Tag Archive for: War on Drugs

Tim Walz Went To War On Zyn While Pushing Free Needles, Legalizing Pot

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Tim Walz has legalized pot, pushed free needles and is open to psychedelic drug legalization, all while taxing nicotine pouches at a 95 percent clip during his tenure as Minnesota’s Governor.

Democrats are attempting to sell Walz as a friend to the working class, praising his “Midwestern values.” His policy history, however, indicates a Walz-Harris Administration may be in favor of crushing the vices of blue collar and traditional America.

Walz, who Vice President Kamala Harris tapped in early August to be her running mate, amended the state’s Tobacco Tax law in May to categorize tobacco-free nicotine products like Zyn as “moist snuff,” rendering it eligible for a 95 percent tax rate.

Use of adult smokeless tobacco, which includes Zyn nicotine pouches, skew heavily towards midwestern, low-income men living in rural areas, according to data from the CDC and the UK’s National Institute of Health (NIH).

Zyn has also become a popular emblem among proponents of traditional masculinity, with popular voices like Joe Rogan and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson championing them.

The product also became an unlikely political battleground after Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for a federal crackdown on the pouches.

The left’s war on Zyn has prompted backlash from prominent Republican lawmakers.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are more concerned with policing working class vices like Zyn than dealing with the crisis on the border, Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville told the Daily Caller.

“Democrats would rather exert more government authority over Americans instead of addressing the surge of deadly drugs pouring into our country,” Tuberville said.

Besides adding tobacco-free pouches like Zyn to the state’s Tobacco Tax, Walz also attempted to further increase the 95 percent tax on vape devices in 2021, according to Americans for Tax Reform.

He also presided over a number of policies seemingly geared towards legalizing and decriminalizing illicit drug use.

Walz signed a bill in May 2023 legalizing the recreational use of cannabis in the state. The bill mandates a ten percent tax rate on the retail sales of cannabis.

A few days later he signed the House Omnibus Judiciary and Public Safety Finance appropriations bill, a bill that expanded access to “harm reduction” services and bolstered the state’s Syringe Services Program (SSP).

The program, funded through the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), provides sterile syringes and supplies, containers for safe disposal of used syringes and overdose drugs like Naloxone at no cost to users.

While removing all language criminalizing the possession of syringes, the bill also legalized the possession of all drug paraphernalia, even that which contained residue.

In May 2024, Walz announced his plans for grants providing $100 million for combatting homelessness. One recipient of the grant was Southside Harm Reduction Services, an organization whose services include “syringe exchange, naloxone distribution, education, rapid HIV testing and referrals to social services including housing,” according to the announcement.

Walz’s pro-drug policies follow a left-wing trend of decriminalizing and legalizing drugs at the state level that are federally illegal under The Controlled Substances Act.

After Oregon became the first state to decriminalize possession of all drugs in 2020, the state’s Democratic Governor Tina Kotek reversed course, signing a bill that re-criminalized the possession of hard drugs in April 2024.

Citizens who voted yes on the bill to decriminalize drugs quickly changed their mind. In 2020, 58.46 percent of voters supported Oregon’s Measure 110, a referendum bill which made the maximum penalty for possession of drugs for personal use $100. But in 2023, 56 percent of voters believed it should be repealed as the state’s largest city, Portland, saw a surge in overdoses. The number of people who died of overdoses jumped from 610 in 2019 to nearly 1200 in 2022, according to KOIN 6 News.

Drug overdose deaths across the country have risen at a prodigious rate, jumping from 52,404 in 2015 to 107,941 in 2022, according to data from the National Institute for Drug Abuse.

While some analysts argue the decriminalization of hard drugs like heroin can drive revenue that can be used for education and rehabilitation programs, others say the costs of decriminalization far outweigh the benefits.

Widespread availability of illicit drugs is “the mother of use,” former United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr. argued in a U.K. National Institute of Health head to head.

