon getting higher tolerance levels or wanting a better rush, switch to different means of ingesting the drug. Snorting and injection are especially common, and given the desire of drug dealers to maximise profit, they will sell forms of drug in its most addicting and instantly gratifying form. For these reasons, drugs such as crack cocaine would be non-existent if it was not for drug illegality; drug black markets will be formed and extended to reach its most profitable conclusion for the suppliers and dealers.

Heroin, although mostly benign physically, can and is bringing large physical harm to users majorly in its method of administration (injecting with unclean needles or into the same area, creating abscesses and infections) and through damaging impurities, which is caused by uninformed drug administration practices, which is worsened by the addictive qualities of heroin, and exponentially exasperated by the criminality of its usage. Heroin was actually used as a child’s cough medicine during the early part of the twentieth century, marketed by Bayer. Indeed, drugs like amphetamine, opium, heroin and cocaine were legally offered, medicinally and recreationally before prohibition in the USA and Europe, and the problems back then was non-existent compared to the ones we have under prohibition, economically, socially, or culturally.

A common argument against drugs is that the cost having more legal users will cost the taxpayer and society more, due to rehabilitation and hospital visits. This completely ignores the massive financial burden the War on Drugs brings: around $40 billion a year in the US. Worse yet, law enforcement has its priorities skewed; in 2002, it netted 87% arrests for possession, and merely 13% for sale and cultivation.  The massive costs of housing an inmate in prison is around US$22,000 annually, whereas contrastingly, drug rehabilitation would have a per unit cost of US$4,700 annually for methadone treatment (although I am not necessarily arguing for mandatory, taxpayer funded care for dysfunctional addicts – I believe they should have the same penalties as non-users on principle), under one fifth of the cost.

Who Profits from Drug Prohibition?

The prison industry: The prison industry is provided with a lot more inmates; and therefore more public funding, labour forces, and power.

Big pharmaceutical companies: Although there might be unprecedented medicinal usage of illegal and schedule substances, the big pharmaceutical companies are a huge power in terms of politics and wealth, and if there’s a drug they can’t make too much money from, they can lobby, bribe and shock anti-drug crusaders, law enforcement and politicians to run a campaign against it- all to their own private benefit. For instance; pain killing attributes of marijuana? No problem, we can’t make much money off of that since people can grow it themselves. Here’s our pill, instead.

Drug cartels: In the end, they make profit directly from the artificially inflated-prices of drugs – to the disadvantage of addicts, families and societies. And since a large number of drug cartels are based in other countries, its more or less a destructive wealth-exchange.

Drug dealers: The little guys on the street selling to users directly. They range from small-time pot-dealing college students to big-time mafia cartel members.

Police and law enforcement: A war on drugs means more government and sheeple support for law-enforcement to crack down on personal liberty, expanding their powers; their manpower and the monetary resources backing these bureaucratic institutions. It also gives the system an ability to racially profile which communities it wants to marginalise more, based on its drug prohibition enforcement strategies and arrests.

Politicians: Ultimately, these guys are the sieve at which all the above lobby groups have to squeeze through and glad-hand to get their end.

The government: At the top, prohibition translates to more power to these guys. Big Brother must dictate what is right and wrong for you, as you are too stupid to decide for yourself.

Conclusions to Draw

In 2010, the federal government of United States of America spent around $15 billion dollars on the War on Drugs, with state and local authorities spending an extra $25 billion. Ending the drug war would not only result in this money not being taken from taxpayer coffers and being allocated to other areas of the economy, and also generate nearly $42 billion in tax revenue, if taxed at similiar (read: high) levels as tobacco and alcohol are presently.

The best argument for the benefits of ending prohibition can be seen in Portugal’s decriminalisation of drugs:

 Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

My belief is that legalising marijuana would be a informed first step for the rest of the Western world. It is one of the most benign and widespread drugs, and although it has been correlated to increased risks of anxiety and schizophrenic tendencies in people with those predilections, the harm it brings in forms of overdose deaths (next to zero yearly), violent stoned confrontations or criminality (compare the incidence of potheads fighting with that of drunks), severe physical symptoms and vehicular manslaughter seems to be abysmally low. Most other types of drugs would benefit from being legalised or decriminalised in the least.

