Positive Liberty

Leitmotif: “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.” — Mae West.

Links and notes on various subjects below the fold.

Surrender: I agree wholeheartedly with Sandefur’s post on drug prohibition. If anything, it actually understates the case a bit: Not only is marijuana the tenth-largest cash crop in Washington state, it is the fourth-largest cash crop nationwide, besting both wheat and rice, and outranked only by corn, soybeans, and hay. According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws,

Marijuana stands as the largest revenue producing crop in Alabama, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. It ranks as one of the top five cash crops in 29 others. Increases in state and federal spending since 1980 to reduce marijuana cultivation demonstrated little effect in limiting overall production.

If you think these numbers might be biased, and if you would prefer a source on the opposite side of the debate, consider this report from the U.S. Department of Justice, which validates much of the NORML report. Or try these pages from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which substantiate most of NORML’s claims on cash-crop status.

Weirdly, though, both sides may have some incentive to exaggerate the extent of marijuana use: NORML wants to demonstrate that the drug war has been a failure; it does so by arguing that lots and lots of people smoke pot anyway. (Now, of course, lots of people really do smoke pot, as a stroll down the DC sidewalks at midnight will quickly confirm. But I digress.)

Meanwhile, the drug warriors want to argue for more money at every chance they get. They want new helicopters, SWAT teams, neat paramilitary gear — and lots of high-paying government jobs for people just like themselves. They don’t exactly want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, do they?

All in all, it’s a good example of the principal-agent problem: How do you reward a government agency that succeeds at eradicating something you hate? You cut its funding. Yet the agency itself doesn’t want its funding to be cut — so it must report that it has failed, again and again, and that it needs more money to do the job right.

And if it really, actually fails, which I think that it has, then the argument for more money becomes all the easier, and the drug warriors get to keep their cushy government jobs, their neat paramilitary toys, and their smug feelings that they, personally are saving the world from The Evil of Drugs. This in itself is another failure of the drug war, a parasitism on the American taxpayer, and another reason that recreational drugs should be legalized.

Demonology: One of the most fascinating exchanges I’ve ever seen on the subject comes from Mark Olson of Pseudo-Polymath and Jim Anderson of Decorabilia. Olson wrote first, in part:

…while those [who believed in demons] in the past did not have all the advantages of MRI, PET scans, and all of the technology of modern science they did have as keen or keener understanding of human nature and were not any less intelligent than we. They found these explanations satisfactory and the argument that they were ignorant, less intelligent, or had less keen insights is almost certainly false. They were made of the same stuff as us and only lacked (!?) the “advantages” of our accumulated technology, health, and wealth.

It’s a serious conundrum for believing Christians, one that has been discussed for centuries as belief in the active supernatural has gradually abated: If we take the Bible literally, demons and witches most certainly do exist. Yet if we deny their existence, or if we deny that they play an active part in the world, then we also deny many supposed miracles of God, including Jesus exorcising the Gadarene demoniacs. Olson finds a solution I’ve not yet seen before. As a historian who has often written on witchcraft and demonism in the past, I was intrigued:

Demonic possesion as an explanation for madness “cured” (or put in abeyance) by anti-psychotic drugs only shows that demons inhabiting bodies are subject to the same physical world as ourselves.

To which Anderson replies,

from a scientific perspective, saying that demons are bound by the laws of physics initially sounds reasonable. After all, they would need a substrate for their wiles, right? But parsimony becomes a problem. If demons, for the longest time, have necessitated exorcism for their removal, why is it that all of a sudden we can control them with the right drugs? Does “demon possession” really explain anything about typical possessed behavior, at least that which has been observed by disinterested parties? (Accounts of levitation, telepathy, and the like, which would seem to be knock-down evidence for supernatural hanky-panky, are notoriously unreliable.) “We battle not against flesh and blood,” the Bible claims, “but against powers and principalities.” Nowhere is it mentioned if these principalities are in any way bound by chemistry or physics.

Second, does possession explain why some people are sane and others are crazy? At least with biochemistry and genetics we have a shot at an answer. We can search for a chemical imbalance, a tell-tale virus, a genetic marker. On the other side, only an exceedingly rare number of persons are possessed, and for reasons utterly inscrutable. As I’ve noted elsewhere, occult activities are often blamed–but in the best-known modern instance, the victim was a devout Catholic.

Third, open-mindedness is indeed a virtue, scientific or otherwise. But the evidence for actual possession is so rare, and so poor, that skepticism is by now the default position–even for the Catholic Church, the standard-bearer in the War on Evil.

I think he’s got it almost right. The most parsimonious reply to Olson seems to be, “What exactly do we gain by adding demons to the mix?” Does this additional hypothesis, beyond the organic cause, end up curing people more effectively? Does it propose new, distinct, and testable forms of treatment? How do these treatments fare under scientific study?

Olson’s reply to Anderson raised a lot of questions, but it answered relatively few. There’s a lot here to discuss on all sides, and it’s a discussion well worth following. Both writers are longtime devotees of Positive Liberty, and it’s fascinating to watch blog-neighbors spar like this.

Follow-ups I: The Washington Blade is reporting that World of Warcraft has changed its policies regarding gays, lesbians, and online guilds. It’s not entirely clear to me that the new policy represents a victory, but it sounds encouraging, and I like to think that my letter to them may have done some good. I’ve been approached in the virtual world several times by other players who have read it; most have actually been far more supportive than I expected.

Follow-ups II: Also from the Blade comes this courageous and very classy blog entry about Lonnie Latham, an anti-gay Baptist minister who was arrested for “lewdness” when he propositioned an undercover cop — a crime that ought not to be a crime at all. (Positive Liberty readers may remember Latham’s story from my post of January 5.)

I now quote from the Blade:

Of course his case is steeped in hypocrisy, since Latham — married (to a woman) with kids — was not only on the executive committee of the virulently homophobic Southern Baptist Convention, but had joined in its condemnation of gays and their “sinful, destructive lifestyle.”

If Latham was viewing homosexuality through only the prism of his own life, his conclusion is pretty justified, seeing as how he was cheating on his wife, whom he apparently duped into a sham marriage. But of course Latham’s condemnation applied to all of us, including those of us in truly committed relationships based on honesty and communication.

He was, as they say, “hoisted by his own petard,” thrown in jail for violating the exact type of sex regulation that he and his Southern Baptist cohorts would use to make all gay people second-class citizens.

We can’t be blamed for hoping all of America saw Lonnie Latham’s mug shot and the sexual hypocrisy it represents.

But the truth is that Lonnie Latham should never have been arrested, much less hassled by police and drug through the media.

Exactly.

That’s All Folks: I’m at a friend’s vacation house in West Virginia this weekend, and Brayton would be proud: We’ve got a Texas Hold’em tournament scheduled for tonight. Details will follow on Monday.