Califano referenced Switzerland’s “needle park,” a government initiative meant to restrict heroin users to a small area. The project “turned into a grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 addicts and had to be closed before it infected the entire city of Zurich.”

He also noted that Italy, which decriminalized possession of small doses of drugs like heroin, has one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in Europe.

In addition to legalizing pot and making it easier for citizens to use needles, Walz green-lit a Psychedelic Medicine Task Force to study the effects of psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA and LSD.

“The task force is mandated to explore both the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and the legal pathways by which Minnesota’s government can help patients successfully navigate the labyrinth of federal laws and regulations in order to get access to these potential medicines,” Kurtis Hanna, a drug law reform lobbyist, told Marijuana Moment.

The bill calls for $338,000 of appropriations in 2024 and another $171,000 to fund the task force in 2025. It calls for “statutory changes necessary for the legalization of psychedelic medicine” and “state and local regulation of psychedelic medicine.”

Walz signing the bill cleared the way for other leaders in his state to follow suit. In June 2023, Minneapolis’ Democratic mayor Jacob Frey ordered law enforcement to deprioritize the use of city resources to enforce laws that criminalize buying psychedelics.

Frey’s executive order stated “that the investigation and arrest of persons for planting, cultivating, purchasing, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with, or possessing Entheogenic Plants or plant compounds which are on the federal Schedule 1 list shall be the lowest law enforcement priority for the City of Minneapolis.”

The psychedelics task force will deliver a final report to the state with findings and recommendations by January 1, 2025, according to the bill. Advocates believe that these steps are clearing a path for the legalization of all psychedelic substances in Minnesota.

“If—and hopefully when—I’m re-elected and this task force gives their final report..my hope is to bring that legislation in that session,” Democratic State Rep. Andy Smith told Marijuana Movement.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: D.C. Bureaucrats Have Unleashed A Hell On American Men They May Come To Regret

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

John Mackey: ‘Capitalism Is the Greatest Thing Mankind Has Ever Done’

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The Whole Foods founder offered a clear message on capitalism at LibertyCON in Miami, where five hundred delegates from 50 countries recently gathered.

On October 14, LibertyCON kicked off with an interview between Students for Liberty CEO Wolf von Laer and John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods Market.

Mackey studied philosophy and religion for several semesters while working part-time at a vegetarian consumer cooperative. In 1978, he and his girlfriend founded a vegetarian supermarket, SaferWay, which evolved into Whole Foods Market two years later through a merger. He recounted how, after starting the company, he initially lived on $200 a month, and since he had no place to live, he and his girlfriend slept in the store. Since there was no shower, they had to wash in the sink. But he has fond memories of those days: He was in love, starting the business was a great adventure, and he didn’t actually need money privately. Later, he became very wealthy, taking the company public on the NASDAQ technology exchange and, in 2017, it was acquired by Amazon for $13.7 billion.

Today, Whole Foods operates more than 500 stores in the US, Canada, and the UK.

Whole Foods was the first grocery chain to commit to animal welfare. Mackey was influenced by animal rights activist Lauren Ornelas, who criticized Whole Foods’ animal welfare standards at a shareholder meeting in 2003. Mackey gave Ornelas his email address, and they corresponded on the issue of how the company treated ducks in particular. Mackey became concerned with the problems associated with factory farming and decided to switch to a mostly vegetarian diet that included only eggs from his own chickens. Since 2006, he has been living on an exclusively plant-based diet. He is an advocate of more humane animal treatment, a vegetarian, and an enthusiastic fan of capitalism—which I like, because I am all of those things myself.

To say Mackey is a proponent of free markets is an understatement.

“Capitalism is the greatest thing that mankind has ever done,” Mackey declared at the event.

The number of people living in extreme poverty, he reminds us, has dropped from about 90 percent to less than 10 percent since the capitalist era began 200 years ago.

