Alcohol Prohibition Deaths in Iran
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:31 PM

The production and consumption of alcohol in Iran have been banned since 1978 [correction: it should be 1979]. But of course, that stops neither production nor consumption, though it may reduce it, and certainly drives it to the black market. And black market alcohol will tend to be more dangerous than the legally-produced version:

Twelve Iranians have died [update: at least 19 have died] and 60 others have been poisoned after drinking alcohol laced with methanol apparently bought on the black market in the southern city of Shiraz.

An official from the southern city's university hospital, Mohammad Baqer Lankarani, says that 23 of those admitted for care are in a critical condition.

"Doctors are not very optimistic," he said.

Up to six of the victims have also reportedly been blinded.

He says the locally-produced alcohol consumed appears to contain methanol, a highly poisonous industrial alcohol used in the manufacture of dyes and anti-freeze.

Small quantities of the chemical can kill, blind and cause serious damage to the liver and kidneys.

Now what was that that Clarence Darrow said? Oh yeah: "Men were as sure that it was just to condemn heresy and witchcraft by death as their lineal descendants are sure of the righteousness of spreading poison broadcast to-day in the interest of the 'Noble Experiment' of prohibition." Come to think of it, heresy could get you in a lot of trouble in Iran, too. And one of the good things about our drug prohibition is that it doesn't lead to such problems, right?

Labels: alcohol, Darrow, Prohibition

 
Recent Drug War Killings
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:48 PM

This week's Drug War Chronicle provides an update on three drug war deaths of recent months:

"On December 10 [in Columbus, Georgia], Kenneth Walker, a 39-year-old black professional and family man, was riding in an SUV with friends when their vehicle was pulled over by police doing a drug investigation (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/316/columbus.shtml). Walker ended up dead with a bullet wound to the head. No drugs or weapons were found in the vehicle.

Three weeks later, on January 3, 19-year-old Michael Newby, a black resident of Louisville's predominantly black West Side, was killed by a Louisville police officer during an undercover drug buy (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/319/threeshots.shtml). Officer McKenzie Mattingly said he shot Newby in self-defense during a scuffle, but the fact that Newby was shot in the back has raised numerous questions, as well as tempers in the black community -- some of whose members engaged in a mini-riot, breaking the windows of the police chief's office and tangling with riot police, a week after the shooting.

Then, on February 17, Oakland resident Rudolfo Cardenas was and killed by a California narcotics officer attempting to serve a parole violation warrant (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/326/wrongman.shtml). But Cardenas wasn't the man the cops were looking for. The 43-year-old ex-con just happened to pass by the house targeted by police and fled for unknown reasons. Police chased him in vehicles and then on foot. Cardenas died in an alleyway, shot in the back repeatedly. No drugs or weapons were found, although police initially claimed he pointed a digital scale at them."

These shootings are tragedies for the victims, their friends and families, the communities -- and for the police, as well. Back to Clarence Darrow again, on alcohol Prohibition: "No other statute is openly enforced with guns and revolvers. For no other minor offense can officers with impunity shoot down a human being in seeking to make an arrest."

Labels: Darrow, drugs, policing

 
Perhaps the Final Post on Clarence Darrow and Prohibition
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:22 AM

OK, even the loyal Vice Squad reader is pretty much Darrowed-out. But the quest for closure necessitates one more post about what Clarence Darrow had to say about Prohibition in his autobiography, The Story of My Life. Forthwith.....

"If the prohibition law had been treated like any other act of Congress or
State legislation it would have died long ago. No other statute is openly
enforced with guns and revolvers. For no other minor offense can officers
with impunity shoot down a human being in seeking to make an arrest."

"The tyrant believes that if the laws do not fit the people then the people
must be bent to fit the laws and forced to obey."

"The Volstead Act in effect brands every one who takes a drink as a criminal,
as a felon. It does this in spite of the fact that the greatest men of the
world have always taken intoxicating drinks."

Plus ca change.... Diehards can find the earlier Darrow posts here, here, here, and at the end of the post here.

Labels: alcohol, Darrow, policing, Prohibition

 
Darrow on Prohibition (Vol. 48)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:49 AM

The loyal Vice Squad reader demands, "More about Prohibition from
Clarence Darrow 's autobiography, The Story of My Life!"
So without further ado....