With notorious narcotic bogeymwn like methamphetamine and crack cocaine, I would advocate stricter scheduling, control and research; the undertaking of a cost-benefit analysis, if you will. If these two drugs are especially addictive and causing of violence and antisocial behavior in users that the costs of legalising them would outweigh the benefits, it might be beneficial to keep them illegal, or disincentivise their usage. For instance, promoting the usage or replacement of meth and crack cocaine users with lesser harmful substances that are easily substitutable and chemically similiar, for instance, regular amphetamine or MDMA. It may be the case that the majority of 20% of determined crackheads are irrecoverable societal outcasts hellbent on antisocial, violent and self-destruction and that the crack cocaine usage is just a shortcut to this venue, and that it may be in society’s benefit (in that the economic and societal cost of trying to help them is not outweighed by benefits of the few successful cases) to marginalise these users, and encourage non-addicted users to switch to less harmful substitutes.

- Johnny Dissidence

Originally published at M4 Monologue on July 13, 2011.

We’re commonly fed the line that on the eve of September 2nd, 1945, that the Allies, the Western powers, had achieved a hard fought and hard-earned victory against the vicious and merciless Axis powers. The Germans had been bowed by the mighty clubs of the heroic American army and the, shall we say…unrelenting…Soviet forces, and the Japanese lay crushed, subjugated and meek from the severe curb-stomping it received from the United States. Indeed, the value of the victory of this epic conflict has received endless attention and revisitation, the eternal villain had been vanquished! All was well…wasn’t it?

A quick glance at our modern society might change one’s mind as to the value of this “victory.” Looking around, I see a collective Western civilisation in terminal decline. The spirit of men in particular is plagued with severe demoralisation and psychological fatigue due to a feminist agenda that wants to beat them down, folk which have no connection to their past and heritage (discounting empowered non-White minorities) and whom have collectively embraced, through inaction and apathy, a multicultural agenda that will ensure minority status for Whites in most Western nations by 2050. None of these feeble embraces are anywhere near reminiscent of the defiant resolve in international mastery and will to conquer but sixty years earlier. This once great bloc now is fast becoming the losers in the game for national superiority, like the Titans who faced off with the more youthful and eager Olympian Gods, confining their fate to the whims of their rivals.

To understand the essence of the conflict, it is imperative to know the background to World War II. The foundations lay with a badly whupped Germany after its failure in World War I. Viciously pursued for vengeance for its role in the war, the Germans had been shackled with the blame for WW1 (even though they had not initiated the war), and had been forced to pay out hefty reparations to the Allies as mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, especially to the French, who had suffered the greatest devastation to their lands. All this was aimed at keeping Germany from ever being a strong contender for Europe’s first place, but of course it had the opposite effect, fostering a sense of injustice and anger at the Allied powers from Germany.

Thus, Germany began to seize Austria and the Sudetenland (large parts of ethnically German Czechoslovakia) non-militarily, the latter being an artificial state, a creation of the Treaty of Versailles, with a mix of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and Hungarians. This was met with no strong response from Neville Chamberlain, the English premier, who truthfully volunteered no real understanding of the region and the groups within, nor a desire to interfere, as indicated by way of the Munich Pact of 1938. It almost sounds like a far-fetched policy nowadays, no?

The war had its relatively humble beginnings, with Germany invading Poland. Great anger had been fostered against Poland for its monopoly and right of access to the now free state of Danzig, as dictated by Versailles, formerly possessed by the German empire before WWI ended and holding an ethnically German majority, with the ethnic Poles forming a minority. The United Kingdom had stuck to its enduring trend of backing the weaker European party against a stronger European party to demonstrate its imperial dominance, a pre-existing alliance with Poland confirming this. But at this point in history, it was not to work in this Goliath’s favour.