Mackey’s support of capitalism inspired him to write a book on the subject titled Conscious Capitalism, but it has not been without consequences. He triggered a flurry of negative reaction when he wrote an article against Obamacare that was published by the Wall Street Journal in August 2009. He did not only offer criticism, he also made ten suggestions on how to reform America’s ailing healthcare system. But his solution was not more government – as with Obama – but more market, which prompted left-wing groups to organize boycotts of his businesses.

Wolf von Laer pays tribute to the modest, soft-spoken entrepreneur for his courage in taking political positions. But Mackey himself says he would no longer write such a political article after his experience in 2009, because the response to it was so damaging to his business. That’s how it is today, and not only in the United States: Political statements from business people are only tolerated if they are critical of capitalism or “woke.” Otherwise, there is the threat of negative reaction and boycotts, as was the case against Whole Foods.

“Cancel Culture” is the name given to this anti-culture, which is nothing less than an all-out attack on freedom of expression.

Libertarians are caught between two stools. By European standards, they combine both right-wing and left-wing policy positions. On the one hand, they are enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and stridently oppose socialism, the welfare state, and wealth redistribution. On the other hand, they passionately support LGBTQ rights and drug legalization. The drug issue marks a dividing line between conservatives and libertarians, according to a panel discussion on “It’s Time to End the Drug War.”

One participant used to oppose drug legalization and now supports it for all drugs, She said the turning point for her was realizing that what she personally liked or disliked had nothing to do with what should be legal and what should be illegal. The panelists taking part in this discussion at Students for Liberty agreed that the state has lost the war against drugs, and that legalizing drugs would lead to fewer drug deaths, less crime, and more freedom and personal responsibility.

The convention moved to another topic. Why are more and more countries in Latin America sliding into socialism? Daniel DiMartino is a Venezuelan who fled the socialist country – along with a quarter of the population. He has now lived in the United States for six years and speaks of an “epidemic of envy” in Latin America. But he also criticizes conservative governments who, when in power, have not seized the opportunity to introduce the kind of radical free-market reforms that truly change people’s lives. He cites Maurico Macri in Argentina as an example.

Martha Bueno, whose parents fled Cuba and who now lives in Miami, warns young American supporters of socialism not to be overconfident that what happened in Venezuela could not happen in their country. As she explains, Venezuela was a democracy and had one of the highest standards of living in the world. And, she reminds us, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. She is convinced that no one ever would have believed that the socialists could run the country into the abyss, robbing it of its freedom and prosperity, in such a short space of time. But that is exactly what happened. And, she warns, it can happen here too, in the United States.

It was worth coming to Miami, to this event with so many interesting discussions. Wolf von Laer, the CEO of Students for Liberty, has succeeded in building the organization into the world’s largest network for libertarian students. The annual convention, to which fewer students can come than one would wish, partly because of the costs involved, is not actually the most important thing Students for Liberty does: that would be the thousands of events the organization holds with students around the world every year.

AUTHOR

Dr Rainer Zitelmann

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. He is also a world-renowned author, successful businessman, and real estate investor. Zitelmann has written more than 20 books. His books are successful all around the world, especially in China, India, and South Korea. His most recent books are The Rich in Public Opinion which was published in May 2020, and The Power of Capitalism which was published in 2019.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The ‘War’ On Drugs And Sophisticated Border Tunnels Could Lead To A Terrorist Attack On U.S. Soil

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cartel book coverNEW YORK, PRNewswire/ — Don Winslow, the acclaimed author of The Cartel, which hit the New York Times bestseller list on Wednesday, says that the U.S. is so concerned with the terrorists half a world away that we don’t recognize them just across our border, and that it could lead to an attack on American soil.

“While the dominant Sinaloa Cartel might be reluctant to risk American retaliation by smuggling terrorists, the lesser cartels, with little to lose, will be tempted,” Winslow said.  “Human trafficking now makes up almost 30% of one such cartel’s income; it’s not a huge leap from smuggling undocumented workers to trafficking terrorists. The cartels are motivated by profit – drug money or terrorist money is the same to them, and these sophisticated tunnels, with railroad tracks, air-conditioning, elevators, and dormitories are perfect clandestine entry points for terrorists.”

