Money For Nothing

Hi! In my last blog which held the nation breathless, I discussed an historical event so incredibly weird it would seem unbelievable if not supported by documented fact: The Prohibition. Today I’d like to discuss—to the best of my amateurish knowledge---a contemporary phenomenon no less strange, shocking and in defiance of common sense: our current US economy.

I came across a fact that I found amazing that I wish was as common knowledge as Donald Trump’s shifting funding strategies for his Mexican Wall that wall never be built. According to a recent study, since 2004, Fortune 500 companies have spent 54 percent of their profits on buying back their own stock and an additional 36 percent paying out dividends to shareholders. So companies on average essentially pay 90 percent of their profits back to Wall Street.

They buy back their own stock because it inflates the stock price to the short term benefit of shareholders. Of course, in a world tethered to reality, a company’s stock price would be merely a reflection of its actual performance, but buying back your own stock artificially manipulate its price—making its dollar value higher than its real world value. It’s the performance enhancing drug of corporate America and companies are addicted in record numbers. This is what folks in finance seem to mean by creating a stock bubble: a problem unless you and your shareholders live in that profit making, insulated virtual reality universe where it doesn’t matter so long as the bubble doesn’t burst (or if you fail to get out before it bursts) because it will just mean larger profits for everyone. A bubble bath of bubble boys in a tub of gold. God what a terrifying metaphor.  

Price manipulation through stock buyback was once not only discouraged, it was illegal. But in 1982, the SEC passed Rule 10B-18 which allowed companies to do this—with some limitations. The SEC sheriff at the time was this guy named John Shad. Prior to being charged with policing Wall Street, he had been a Wall Street CEO---totally not a conflict of interest or anything. “John, we’re going to call you a “regulator” but of course your real job is to provide hall passes”. “I see you have an extensive background in burglary, have you considered applying for a security guard job?”, said no one ever, but on Wall Street and in Washington this type of thing seems common: use insiders to blow it up from the inside!

Of course occasionally reality makes a furious comeback (reality loses a lot of battles but it seems to win every war) and a massive mess ensues. This is what nearly crashed the world economy in 2008—bonds linked to mortgages were given to people despite common sense dictating the new homeowners would have to default on them eventually and these bonds artificially soared in value in the short term and everyone got out after the bubble burst---and tax payers cleaned up the mess. The official cost was “only” $700 billion, but factoring in loans and such, another estimate pegs it as $12.8 trillion. Oh well, money can’t buy you love.

A second reason stock buybacks would be outlawed if the inmates weren’t running the asylum: it literally costs jobs. In 2011 Pfizer laid off 1,1000 workers. “Well, it’s sad when people lose their jobs, but when times get tough companies have to tighten their belts”. No. They laid their workers off so they could buy back $4 billion of their own stock. People were expendable, the stock price was invaluable. The following year their reduced staff gave them such massive surpluses they hired back those workers and created new and improved life saving drugs. Just kidding, They bought back an additional $5 billion of their stock. Wall Street was partying, Main Street was crying.

This habit is even more insane when you consider that companies make no money when they do this, but Wall Street has become so powerful and arrogant that they can and will get CEO’s fired if they don’t do their bidding. And 76 percent of CEO compensation now comes in the form of stock options—so they are incentivized to play along with the madness too. This essentially makes CEO’s embedded members of Wall Street themselves. Regulators, CEO’s…….Wall Street has its golden ring wrapped around all of them. “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”. Too dramatic?  

And when so much of a company’s profits are drained to feed the carnivorous “greed is good” crowd, it’s money not spent on employee salaries, pensions, building new plants/offices, developing new products and services, etc.---in other words, all the things that can benefit the rest of society, not just those impeccably dressed vultures on Wall Street demanding their pound of flesh. The middle class keeps having to sacrifice because we’ve run out of money or because we’ve all become the sacrificial lambs of high finance?

And here’s the punchline: it doesn’t seem to work. Carly Fiorina (remember her? The Republican candidate Trump hated the most because she wasn’t a young, submissive Eastern European supermodel speaking broken English?) ran Hewlett Packard from 1999—2005. She purchased $14 billion in stock buybacks compared with $12 billion in profits over that time. She laid off a bunch of workers. Then she was fired. The company wasn’t growing enough. Giving investors easy money through buybacks is like buying children’s love with too many cupcakes: rather than earning their undying love and loyalty they will just say they want more cupcakes--and a new mommy. HP’s successors followed a similar strategy. But instead of enriching their shareholders, imagine if they had used that money to develop the best mp3 player, smartphone, or tablet. Maybe we would all consider the iPod, iPhone, and iPad pieces of copycat junk compared with the HP Hella Wicked Volcano phone. (I don’t work in marketing). But they opted for fast food takeout instead of a full course home cooked meal. 

