It’s certainly an injustice that former soldiers who turn to drugs as a way of coping with the return to civilian life should be thrown in prison for a nonviolent offense that hurts only the drug abuser himself.

But I think I have a better suggestion for how to deal with that injustice. Instead of inventing special courts so that former soldiers can be treated as if they were legally superior to everyone else — why not just stop imprisoning anybody at all for nonviolent drug offenses?

Any reason you could give that would make it reasonable not to imprison former soldiers with non-violent drug problems would be just as good a reason not to imprison anybody else with a non-violent drug problem. You don’t need special courts; you just need to realize that the government’s campaign for drug prohibition is stupid, destructive, and is destroying the lives of all too many peaceful people.

Norm,

I’m sure that there are some drug cartels paying off cops somewhere; that’s what underground business operations tend to do. But as far as the topic of discussion goes — that is, the increasing aggressiveness and militarization of local police forces — the really payoffs here are coming from none other than the United States federal government, which has spent the past few decades as the prime sponsor, trainer, and supplier for paramilitary SWAT squads, “elite” task forces, and local patrol cops, through the mechanism of tax-funded federal grants, special training seminars and collaboration initiatives with federal law enforcement agencies, surplus equipment sales, etc. And while counter-terrorism and other so-called “Homeland Security” projects are now a driving factor in this process, the chief driving factor, over the past 30-40 years, has been the War on Drugs itself. If you want an explanation of why small-town police are increasingly trained to be belligerent, have the equipment and the desire to conduct paramilitary SWAT raids at the drop of a hat, are taking on larger and more powerful assault weapons just for ordinary patrols, and generally act like a case study of collective roid rage, it’s precisely because the Federalis have been juicing them for the past 30-40 years in order to use them as foot soldiers in the enforcement of federal drug policy.

At the end of the article, Franks does express some “regret” that “we really couldn’t honestly find enough reasonable doubt to acquit Mr. Rhett.” Not because he feels bad about abducting harmless people and locking them in a cage for 10 years, of course, but rather because he would have rather reserved that treatment for some other innocent person higher up in the import-export business. But Rhett didn’t snitch, and “he was the one that got caught,” so ten years of his one-and-only life is close enough for government work.

Jason,

Thanks for the link and the reply.

I recognize that there are minarchists more radical or principled than Dale Franks, who would have refused to collaborate in a drug conviction. I have other problems with their position (after all, I’m not a minarchist), but not the problem that I have with Dale Franks. I didn’t mean to imply that every minarchist would have done what he did.

However, I do think that it’s fair for me to suggest that being a minarchist makes one systematically more likely to indulge in that kind of legalistic error than one might otherwise be. Being an anarchist has built-in intellectual safeguards against it, whereas being a minarchist doesn’t. (That’s not intended as an argument for anarchism over minarchism per se; rather it’s why I think that this case and others like it go to support my prior argument that people who have already been convinced of anarchism for other reasons should be cautious about how closely they work with smaller-government campaigns or institutions.)

As far as drug trial juries go, I would happily lie about my political views in order to get on the jury, and then, if I got on it, do everything in my power to obstruct or prevent a conviction. I think that the prosecutor in a drug case has no more moral entitlement to get the truth from me than the Gestapo would if they stopped by to ask whether I’m hiding any Jews in my attic. And while the pay scale for sitting as a juror would be shitty compared to what I could be making for my time in other pursuits, I’d be happy to give up the profits in order to help an innocent person go free.

Less Antman: “Question: would you have lied to the judge when asked the standard voir dire question about whether you would follow the law as instructed by the judge? I’ve wrestled with this question since the first time I got dismissed for an honest answer, and would like to know the opinion of others.”

Yes. I’d also lie to the Gestapo if they asked me whether there were any Jews in my attic.

If what’s at stake is someone going to federal prison for ten years on a drug rap, I’d say that the difference between the one case and the other is only one of degree. And a smaller difference of degree than many people believe.

Anthony,

Suppose that Prez Ron Paul decided — as Harry Browne, for example, promised to do when he ran on the LP ticket — to issue blanket presidential pardons to all nonviolent drug offenders in the United States, including both those in federal and those in state custody. In one sense, this action wouldn’t increase the net extraction of taxes against anybody (it would dramatically reduce spending by both state and federal government). But then, neither would the action of declaring all local government schools abolished. In some other sense, both actions would make use of some non-zero amount of tax money — to pay for the paper and the pens and the administrative costs of notifying the prison and so on — but that money would have been extracted whether it was used to pay for one thing or for the other thing, and neither nullifying drug laws through blanket pardons nor declaring local government schools abolished would directly increase the amount of taxes extracted in the future, either. (In fact, both actions would stand some small chance of indirectly decreasing the level of taxation.)

That said, would you make a similar argument to the effect that if even one taxpayer objected to releasing nonviolent drug offenders from state prisons, the nullification-through-blanket pardon would (1) have an identifiable victim, and (2) victimize that victim in such a way as to be fairly characterized as “an astonishing act of centralized tyranny”? If so, why? If not, what’s the difference between the one case and the other?