Winslow’s epic crime novel The Cartel has been compared to The Godfather and Game of Thrones, and since its June 23 publication has received wide praise by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times and dozens of other publications.  Winslow has spent more than fifteen years writing and researching the Mexican cartels and the war on drugs for the international bestsellers The Power of the Dog and Savages.

“Politicians and Donald Trump keep talking about building a wall that stretches the entire 2,000-mile land border with Mexico. It doesn’t matter how high a wall you build if the traffickers can tunnel under it,” Winslow said.

“Every few months we discover a new tunnel under the Mexican-American border, mostly in the Tijuana–San Diego area,” Winslow said.  “Since the early 1990’s they’ve been used to smuggle drugs, but how long will it be before they’re used to transport terrorists into the United States?  Congress’s tough-on-crime stance makes us soft on border security.”

“The Mexican drug cartels are more sophisticated and wealthier than the jihadists, already have a presence in 230 American cities, and have carried out executions inside the United States,” Winslow stressed.  “The cartels were running the ISIS playbook—decapitations, immolations, videos, social media—ten years ago.  There is a very direct connection between the Mexican cartels and ISIS in the sense of the atrocities they carry out, and largely ISIS learned this behavior from the cartels.  There are also credible reports that ISIS considers the Mexican border to be vulnerable.  Right now it’s just a threat, but how long will it be before the threat is real?”

Airport Pirates Loot a College Student’s Life Savings by Trevor Burrus

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Today, our friends at the Institute for Justice launched a new challenge to yet another instance of egregious civil asset forfeiture abuse.

Charles Clarke is a 24-year-old college student who found out the hard way that government officials can confiscate property on the mere suspicion that it has a “substantial connection” to a crime or is the proceeds of a crime. No underlying conviction is required.

Functionally, this means that officers can claim that “something was a little off” about your behavior, or that “something smells a little like drugs” and then have carte blanche to take whatever cash you have on you. After that, your cash is presumptively guilty, and it is up to you to prove its innocence.

In the winter of 2013, Charles was stopped at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport based on the officers’ assertion that his bag smelled like marijuana. Actually, it was based off of a drug dog’s “signal” that his bag smelled like marijuana. By claiming that a dog “alerted” an officer can obtain probable cause, but in reality the dogs are about as reliable as Clever Hans.

After searching his bag, the officers found no drugs or other illegal substances. They then asked him if he was carrying any cash. Charles volunteered that he was carrying $11,000–clearly thinking, not unreasonably, that in a just world there is no way the officers could just take his money. Charles’s mistake, however, was thinking that he lives in a just world, and the officers walked away with his life savings.

Charles had saved the $11,000 over the previous five years, from work, financial aid, educational benefits, and gifts from family. Now he must overcome the officers’ hunches by proving that his money came from legal sources.

By now, hopefully you’re familiar with civil asset forfeiture. Thanks in part to the excellent work of the Institute for Justice, as well as biting commentary from John Oliver and dogged investigative journalism from the Washington Post and the New Yorker (as well as Cato’s own work), civil asset forfeiture no longer exists in the shadows, where the perpetrators would have preferred it to remain.

In a time of sharp political divides, there’s one thing we all should agree on: police and other law enforcement officials should not be allowed to take assets based only on the suspicion of criminal activity and then be permitted to use those assets to purchase needed things for the department, like margarita machines.

Charles – who admittedly smoked marijuana on the way to the airport – lost his life savings to what amounts to legalized piracy. It seems Mancur Olson was on to something when he described the government as “stationary bandits.”

Thankfully, Charles has the saintly lawyers at the Institute for Justice on his side, who use the money from IJ’s generous donors to defend people like him from the most powerful organization in human history – the United States government.

