Guest Post by Alex Berenson
The Chinese experience proves that countries do not have to tolerate drug use; the United States is currently under siege from a disastrous campaign to prove the opposite.
Hola, amigos! I know I haven’t rapped at ya (as the literally legendary Jim Anchower used to write) in a few days – I’ve been busy working on a couple of pieces that are taking a bit longer to come together.
In the meantime, I thought I’d offer two Twitter threads about drugs and drug use I wrote this morning (as I mention in one, I was working on a book about drugs when Covid hit and lockdowns supercharged the American crisis). If nothing else, they’ll give those of you who follow me here and not there a look at the rather different tone I use on Twitter.
1/ Funny story about opiates. Put it in the weird but true category! China had a big ol’ problem with opium in the 19th and early 20th centuriues. Our fault (okay, the Brits too), we shoved opium down their throats. Fought a war to make them import it. I know, not nice…
2/ But hey, the Chinese had all this tea and silver and silk, and it was ours for the taking if we just got them hooked on the shit. Anyhoo, we pretty much ruined China, the whole ruling class was too high to function, dynastic collapse, civil war, famines, whatevs…
(China, then: Smoking the (opium) bowl)
3/ Then Mao and the Communists came along. And it took a while but they kicked Chaing Kai-shek’s ass and sent him to Taiwan. And guess what the Communists liked even less than greedy landowners and other capitalist pigs? You got it! Drugs in general and opiates in particular…
4/ And the Chinese Communist Party has changed its mind about a bunch of stuff since 1949, but not drugs. China’s version of harm reduction is real simple, they catch you moving the stuff, they reduce the harm by putting a bullet in the back of your head:
(China, now: this is your brain on drugs)
5/ Now, you may say the death penalty for drug trafficking is a little harsh. Maybe so. But guess what country did NOT have 100,000 drug overdose deaths last year? Yep, the same one addicted to opium 100 years ago. Because drug use is not some immutable cultural force…
6/ In the long or even medium term, nations can radically change the amount of drug use by making it more or less culturally and legally acceptable. The left and legalizers know this (which is why they seek to normalize use/addiction), they just like to pretend it’s not true…
7/ They want to make you believe levels of drug use are fixed (or inevitably rising) and that all we can do is manage the harm it causes, without admitting A) That we have NEVER found ways to manage the harm B) That the mere fact of pretending we can’t deter use encourages it.
8/ And of course you know the kicker on the story: China’s hatred of drug use doesn’t extend to the fentanyl its factories ship by the kilo to the United States of Overdoses. You might call that karma for the Opium War. Or you might wonder if karma is another word for revenge.
—
The second thread came in response to a question a reader asked in response to the first, the classic libertarian argument to allow drug use:
Should people not have the freedom to use drugs and overdose/kill themselves if they please? Now if we as society should have to pay for their treatment, that’s a separate point entirely. My cousin died from the stuff, a safe regulated supply would have saved her life.
My answer:
No. The externalities of use and especially addiction are too severe. The pleasure goes to the user (for a time), the harm to everyone else. This isn’t a moral judgment, it’s an economic/legal argument. The user is a polluting chemical plant – he profits, the community suffers…
And it’s perfectly reasonable for the community to regulate the polluter in the way it sees fit under those circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily mean jailing users. What it means at the core is understanding that WE, not they, are the victims of use.
This is the point the legalization/harm reduction movement has succeeded in obscuring. The harm that should be our focus is to the people and community around the user – and we should reduce it as WE think best. The user can always reduce his own harm by stopping use.
(The only thing worse than the War on Drugs is surrendering to them:)
This argument, by the way, is the book I was working on when Covid hit – the philosophical case against legalization/normalization. It’s surprisingly necessary. The anti-drug movement argues in pieces: METH ROTS YOUR TEETH! The legalizers have taken the intellectual heights..
Which is why they are so close to winning despite the ever-more obvious harms of rising use. Someone needs to explain (without depending on religious or moral arguments, as those are unpersuasive in the modern West) why societies have the right and responsibility to fight use.
Obviously, this came out of my experience writing Tell Your Children, but it’s a different and larger topic – and I was stunned I couldn’t find a major (or even minor) book making the case. Maybe I missed it, but I looked.
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In skool they politely called it , the spice trade. It is in large part where the royals of Europe made their vast fortunes and then funded wars on both sides for consolidation of control.
