Ron Paul was right; there are cracks in the argument of the Drug War crowd

I see Colorado recently legalized marijuana. Good for them. It should improve the scenery next time I drive through.

In 2009, I decided it might be fun to drive to California to visit my brother. It was a great trip across this great country, but one thing marred it. As I made my way west, I saw lots of billboards warning of the dangers of meth. Nothing quite spoils the view like a 10-foot-tall photo of a speed freak whos lost her hair and teeth.

After I got to my brothers house in Oakland, I decided it might be useful to do some research into the recreational drug most popular in California. Thats sold in various "clinics" as "medical marijuana."

I use the quotations advisedly. The young hipsters scoring at the coffeehouse I visited did not look the least bit ill. But so what? Marijuana wont rot their teeth. You wont find me crying in my beer at the local brewpub if the coffeehouse down the block sells pot to potheads.

The feds felt differently, however, and in April of 2012, agents descended on the "Oaksterdam University" complex that ran the coffeehouse and hauled off the teaching materials.

As a conservative, I got a good laugh out of that. All of those agencies are under the control of a president who used to smoke pot when he was young. And I would imagine most of the customers at the coffeehouse voted for Barack Obama.

Some young people are smarter than that, however. Four days after that raid, about 8,000 of them showed up at the University of Californias Berkeley campus for a Ron Paul-for-president rally. In 2012, the Texas Republican was the only candidate in either party who called for the federal government to get out of the drug enforcement racket.

It should be no surprise that a conservative Republican would oppose the war on drugs. The war traces back to the expansion of federal power under Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, when the Food and Drug Administration was charged with regulating pretty much everything Americans ingest.

For the remainder of the century, the only meaningful objection to this sort of thing among major political figures came from conservative William F. Buckley. In debates over drug policy, Buckley would get politicians of both parties sputtering by saying things such as: "If every American who had ever taken a proscribed substance were put in jail, there would be almost as many beds in American jails as there are beds in American homes."

Buckley also pointed out what might be called the Golden Rule of Smuggling: the more difficult the government makes it to bring big things into the country, the more likely the smugglers are to import small things. The federal government started out in the 1960s trying to cut off the supply of weak marijuana from Mexico. They largely succeeded, but by the 1980s the smugglers switched to cocaine, creating the crack epidemic. Meanwhile the meth producers started cranking out cheap speed.

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Ron Paul was right; there are cracks in the argument of the Drug War crowd