Otherwise, Charles would be out of luck. His confiscated $11,000 is just small enough to make it almost not worth it to pay thousands in attorney’s fees in order to possibly get some of it back. It’s almost as if the officers who confiscated his money thought that Charles would be unlikely to have the resources to fight the seizure.

Last year, the officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport had a “good” year taking things from people who haven’t been convicted of a crime, raking in $530,000 from travelers similar to Charles. Under the federal “equitable sharing” program, the departments of the deputized airport police are allowed to keep up to 80 percent of that money.

The Institute for Justice is not only seeking to recover Charles’s money, they are challenging the constitutional deficiencies of the civil asset forfeiture program in general.

For more on Charles’s case, see Vox’s story.

For more on civil asset forfeiture, see our episode of “Free Thoughts” featuring Scott Bullock from the Institute for Justice.


Trevor Burrus

Trevor Burrus is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, and legal history.

EDITORS NOTE: This post first appeared at Cato.org.

There Is No “Nationwide Crime Wave” — But Baltimore Is in Trouble by Daniel Bier

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Heather McDonald’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The New Nationwide Crime Wave” has exploded into the debate over police misconduct and criminal justice reform like a flash-bang grenade. It’s been discussed on numerous talk radio and cable news shows, and it’s been shared nearly 40,000 times on social media.

It’s a story engineered to go viral: It has a terrifying premise (crime everywhere is spiraling out of control!), a topical news hook (it’s all because of protesters!), a partisan bad guy (it’s all liberals’ fault!), and a weapons-grade dose of confirmation bias.

But there is no nationwide crime wave. It is completely manufactured by cherry picking data and misleading stats.

McDonald selects a handful of cities and quotes statistics to show that crime is exploding in “cities across America” this year:

In Baltimore… Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. …

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Does this blizzard of numbers show a “nationwide crime wave”? No.

As John Lott points out at FoxNews.com,

Overall, the 15 largest cities have actually experienced a slight decrease in murders. There has been a 2 percent drop from the first five months of 2014 to the first five months of this year. Murder rates rose in eight cities and fell in seven. There is no nationwide murder wave.

Murder rates fell dramatically in some of these cities. Comparing this year’s January-to-May murder data with last year’s, we find that San Jose’s murder rate fell by a whopping 59 percent; Jacksonville’s fell by 31 percent; Indianapolis’ by 28 percent; San Antonio’s by 25 percent; and Los Angeles’ by 15 percent.

Even in the cities where murder is up compared to 2014, other categories of crime are down. New York, for instance, has had more murders but fewer burglaries and robberies. LA’s other violent crimes may be up, but murder is down.

She also implies that police are being attacked and killed more than ever: “Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.”

This 89% statistic is a deeply misleading view of the facts. Yes, 51 officers were murdered in 2014, compared to 27 in 2013. But 2013 was the safest year for police since World War II. It had the fewest shooting deaths for police since1887.

If you compare 2014’s 51 murders to other recent years, it’s not exceptional. In 2012, there were 48 officers killed. In 2011, it was 72. Over the last couple decades, the rate of police murders (and indeed work-related deaths from all causes) have fallen by nearly half, as have assault and injuries of police.

There’s another reason why McDonald quoted last year’s statistics for officer deaths when all of her other figures come from this year: officer shootings are down 27% so far this year.

Just like her other statistics, if she had given any context at all to the 89% figure, it wouldn’t have fit with her narrative of rising violence.

But never mind — as the author of this story, McDonald knows the cause of this fictitious trend: the “Ferguson Effect.”

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

By her account, an “incessant drumbeat against the police” is behind the nonexistent “wave” of crime and violence against cops.

But this is also a myth. Public support for police has not waned. Gallup’s polling shows that confidence in law enforcement has been steady since the early 1990s.

That hasn’t changed, even after the protests against police abuse around the country. A Huffington Post/YouGov survey from April 2015 showed that 61% of Americans have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in their local department; 21% said “not very much,” and only 14% had “none.”

