Month: February 2014

Testifying before the House
Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Gen. John F. Kelly, who is
in charge of the U.S. Southern Command,
complained that marijuana legalization in Colorado and
Washngton has made it harder to enlist Latin American countries in
the war on drugs:

We’ve been encouraging these countries to be in the drug
fight for 25 years. The levels of violence that our drug
problem has caused in many of these countries is
just astronomical. And so when we talk about
decriminalizing, the example I would give you is the two
states that voted to decriminalize marijuana, or legalize
marijuana. Most of the…countries I deal with were in utter
disbelief that we would, in their opinion, be going in that
direction, particularly after 25 years of encouraging them to
fight our drug problem in their countries and, you know, in
their littorals. So that’s kind of where they are on it.
They’re very polite to me, but every now and again when
they’re not so polite, the term hypocrite gets into the
discussion. But frankly, the crime rate is so high in many of
these countries and the fact that they see us turning
away from the drug fight…They’re starting to chatter a lot
about, “Well, why don’t we just step back and let it flow?”

Contrary to Kelly’s gloss, “the levels of violence” in Latin
America are caused not by “our drug problem” but by our insistence
that other countries help us solve it by cracking down on
suppliers, a strategy that has never
succeeded in cutting off the northward flow of drugs but has
resulted in many
deaths. It is the height of arrogance for the U.S. government
to demand that Colombians, Bolivians, and Peruvians help enforce
its arbitrary pharmacological decrees, especially when that effort
is not only futile but demonstrably harmful. So it is not hard to
see why the officials with whom Kelly deals might react in the way
he describes to signs that Americans are having second thoughts
about this crazy chemophobic crusade. But recommitting to the
never-ending, always-failing “drug fight” is not the only way to
avoid charges of hypocrisy. If the experiments in Colorado and
Washington lead to a broader re-examination of the war on drugs, I
would count that as a benefit, not a cost.

Kelly claimed “countries that have decriminalized or legalized
drugs are all now trying to figure out ways to turn back the
clock,” because “legal or decriminalized drugs bring crime, bring
higher addiction rates, bring higher, you know, substance abuse
problems.” He did not cite any specific examples, which is not
surprising, since no country has ever “legalized drugs” in the
sense of eliminating penalties for production, distribution, and
possession. The closest example is
Uruguay, which has approved a plan to make marijuana legally
available but has not implemented it yet.

[Thanks to Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority for the tip.]

In Ukraine’s Crimean region, tensions
continue to rise as hundreds of heavily armed men began patrolling
two airports and are blocking road access with military vehicles.
Who they are, though, remains unclear.

The Minister of Internal Affairs issued a statement describing
the action at Simferopol, a civilian airport, and Sevastopol, a
military airbase, as an “armed invasion and occupation in violation
of all international treaties and norms. It is a direct provocation
of armed bloodshed in the territory of a sovereign state.”

Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov
said that that “judged by our special services” that although
they bear no insignia, the gunmen surrounding these locations are
“professional soldiers.”

Daniel Sanford of the BBC speculates
that “they could be a pro-Russian militia or they could be Russian
troops,” because “they don’t want to say who they are but are being
helped by pro-Russian activists, who are keeping cameras at a
distance.

Although the Russian government has previously threatened
intervention, has been running military exercises near the border
this week, and is reportedly both
flying military helicopters in Ukrainian airspace and blocking
Balaklava Bay with an armed ship, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet
denies any involvement in the airport standoffs.

The region has a large ethnic Russian population and some want
to
break entirely from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, ousted fugitive President Viktor Yanukovych, whose
whereabouts were unknown after he fled the capital one week ago,
has reemerged in Russia. He spoke at a press conference in
Rostov-on-Don rejecting foreign military intervention in Ukraine’s
domestic affairs, but said that
“Russia should and must act.” He
blamed the nation’s instability on western powers and the
opposition, describing the latter as “pro-fascist activists” and
“bandits.” Yanukovych also said he won’t participate in the
presidential election in May 2014, calling
the decision to move the vote from February 2015 as “unlawful,”
though he also assured that he remains Ukraine’s legitimate leader.
Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko today confirmed
that both he and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will
run.

For more Reason coverage of Ukraine, click
here.

Strictly speaking, Maryland
lawmakers aren’t overtly planning a gift to cigarette
smugglers, but that’s certainly going to be the ultimate result of
a proposal to massively hike taxes on all sorts of tobacco
products. The share of cigarettes supplied in the state by the
black market more than doubled from 2006 to 2011 under the pressure
of politicians’ appetite for other people’s money. That can only
continue to grow if
SB 589 becomes law and gives the state the fourth highest
cigarette tax rate in the country.

