Remora

"...the faces change back to black and white cartoon old men, obscure members of the cosmopolitan night." -- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries


Unfortunately, the cartoon old men and one woman LI has to talk about this morning are less obscure than they should be. The cosmopolitan night they belong to is called the Supreme Court, and they are called judges. These sad-sacks are up to their usual tricks -- allowing, on the one hand, the state to practice its most egregious tyrannies on the subaltern population of the young, the poor, and the feckless, the clipped angels among the faceless many, while on the other hand chipping away at the limitations placed, however imperfectly, on the natural malefactors of great wealth, aka entrenched corporate power.

A ruling yesterday is typical of the Court's absolute decrepitude. The court ruled that schools could arbitrarily order drug tests -- in other words, have access to the bodily chemical infrastructure of -- students. And so, a right that inheres in the governance of the modern nation-state -- the right to be educated -- is turned into a gun against the educated. Here's a couple of grafs in the NYT:

"In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.

But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion while also signing Justice Thomas's, said it was significant that the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion," Justice Breyer said.Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise disciplined or reported to the police. The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College."

There is the outrage, this band of carcasses with their martinis at home, their drinks for dinner, pissing on the kids, and there is its conjunction with the greater outrage, the continuing war on drugs. There seems to be a misperception out there that the war has moderated on, at least, the most common of those drugs, marijuana. Wrong, captain. Drugwar lists some very interesting stats on its site:

"In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."

LI must admit, the left is not the counterforce it should be to this incredible and sick machinery. The best arguments against the day, the year, the decade, the two decades, the half century of infamy encoded in 704,812 marijuana arrests have been flung out by libertarians. James Bovard has a nice article on the Future of Freedom site. He is especially acidic about the current administration's cute idea of linking one losing war -- on drugs -- to its current idee fixe -- a permanent war on terrorism. Bovard points out that the war on drugs, unlike the war on terrorism, is a war on the laws of the market:

"But how will the DEA change the laws of agricultural economics that encourage farmers to grow crops disapproved by the U.S. government? Afghan farmers can easily earn ten times more from growing opium than from growing wheat or other crops. The effort to persuade Third World farmers to abandon illicit crops will be about as successful as trying to persuade stockbrokers and law-firm partners to abandon their high-paid jobs, move to Mexico, and scratch out a livelihood assembling toilet brushes for sale at Wal-Mart.

"If the Bush administration is really serious about defunding terrorist groups, it should summon the courage to look at drug laws themselves. The falling price of cocaine and heroin in recent decades is proof of the failure of drug warriors to close the borders. Federal officials have admitted that the government fails to interdict up to 90 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the United States. This failure rate is absolutely intolerable when illicit drugs finance terrorism. "

LI has a theory about how to look at state actions like banning products (marijuana, or handguns) or services (euthenasia, robbery, murder) should be seen within the framework of effective and ineffective regulation of markets. We should post that theory one of these days -- as far as we know, it is our original contribution to political philosophy.