But American’s sweethearts Apple are part of this game too. (I’m writing this on a Mac so my hands are also dirty it would seem). Last year  they spent $37 billion on stock buybacks. They have also been accused of being tax dodgers. They, along with other companies, have tax shelters in Ireland. Their CEO Tim Cook has defended this, shifting the blame to a supposedly unfair and outdated tax code in need of reform. In 2014 they paid $14 billion in taxes. A lot of money, second most of any corporation, but still roughly $23 billion less than they paid to Wall Street. They paid less to the people who build roads, bridges, and schools and fight our wars—and grant patents, copyrights, and subsidies that allow American companies like Apple to flourish--compared with the bros who gamble with money and call each other “chief”. Companies claim to be so upset about their taxes, but maybe their enslavement to Wall Street causes them to pay such exorbitant amounts back to them that they can’t stand having to pay government taxes on top it. Is Uncle Sam or Carl Icahn the real villain?

And so they lay off workers, outsource workers, cut products and services…..all to avoid facing the elephant in the room and confronting Wall Street and those activist investors who threaten their heads on a platter or a takeover of their company if they don’t pay their ransom money through huge buybacks and dividends. And this subservience to the stock price and its need to grow every single quarter to please investors (you made $50 billion last quarter but you made $51 billion the quarter before? I can’t wait to get a no-growth loser like you out of my life) seems to breed a kind of madness. The laws of nature dictate creatures stop growing after adolescence, the laws of gravity dictate anything that goes up must come down, but a company slavishly shackled to its stock price has to rise above the laws of nature and never stop growing. So if stock prices have to be manipulated, jobs have to be lost, and profits have to be drained for no societally productive use just to ensure growth (or the appearance of it) it beats getting fired.  

Finance and Wall Street have been around since the system was created by Alexander Hamilton while serving as George Washington’s Treasury Secretary. And right from the beginning, there were “occupy Wall Street” types who decried its perceived exploitation and greed and feared America was being hijacked by the “stock jobbers”. But, like, Kanye West’s ego, finance has only gown over time. Since 1990, the financial sector has represented a higher percentage of our GDP than ever before in US history—and it’s growing all the time. The only other period that came close was the Great Depression. But does this matter? After all a larger financial sector means more jobs….in finance. But many site history and note rich societies of the past underwent similar evolutions: starting out as agriculturally based like us, then shifting to industry/commerce like us, then finance like us, then collapse. Like us? Pass the popcorn.  

How did this growth happen? One prevailing theory is that deregulation--championed by economist Milton Friedman and implemented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and virtually every leader since—has opened the finance floodgates. I noted above how the stock buyback craze is the child of early 80’s deregulation.

Another fascinating—if a little confusing to a layperson like myself—theory says the root lies in our monetary system itself. Prior to 1971, our currency was tied to the gold standard. Our money’s link to gold had already been watered down in 1933 but it was eliminated entirely in ’71. Under the gold standard, your currency had to be linked to your gold reserves. In ’71 a dollar was worth 1/35^th of an ounce of gold. This system had one disadvantage our fearless leaders hated: you couldn’t just make new dollars without new gold to back it up. Nixon complained that our gold reserves had gotten too low (and they were discovering new gold in Russia! Those commies were at it again!) but the other problem was funding that anti-communist police action called The Vietnam War.

With out current “fiat currency” in which currency and gold are divorced from each other, less money creation limitations exist and banks can literally create money out of thin air—order it into existence by “fiat”. God said “let there be light”, AC/DC said “let there be rock”, and banks say “let there be money”. But the value of the dollar has to be measured against something, so instead of being measured against gold, it’s now measured against other currencies. Instead of the dollar’s strength resting on the intrinsic value of a shiny yellow rock, it now rests solely on its relative value to the pound, the euro, the yen, etc. Instead of a fixed currency, we now have a “floating currency”.

Problem: as the names imply, floating is less stable than fixed. Because gold is rare and gold rushes are rarer, currency fluctuations were usually kept in check, but when currency only has relative value to other currencies, it can swing up and down daily, hourly, by the minute. But this see-saw created a new game for Wall Street: the futures market. This is a labyrinthine system (which I barely understand) which allows an investor to hedge against loss due to currency fluctuations and even profit from them. Floating currency may also hurt trade: if your currency is stronger, your exports are more expensive to sell to other countries and imports are cheaper to buy from other countries. After decades of trade surpluses, we’ve had trade deficits every year since 1975—partially thanks to floating currency it seems. And do cheap imported products steer the American consumer to not buy American? And do expensive American exports steer the American employer to not employ American?    

So monetary policy changes may have had deep economic impacts that went way beyond helping fund the Vietnam War and helping Nixon get re-elected: increasing wealth inequality and weakening the overall US economy. Yep, I’ve learned there are some crazy people on the Internet and elsewhere who argue that while tax policy, tax shelters, salaries lagging behind cost of living, the decline in organized labor, and outsourcing may contribute to inequality, they are mere symptoms of the disease of fiat monetary policy.