According to Jeremy Bauer-Wolfe at
MarylandReporter:

The Senate Budget and Taxation Committee heard testimony
Wednesday on
SB 589, which would increase the tobacco tax rate from $2 for a
pack of cigarettes to $3. The bill also calls for steep hike on all
other tobacco products — from 30% to 95% of the wholesale
price.

Products affected would include cigars, roll-your-own, and forms
of smokeless tobacco.

The bill would give Maryland the fourth highest tobacco tax
rates in the nation. No. 1 is New York at $4.35 per pack of
cigarettes. (Cigarette smugglers nabbed by comptroller’s agents
coming through Maryland from 30 cents-a-pack Virginia are often
headed to New York.)

According to estimates by the Mackinac Center for Public
Policy, which tracks tobacco taxes and smuggling, 25.76 percent
of Maryland’s cigarettes come from the black market, up from 10.38
percent in 2006 (the state doubled cigarette taxes in 2007). Not
only is it logical to expect that a further hike in taxes would
increase illegal sourcing of tobacco products, but Mackinac’s
Michael D. LaFaive and Todd Nesbit were even kind enough to suggest
by how much:

We also modeled for Maryland the impact of a recently proposed
50 percent hike in its excise tax, from $2 per pack to $3. If such
an increase were enacted in Maryland, the proportion of smuggled
cigarettes consumed by its smokers would leap from 26 percent of
the total market to 52 percent, and would actually result in a net
decline in tobacco tax revenues.

In New York, with the highest taxes in the country, the black
market already supplies 60.94 percent of the market, so a
52 percent share seems quite plausible if Maryland lawmakers move
forward with their attempted mugging of the state’s smokers. To
beat the taxman, smokes are smuggled in from low-tax jurisdictions,
from out of the country, or manufactured off the books and
under the legal radar.

Legislators really are the gift that keeps on giving—to people
who find economic opportunity in restrictive laws and high taxes.
Participants in the underground economy may want to consider
settting aside a few bundles of smoke-infused cash as thank-you
campaign donations to legislators. If they didn’t already do so to
get to this point, that is.

Here’s a moving little documentary about how VHS machines, a
shadowy entrepreneur, and a ubiquitous voice-over translator gave
the oppressed, audio-visually starved Romanians living under
Ceausescu a little dynamic glimpse of what freedom might look
like:

Director Ilinka Calugareanu adds some thoughts
here. Link via the Twitter feed of Kmele
Foster.

I wrote about the integral role of movies and culture in
Romanian politics (both before and after Ceausescu) in this

2005 Reason piece, which details how the show Dallas
was miraculously smuggled into the dictator’s shrinking TV
schedule. For more on J.R.’s liberatory role, watch this Reason.tv
vid:

In “Is U.S. Economic Growth
Over?,” a 2012 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon
argued that the country was in for 25 to 40 years of very slow
growth. In particular, Americans in the bottom 99 percent of the
U.S. income distribution could expect only 0.2 percent annual
increases in their real per capita disposable incomes. Faltering
technological innovation contributes substantially to the fall off
in future growth. Gordon has just published another study,“The
Demise of U.S. Economic Growth: Restatment, Rebuttal, and
Reflections,” in which he seeks to bolster his earlier conclusions.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey thinks Gordon
is too pessimistic about the trajectory of technological progress,
but admits that the economist has a point when it comes to the
doleful direction of the economic headwinds.

View this article.

“Let me put it this way: If one year from now, you’re not using
Dark Mail, it’s because you enjoy knowing the NSA is reading your
emails,” says Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, the email provider used by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

After Snowden’s identity became known, Levison shut down
Lavabit, posting the following message on the company website:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become
complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from
nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After
significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I
wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my
decision. I cannot.

Levison was prohibited from discussing any details of the case
until last October, when the court unsealed a portion of the
documents. The unsealed records reveal that the FBI was demanding
access to Lavabit’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) keys, which would
essentially allow the agency access to all messages on Lavabit’s
server. While the FBI was ostensibly targeting only a single user,
Levison was unwilling to sacrifice the privacy of his other
400,000+ users.

He is still not allowed to discuss the identity of the user the
FBI hoped to target.

Levison sat down with Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller at the
Messaging
Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) conference to talk more about
his decision to fight the federal government, his thoughts on
Edward Snowden, and his vision for Dark Mail, a collaborative effort with
Silent Circle, another
encrypted email service that shut down in the wake of Snowden’s NSA
revelations. 

Click the link below for downloadable versions.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Sharif Matar.
Approximately 15 minutes.

Subscribe to Reason TV’s
YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new
material goes live.

View this article.