No, Russell Brand, draconian drug laws didn't kill Philip Seymour Hoffman

I applaud the British Atheist Jesus, Russell Brand, talking about his own addiction, in this piece.

However, while he's personable there, and thoughtful in other things, or thought-provoking in his piece about not voting, and certainly intelligent, sometimes ...

Brand is just wrong.

And he is here, in claiming that America's draconian drug laws killed PSH. 

Before we start, a stipulation that I support decriminalization of marijuana, and am even OK with full legalization. I absolutely agree on "leveling" current sentencing on crack and powder cocaine. Beyond that? Most experiments with legalizing, or even decriminalizing, "hard" drugs have been done in countries with a lot smaller population, and with less racial and ethnic diversity, than the US. Their results don't necessarily translate here. Nor do I believe the standard libertarian argument that all drug problems disappear with legalization.

Next, one thing specific to Brand's diatribe.

His claim that many countries have legalized heroin is true only in a narrow sense. They have, instead, legalized its officially prescribed use. In other words, countries like Switzerland treat heroin like methodone here. Or stricter. It's "legal," but I take Brand as meaning something more like "street legal." And, that's simply not true of about anywhere.

This is true,  yes:

If drugs are illegal people who use drugs are criminals. We have set our moral compass on this erroneous premise, and we have strayed so far off course that the landscape we now inhabit provides us with no solutions and greatly increases the problem.

That said, the solution is not to legalize, but to do more on the rehabilitative side, especially for users of smaller amounts, to lessen legal sanctions on users of smaller amounts, but without giving a free pass to coke or heroin.

Then there's this:

This is an important moment in history; we know that prohibition does not work.

True enough, but the false implicit conclusion that full legalization will magically make things better doesn't follow. Modus tollens.

That's even more true of this:

People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition. What prohibition achieves is an unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.

For the first decade or two, here in the US, we'd probably have massive turf wars between drug gangs, an increased global mob economy with tax evasion, bribery, and more.

Now, back to the details of Hoffman's death.

First, as noted above, very few countries in the world have legalized or even "just" decriminalized heroin.

Second, even if it were legal, that still wouldn't guarantee that PSH wouldn't have gotten some tainted supply, unless you had "inspected" heroin.

Third, per No. 2 and my above statement, Hoffman could have wound up buying tainted heroin even with a tax stamp on it or whatever. International cigarette smuggling is proof of this. (I'm not saying that smuggled cigs are "tainted," just that government tax stamps are often fraudulently duplicated.)

Fourth, it doesn't guarantee that somebody might have tried turning him on to mixing heroin and fentanyl, either. Given that Hoffman's relapse reportedly started with what he took as an "innocuous" drink of alcohol, but escalated, he may have been at the point where he wanted to push envelopes.

Fifth, even if I remove 2 and 4, it doesn't guarantee that he wouldn't have OD'd on plain old heroin, perfectly legal.

Sixth, back to prescribed heroin again. People here in the US steal, forge scrips and otherwise do all they can to get their hands on legal, but prescription restricted narcotics of all sorts of stripes. I'll bet the same is true in Britain. Maybe even in Switzerland or Portugal.

Again, I'm not against at least a somewhat more libertarian attitude on drugs in the US. But, let's not pretend that loosening, let alone legalizing, drugs is a panacea for addiction, including for what can be the final result of addiction. After all, alcoholic, sadly, still die all the time.

$5 gallon gasoline next?

We're already at $4 in selected U.S. spots. And, Peak Oil, not just the unrest in Libya, is a cause, it seems.

"Peak Oil" only comes strongly into play if demand is pushing upward fairly rapidly.

And it is.

China has already passed the U.S. in coal use. By 2020, it may pass us in oil consumption.

Since we may well have hit "Peak Oil" three years ago, if China doubles its oil use in a decade or less, that will inevitably put upward pressure on oil, and thus gasoline, prices.

In Canada, where gas prices are fairly similar to those in the U.S., gas is at $5 a gallon in liter equivalents already. That's leading to talk of gas at $2 a liter, or about $7.50 a gallon, being just a year or so away.

In case you think any of that is due to cheap Canadian money, the loonie is trading with the U.S. dollar at rough parity.

So, we could see gas at $5 a gallon in the U.S. heartland a year or so from now, and $6 a gallon in places like New York City and San Francisco.

Now, the one silver lining? Per Rubin's column from Canada, this could mean, if not the end, at least a partial reversal of globalization. He touches on that more in a book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. And, he's not alone. Walmart, when oil prices hit $147 in 2008, was already talking about how some of its supply chain might have to move back from overseas.

That said, U.S. workers wouldn't benefit, in many cases. Mexican maquiladoras would see new spurts ... if U.S. companies could stomach the overhead of armed guards against drug lords.

That then said, such actions could spur Mexico into further disintegration, with major manufacturers extending their security forces outside their factories and creating de facto statelets.

At the same time, don't forget that hear in the U.S. President Obama refused to tackle the need for more regulation of commodities derivatives as part of financial regulation reform. If Peak Oil is here, Enron of a decade ago will seem like nothing.

Some ‘Washington Wowie’ with that merlot?

Some of Washington state’s newest fruit farmers are allegedly Mexican drug lords, a few of whom may even be growing pot in vineyards.

The story notes that drug folks have made some major busts there already, and that many farmers who are selling out have been approached, without having offered their land, are being invited to name their price, and are getting it paid in cash.

About that pot grown on federal land

Much of the marijuana in places like California’s Sequoia National Forest isn’t hippie homegrown stuff, or even sophisticated pseudohippie stuff, but comes from complex operations run by Mexican drug cartels, according to U.S. government experts.

Supposedly, its getting hard enough to smuggle pot across the border that the cartels are setting up inside the U.S.