Wars of prohibitions empowers all the worst elements in society that can be empowered. Repeated wars as such should have taught us that if nothing else. Drug warriors are just the monopoly enforcement arm (paid for by the people) of the legal drug monopolies. As always they internalize profits and externalize expenses. And make money on all ends of the equation, from the debt for fighting the wars and money laundering to the sale of their own drugs, and to the care of the casualties. And maybe more importantly it furthers their vise / vice of control agendas on the society / civilization.
Too bad Berenson is such a fanatic when it comes to drugs. I have long been against the drug wars and all the damage they do. But at the same time, I would like to hear some sane thinking and solutions that address problems with a permissive policy. True, it will cut overdose deaths back down to the bone, and smash the cartels, but it does not address the issues that have to do with social impacts of a society high on drugs.
You know what? In the early nineties, US heroin overdoses were at about 7k. And drug warriors were all up in arms about it. Now? Yeah, far far worse. And Berenson brings up how Mao cracked down on opium. Yeah, he got rid of opium at the price of brutal totalitarian tyranny. Does that sound nostalgic to you?!
Yup. Take the black market profit motive out via total legalization. Then, devastate the demand side by fixing America. Just ‘coz they sellin’ don’t mean we buyin’.
But how? I know what you mean in part… miserable people turn to drugs more. But, stll… look at what happened with cocaine way back when. It was not the miserable down and outers buying it. It was the upper middle class and the rich.
Indeed, drug use is a symptom and nobody wants to face that truth because they are too busy promoting the disease.
“The Spice MUST flow.” – The Navigator’s Guild, Dune
It was British jews that began the opium wars and that profited from them … and they set up HSBC (HongKong and Shanghai Banking Company) to launder the profits — which it still does in the global drug trade …
Look up the (((Sassoons))). They ran opium production in India. His reward for pulling off the opening of China to opium was to be allowed to marry into the (((Rothschild))) banking cartel.
“No. The externalities of use and especially addiction are too severe. The pleasure goes to the user (for a time), the harm to everyone else. This isn’t a moral judgment, it’s an economic/legal argument. The user is a polluting chemical plant – he profits, the community suffers…”
So the externalities of drug use is to severe, but the externalities of drug use AND corrupting the whole society (especially law enforcement and other government actors), and turning the whole country and rest of the world into a police and military state and gutting our founding principles and laws isn’t too severe?
Must be that new math I have heard so much about.
“And it’s perfectly reasonable for the community to regulate the polluter in the way it sees fit under those circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily mean jailing users. What it means at the core is understanding that WE, not they, are the victims of use.”
And there is the poison pill again. It is becoming quite redundant. This appeal to the subjective. Communitarianism. Drug use is an extreme example. That is the whole point to sell it. But it works equally as well for the color of your house or how many cars, or anything they don’t want you doing or having, and all in the name of community standards. And you find yourself living in an fictional HAO where the rules are arbitrary and fleeting.
In my case it started out over a fucking enclosed trailer my daughters and I spent a month rebuilding! And it escalated to losing the house, property, and vast wealth of other personal and business property, being under constant attack to the point you couldn’t even function day to day because of them stealing the means your livelihood, or threatening to steal the means of your livelihood anything you tried to do. All in the name of arbitrary ever changing community standards and abuse of process.
And isn’t that exactly the stated goals? You will have nothing and be “happy?” Probably what that really means is you will have nothing (and TPTB will) be happy. If you are the ones running the place, and like every other bunch of jackboots running a place, they can have as much of whatever they can steal from you. Just like they repeatedly did to me without ever going into court till it was time to collect the money they charge you for the pleasure of stealing and destroying all your property and home.
Yes by all means I would rather see addicts ending their days in some drug den or being helped if needed (before the drug wars most people were quite functional even though they used drugs), than the authoritarian jackbooted “Communitarianism” we have now. Which in reality is just a synthesis of every control freak authoritarian control matrix ever conceived by the adversary with a shiny new coat of high tech overlay.
Take your falled wars (though obviously it has been a great success to some) on the people and shove it sideways up your arse.
yes.
the tragedy of the commons is the commons.