Darrow recounts the disingenuous approach to Prohibition that was taken
during World War I, during which a temporary prohibition was enacted
under the guise of saving food (grain) for the war effort. Darrow believes
that the supporters of this measure were more motivated by an interest
in stopping drinking than in winning the war.

A Constitutional Amendment was needed for the federal government to
have the power to regulate alcohol. But that was all that was "needed",
Darrow notes: the amendment could simply have given the Federal
government that power (without specifying the nature of the regulation),
and then Congress could have voted for national prohibition. But instead,
the dry forces enshrined the policy itself, prohibition, into the
Constitution, "intending thereby to make it impossible ever to permit
the sale of intoxicating liquor in the United States." As for the 18th
Amendment and its implementing legislation, the Volstead Act,
"If senators and representatives had voted as they drank, no such
legislation would ever have disgraced America."

"A small minority cannot nullify a law, but where a statute is considered
tyrannical and unjust it always meets with protest. Refusal to be bound
is such a protest. If protest is so great as to interfere with its
enforcement by ordinary methods, it is plain that it has no place in the
law in the land."

"Men were as sure that it was just to condemn heresy and witchcraft
by death as their lineal descendants are sure of the righteousness of
spreading poison broadcast to-day in the interest of the 'Noble
Experiment' of prohibition."

Labels: alcohol, Darrow, policing, Prohibition

 
Clarence Darrow Responds to Guest Blogger!
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:41 AM

Guest blogger Michael Alexeev has done his host the honor of quibbling! Mike is
concerned that I too blithely assumed that drug possession is unworthy of jail,
and yes, I agree, I was too blithe about it in my post. For one, I did not
specify that I was talking "personal use quantities", and the immediate "no
punishment" argument only applies to possession for private use, not sale,
so I should have made that clear. But Mike goes further, and suggests that
maybe drug possession is like drunk driving, not immediately and necessarily
harmful to others in itself but posing enough of a risk of harm that we rightly
can proscribe drug possession and punish drug possessors, as we punish drunk
drivers. This criticism is a species of a traditional attack on John Stuart Mill's
harm principle, that we cannot easily draw the line between self-regarding
acts and acts that harm (or pose a non-negligible risk of harming) others.

In general, it is indeed hard to draw the self-regarding/non-self-regarding
line. But for me (and for Mill), it isn't a close call with drug possession (hence
my leaving it out of the post). The criminalization of drug possession is an
unjust restraint upon liberty.

The full argument requires an examination of the external costs of
drug use, and the certainty with which these externalities arise from drug
use. I won't go through all the possibilities here, but I will state the general
conclusion: the external costs that plausibly arise from drug use are way too
uncertain to justify criminalization. Millions of Americans have used illicit
drugs, and the vast majority of them have not caused any problem for anybody.

But my assertion alone is of course unsatisfactory, so let me at least point
the way to a more organized approach. In what ways do drugs cause harm to others?

Mark Kleiman, in his book Against Excess, offers one potential accounting of
"harms to others" associated with drug use: dereliction of duty; crime; nuisance;
health damage; drain on common resources; risk-spreading and cross subsidy
effects; leading others to use drugs (in epidemiological fashion); and "notional"
damage. (Notional damage is the possibility that some people are made
unhappy or disgusted simply by knowledge of others' drug use.)

Consider Kleiman's first three external costs, dereliction of duty, crime, and
public nuisance. Dereliction of duty (such as failure to provide for children)
can rightly be punished, whatever the cause. But the potential for drug taking
to lead to this outcome is not sufficiently direct and certain to justify
making drugs illegal. Likewise, the crime that is engendered by some types of
drug consumption -- violence by drunks, for instance -- is not sufficiently
direct and certain to stand as a basis for outlawing drugs. The external harm
that arises from creating a public nuisance, like the harms from dereliction
of duty or drug-induced crime, could provide a reason to punish those who
create public nuisances. Again, however, the public nuisance associated with
most types of drug use is insufficiently direct and certain to justify drug
prohibitions.

If a person had once been violent under the influence of alcohol or drugs,
however, then a prohibition specific to that person would be OK by Mill
and by me.

Some drug use might have a direct influence on the health of others, and such
use could justly be controlled on that basis. Second-hand smoke is the premier
example here, though the extent to which it causes health risks to others is
quite controversial.