Winston Churchill, the so-called hero of WW2, was the real pusher for an English response to German aggression, representing an isolated voice supported by the rabble, before being put to the position of Lord of the Admiralty in 1940. A zeitgeist of the English’s desire to fight and maintain an Anglo-Saxon hegemony on Europe. His throwing of Australia to the Japanese, and a refusal to return Australian troops fighting in the Middle East back home to protect their homeland, and also lying about a promise of defence for Australasia in the face of Japanese aggression as stipulated in his “Germany First” policy, point to a more psychopathic character than we’ve traditionally been fed about dear ‘ol Winston. Additionally, the bombing of Dresden was another indicator of his impartiality to the loss of innocent life.

Another thing a lot of people hash over in is the fact that Germany offered England peace, which Churchill flatly refused time and time again. In essence, there existed a great counter-weight to the two great European powers in terms of a reluctance due to the sheer amount of carnage and death these two colossal forces would wreak, and only a truly violent, forceful push could make them bash their skulls together. Churchill was this push.

As the war progressed onward, a disturbing trend was established by the Soviet Union that is commonly hashed over in high school history classes: a series of purposefully conducted land-grabs and campaigns of violence, in order to make the most out of a chaotic situation and secure its communist feet in eastern Europe. England and the Allies never declared war on the Soviet Union, despite its holocaust of two to six million Ukrainians (also known as Holodomor), and despite its unprovoked invasions of Finland and Poland. Indeed, geographically proximate nations were more terrified of the Soviet behemoth than of the Germans, and rightfully so. Even General Patton knew the danger that the Soviet Union posed.

Stalin had a few excellent ways of silencing and exterminating any trace of any potential opponents or dissidents from the face of the Earth…and their friends, their families, and their neighbors. Ironically, this eugenically-charged scorched earth extinction policy is not in line with the proletariat-empowering, universalist and egalitarianism rhetoric that modern leftists spout.

At the conclusion of the war, the English were so thoroughly bankrupted and decimated that they lost their empire (somewhat willingly, to avoid total bankruptcy, due to the financial burden the war imposed on English coffers), and became a withered and wilted mess, a crippled and blind giant far past her glory days. England is now submitting to an unlubed immigrant arse-fucking of epic proportions, intellectualised as karmic retribution for the empire’s past indiscretions; several areas now act as no-go zones for non-Islamic Whites. Continental Europe is no different.

Through a policy of willful ignorance and neglect of the Soviet problem, we have had an enormous change impacted on us in the West. One of the largest psychological imprints the strengthening of the Soviet Union had was the propagation of socialist (and especially Marxist) ideals in Western society. Take critical theory in the education system as an example; the way Western history is observed in modern educational systems as just a series of exploitations and racist oppressions, and schools seem to transform into White Guiltist indoctrination centers. And with this ideology’s entrenchment, the nations of Europe were permanently sapped of their strength and an ability to exercise their will; expressing any kind of overt, ethno-nationalist pride was becoming more and more of a taboo (unless its during a sporting event, of course), because deep down in every European is a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

The Nazi and Holocaust victim narrative tie into this, forming into a baton with which to beat the heads of anyone who questions the prevailing cultural norms. For instance, take the practice of wanting to improve your society’s gene pool, or eugenics, or even wanting to halt or reel back dysgenics. No, even wanting to offer free contraception to welfare recipients is comparable to Nazism, and so a thought-crime offense. Contrast the cultural victim narrative of the Jewish Holocaust with that of the Ukrainian Holocaust; one is in every single Western history class curriculum, and the other is all but ignored, a forgotten horror collecting dust in the voluminous pages of history.

But, one power emerged from the conflict full of piss and vinegar, energised and now a hulking powerhouse. In contrast with its European counterparts, the United States took away the lesson that they were the Man, the shining light of dick-ish hope in a world full of blind betas. The US of A (specifically its elites), has been imbued by God™ to spread its oligarchical influence via warfare under the guise of democracy and peace that will benefit nobody, not SWPL Steve or Muhammad Mujahideen. In essence, “democratic invasion” is the act of polluting the world with a shallow, egalitarian idea of what a nation should be (as told by a few sociopathic neocons) where people are bound together as a concept, an abstraction with no value in the real world. Democracy, as defined as cheeseburgers, antidepressants, raunchy cable TV shows and artificially-empowered sluts. Fuck yeah.

- Johnny Dissidence.