“externalities” result, as planned & intended, inverse private property, & the property of privacy.
once (but only temporarily) private bakery businesses word-magically become “public accommodations” they defy legality & “invite” peril when demonstrating the temerity of deciding who they will associate/do business with, & who they won’t. that’s not up to them.
your liberty to not wear a mask privatizes a profit that socializes/externalizes the costs to everyone else. if you refuse – peril. If you refuse in a “public accommodation” now tasked with enforcement of tragic lowest commons’ry, & that pa does not enforce -peril for them.
short straight line to essential & non-essential designations. & the big box essentials roll up all the mom/pop non-essentials customers.
useless eaters are, of course, non-essential, too.
competition is for losers, said the paypal fag. & so is quality products/services & good prices once the competition has been killed off.
the principles are the principles.
personal pronoun principles are just relativism, special pleading, venal greed, & under it all, cowardice.
the principles are the same for all.
but the unprincipled, the flexibly principled, have a “principle” of their own: the shortest cuts to the fattest slices. they don’t care how they get what they want, so long as they get it.
this is the property principle, & gangster humanimal will never have the chops for it:
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos (Latin for “whoever’s is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell”)
So in this scene which elicits admiration for the hero, well … why is he the hero? according to flash et al, cuz might makes right.
How can I downvote this garbage article?
Send an e-mail to Alex Berenson?
Strongly-worded.
Nice article Alex.
Thankyou.
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Cycles of life in nature indicate that nothing is a sin for a human except choosing to harm others, the planet or oneself-to the point of becoming a burden to others.
If one studies the observable cycles of life, one will find that all morals are self evident.
_________
Question:
Wasn’t the British Empire kidnapping the poor off the streets of England (and Ireland and Scotland) and shipping them to the colonies as forced indentured servants [slaves] to die of abuse and malnutrition in the Americas concurrent to the China opium trade?
That’d be a ‘yes’ … but, since it’s also one of those ‘inconvenient truths’, you’ve already gotten one DV …
“Cycles of life in nature indicate that nothing is a sin for a human except choosing to harm others, the planet or oneself-to the point of becoming a burden to others.”
What a bunch of crap. By your definition, being a child or old or sick, or a legal drug or alcohol users, and even the human condition in whole (we are for the most part all dependent / a burden on others, with very few exceptions, if any, to live) is a sin.
I have an idea, let’s declare war on humans and kill them all off? Seems that is the same thing the PTB are pushing. Who’d a thunk.
In your two comments, you have uncovered the mind of the Jew.
… and worse, the committed Talmudist, i.m.o.
Goat:
Key words= “choosing to harm others, the planet or oneself”
How you got from “choosing to harm self or others” to “being a child or old or sick, or a legal drug or alcohol users, and even the human condition in whole” is beyond me.
Do they not choose to live? Do they not harm others by demanding time and resources from others (etc.) to survive? They harm others as much as drug users.
Well, bless your heart goat!
Not sure I follow your reasoning, but it’s all goat!
; ) wink!
Maybe it doesn’t make any sense because your original statement is crap? Nice attempt at deflection / gaslighting / ad hominem.
Good thing we’re on the same side*!
“Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
*I am for the living, and life.
Say what you will, but those wars resulted in the finest pistol the world has yet to see…the 1911 A1.
“When they absolutely, positively need to hit the ground now, professionals turn to the 1911”
The 1911 was adopted in a search for a more effective man stopper after the deadly failure of the Colt .38 revolver the Army was using fighting the Moros in the Philippines following seizing the Phillipines in 1898. The 1911A1 was introduced in the 1920’s featuring a curved backstrap, shortened trigger and scalloping the frame around the trigger guard and slightly extending the tang of the grip safety.
The Opium Wars were the days of the Webley or the Colt Navy. Had the US Navy followed orders and not intervened the Brits would have lost the 2nd Opium War. So the Zips have a real grievance from the days of James Buchanan with the US.
i’d say all the good things that come out of wars to people who weren’t in those wars, harmed directly or killed in those wars, is appreciation equivalent to “screw you, I got mine!” the net is red blod & red ink & it just keeps compounding …reality: all are adversely impacted.
john browning’s ghenius, edward teller’s ghenius, et al was waste/d that put the ghengis khan to shame.
Here we have the freedom to make bad decisions. I have wondered what the folks in Washington are on. Drug users have never been a problem for me but people who drink have made my life harder. always covering for them or knowing that they can’t make it to work on Mondays or other days of the week. The problems in big cities? they need mental asylums and internment camps with drug rehab counselors. The people stealing stuff need a lead injection.
Being a decent productive person should be taught at home, but since many parents are idiots maybe the schools can offer a class for kids.
Exactly. You handle problem drug users like you do any other problem person. Had this guy across the street from me at the old house that had a problem with both drugs and alcohol. He was a problem when he was drinking, not when he was doing drugs. And that has been my experience through life that drunks are way worse.
Not quite behind internment camps per say, but yeah I think we should have something brought back like the old poor house or homeless camps.
I can’t even get decent chink food anymore since the plandemic.