Kleiman's remaining types of external costs (drains on common resources,
risk-spreading and cross subsidy effects, leading others to use drugs, or
"notional" damage) do not appear to me to "rise to the Millian level" to
justify prohibition. Such costs, to quote Mill, generally do not constitute
"perceptible hurt to any assignable individual...."

Let me give the last word (for now--Mike?) to new Vice Squad hero Clarence
Darrow: "Criminal statutes are very different from civil legislation. Punishment
is inflicted on the theory that a right-thinking person could not commit the
act without a feeling of guilt. No such feeling has ever been experienced
with the taking of a drink of intoxicating liquor." (...or from the taking
of a hit of an intoxicating drug...OK, couldn't leave the very last word to
Darrow.)

Labels: Darrow, Mill, recreational drug use

 
Clarence Darrow on Prohibition (II)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 8:34 AM

Yesterday I started to relate some of what famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow had to say about Prohibition in his autobiography, The Story of My Life. I thought that I would expand upon the Darrow/Prohibition theme today. Here's a brief excerpt on the practice of denaturing industrial alcohol in ways that made it not only unpalatable but sometimes poisonous:

"So far as I know, no organization of human beings heretofore has coldly
and deliberately advocated poisoning any one who might run counter to their
will. The prohibitionists insist that alcohol sold for mechanical purposes
and shipped broadcast over all America shall contain deadly poison. They
advocate this, knowing that much of it is redistilled and used as a beverage,
that many people might and do get it through accident and without any design
to take intoxicants; and that, at best, or worst, to drink it is only a minor
offense; yet men and women, who in ordinary life are kind and humane, are so
obsessed by their delusions and so sure of their convictions, and so resentful
of those who do not follow their dictates, that they are willing to condemn
to blindness and death thousands of people, without arrest or indictment or
trial, by putting poison into their drink. Heretofore such measures have not
been resorted to against anything but rats and vermin, and many humane
persons hesitate to do this."

Labels: Darrow, Prohibition

 
Clarence Darrow on Prohibition (I)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 1:04 PM

I just finished reading Clarence Darrow's autobiography, The Story of My Life
(New York: Scribner's, 1960 [1932]), which I enjoyed way beyond my expectations.
Some of the special payoff comes from the local color, in that I live in
Darrow's old neighborhood. But the vice-specific material in the autobiography
also provided a lift. Darrow took the John Stuart Mill approach to self-regarding
actions, it seems. He was a fervent opponent of alcohol Prohibition, and even
co-authored a book (which I have not read) attacking national Prohibition. But
he has plenty to say about Prohibition in his autobiography, too. The Story of
My Life was originally published in 1932, while Prohibition still ruled the
land.

Darrow highlights the contradiction between the gluttony that he attributes to
many temperance reformers and their stern warnings about touching even a drop
of alcohol, even though "There were always more graves filled from overeating
than from over-drinking..." [This is recognized, incidentally, in the modern
day US, where obesity leads to more early deaths than alcohol.] Picking up
again, from page 287 (of the 1960 Scribner's edition, not the more recent edition
linked above)...

"Puritanism has always associated pleasure with sin. To the real Puritan, life
is a grim, depressing duty; this earth is nothing but a preparatory school
for entering heaven. And to be happy in heaven, one must be unhappy here.
So the old revivalist and temperance reformer had no difficulty in holding
up the drunkard as a horrible example: Just see how happy and carefree and
unmeddlesome he was; always so satisfied with his lot in life and willing
that every one else should do as he liked; naturally there was something
wrong with such a method of living. The glutton dragged himself to the
meeting and shouted "Amen!" in the right places, a friend to heartburn but
not to hiccough....

Devouring all the food that one could hold was praiseworthy. But drinking
liquor, even one mouthful, was damnable....

It was on this popular foundation that prohibitionists organized their
forces and waged the campaign to destroy the liberties of American
citizens. It was on this foundation that they foisted upon the United
States a reign of terror, intimidation, violence, and bigotry unprecedented
in the modern world."

Times certainly have changed: we can no longer claim that our current
prohibition is unprecedented.

[If you think that the title of this post threatens more later on Darrow
and Prohibition, uh, well, that might be the case.]

Labels: alcohol, Darrow, Mill, obesity, Prohibition