There is no national crime wave. Big cities are not facing a “surge of lawlessness.” There is no “war on cops.” The public hasn’t turned against the police.

So what’s going on in Baltimore? McDonald isn’t wrong about the spike in crime there. Baltimore City really is facing a breakdown in law and order.

Alex Tabarrok notes that police have made 40% fewer arrests since the start of the protests and the filing of criminal charges against six cops involved in Freddie Gray’s death.

As arrests have declined, crime has soared.

Tabarrok writes,

Not all arrests are good arrests, of course, but the strain is cutting policing across the board and the criminals are responding to incentives.

Fewer police mean more crime. As arrests have fallen, homicides, shootings, robberies and auto thefts have all spiked upwards.

Homicides, for example, have more than doubled from .53 a day on average before the unrest to 1.35 a day after (up to June 6, most recent data) – this is an unprecedented increase – and the highest homicide rate Baltimore has ever seen.

It’s not just murder. Shootings are up over 250%. Robberies are up 64%. Car thefts are up 42%.

It’s reasonable to assume that the increase in crime is at least partially related to the decline in police activity — criminals respond to incentives just like everyone else — but why aren’t police making arrests?

The answer might be found in the “De Blasio Effect.”

New York saw a similar “work stoppage” — that is, an unofficial strike — by the NYPD during its feud with Mayor De Blasio over his critical comments about the death of Eric Garner.

The NYPD retaliated: Arrests fell by 56% and criminal summonses fell by 92%, until the mayor made up with the department and police work resumed.

Kevin Drum speculates that BPD’s precipitous decline in arrests is a similar reprisal against the indictment of the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death.

It’s certainly possible that has something to do with it, but officers appear to be genuinely spooked. About 130 cops were injured in the riots — that’s about 4.5% of the city’s officers down over the course of a week. That’s almost twice the rate of injury the average department sustains in a whole year.

Cops are understandably worried. Peter Moskos, a former BPD officer, says, “In Baltimore today, several police officers need to respond to situations where formerly one could do the job. This stretches resources and prevents proactive policing.”

There’s another issue: when crime spikes, police can be overwhelmed. Cases build up, and as new reports pour in, less and less time can be devoted to the old ones.

Most murders in Baltimore this year have gone unsolved. BPD’s clearance rate for homicides has fallen to just 40%, and the surge in killings can only make things worse.

Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said the rise in killings is “backlogging” investigators, just as the community has become less engaged with police, providing fewer tips.

Tabarrok is worried that a new equilibrium for crime could emerge in Baltimore. If crime continues to rise, clearance rates will fall further, detectives will get more backlogged, and it gets even harder to solve the next case. And if the probability of being caught and punished goes down, criminals will commit more crimes.

With luck the crime wave will subside quickly but the longer-term fear is that the increase in crime could push arrest and clearance rates down so far that the increase in crime becomes self-fulfilling. The higher crime rate itself generates the lower punishment that supports the higher crime rate…

It’s possible that a temporary shift could push Baltimore into a permanently higher high-crime equilibrium. Once the high-crime equilibrium is entered it may be very difficult to exit without a lot of resources that Baltimore doesn’t have.

Some people see criminal justice reform as being anti-cop or “soft on crime,” but it’s not. Reform enables police to do a better job, which reduces crime — and that makes them and their citizens safer.

The best thing that Baltimore can hope for is that cops get back to work and start solving crimes. The best way to do that is for the community to engage with law enforcement.

Communities’ trust in police is key to fighting crime, and right now the BPD doesn’t have it. The Baltimore Sun has documented in excruciating detail the department’s history of corruption and excessive force, writing: “The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police.” And that leads to tips not given, 911 calls not dialed, and witnesses failing to come forward.

Real, credible reform, combined with accountability for misconduct and a strong commitment to community safety, is the best and probably only way to rebuild the relationship between citizen and cop and to turn crime around in Baltimore. The city and the police must embrace the task; they won’t accomplish it without each other.


Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.