Others think gold standard vs. fiat currency misses the point. Do you know where money comes from? I mean we all know where babies come from (the stork) but how about money? The government creates money, right? That’s what I always assumed. Not so. The government creates about 2 percent of the money in circulation: mostly coins. The rest is created entirely by private banks when it issues loans. This means our entire economy is fueled by debt. If debt didn’t exist, we would have to create it. The argument that money creation should be the sole role of our democratically elected government, not our unelected bank managers is now considered….well, pretty much a crackpot idea. But it wasn’t always so. In fact, for the first 100+ years of our country’s history it was a popular idea. Andrew Jackson dismantled the central bank and, probably not coincidentally, was also the last President to balance the federal budget. (He also liked to kill Native Americans and place them on reservations so there was that). Lincoln bypassed the banks and poured “greenbacks” directly into the economy to help the people and the struggling Civil War economy. 

But it gets even crazier. Did you know that when a bank issues a loan they are loaning you money they don’t have? They only need to have a fraction of the money they loan in reserves because they know people only take out a certain percentage of their deposited money at any given time. (Unless of course there's a major scare and they need a bailout from the government). It’s called fractional reserve banking. So they create money out of thin air and essentially make multiple loans to multiple people backed by the same reserve of money. What a racket. And each time you pay them back, you pay back with interest. Banks then are the beneficiaries of scarce incomes and big ticket item prices which combine to prevent most people from buying things in one debt free lump sum.

And consider this: to the economy as a whole loans mean inflation because new money is now going into circulation. Under the gold standard we have fluctuating inflation and deflation, but with central bankers’ increased ability to manage money, we’ve had steady inflation since the early 70’s. But—some argue—inflation creates income inequality. Richer people can make more investments in stocks, bonds, real estate: things that will appreciate in value over time if they play their cards right and more than offset inflation. Banks can charge interest and thereby protect themselves from inflation. But middle class and working class people have far less opportunities to shelter themselves from inflation. And when employers don’t adequately adjust salaries to cost of living increases it gets even worse. And when payroll taxes—paid primarily by lower and middle class workers—increase over time while corporate taxes—paid primarily by the rich—go correspondingly down as a percentage of overall tax revenue, the problem gets worse still.

Well I could maybe go on…..but I think all this talk about money is giving me indigestion. So how do we solve this? 1. Make stock buybacks illegal again, 2. tie currency to some natural commodity again, 3. crack down on tax evasion by the very rich, 4. ……..I think I’m out of ideas. No, wait! Ban the charge of interest on loans! This is another crackpot idea that was once mainstream. Interest’s dirty synonym is usury. Both The Bible and The Koran decry usury as a shady tactic which exploits those in need of loans. But what about inflation? Won’t the lenders actually lose money on loans without charging interest? If it’s the case that loans are the very thing that create inflation, maybe the problem would take care of itself. Make banks non-profit organizations who loan without interest!      

I’m sure all those things will happen any day now, no problem.

Well at least they’re about as likely as a classy Trump Wall around Mexico.   

  

The Prohibition Era: Why?

Hi. Today I’d like to discuss drugs. Kids, as Nancy Reagan once said, “Just say no”…….to not legalizing drugs. Just kidding.

Our country may be on its way to legalizing marijuana and on behalf of the owners of the royalties to Bob Marley’s Legend album and the sellers of Lays potato chips, “It’s 4:20 somewhere”. But is legalizing pot merely the first step to legalizing all recreational drugs? Will this be a slippery toke, if you will? (See what I did there? Not a slippery slope but ….sorry).  For many, the very idea is pure insanity. You read about kids dropping dead from heroin overdoses and some dweeb claims the problem is that this deadly drug is illegal?! This apparent assault on common sense is so strong that I wonder if we will never become like the Dutch and legalize drugs. Amsterdam will remain just a far away sin city of the American imagination and a mediocre Van Hagar song.

Yet the other day I came across the best argument for legalizing drugs I’ve ever read--and it had nothing to do with drugs. I read a thorough academic analysis of Prohibition. (You’re right: it was mostly the Wikipedia page. You’re also right: I only read it after I started watching Boardwalk Empire). And let me just say it’s completely crazy that this was ever a thing. And it wasn’t terribly long ago: from 1920—1933. There are people still living who were around back then. The US Government—which always touts itself as a gleaming beacon of freedom—decided Americans no longer had the right to legally buy or sell alcohol. We could say, “Well, hindsight is 20/20” but many thought it was insane in real time. Winston Churchill said it was “an affront to the whole history of mankind”. And that was an understatement.

So how did this happen? Well for one, more non-white Anglo Saxon Protestant immigrants were coming to America. Nativists (think many Trump supporters) associated heavy alcohol use with immigrants. Germans were our enemy in World War 1, Germans were huger beer brewers, you do the math. I’d like to take the moral high ground here, but a few years ago I went to a Hartford Wolf Pack game and got off the bus at around 5PM with the morning/early afternoon’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade revelers still stumbling around loudly slurring f-bombs and Neil Diamond classics and even I wondered if revisiting Prohibition might be worth consideration. Anyway, upright post-WW1 Ned Flanders-esque Protestants thought they could correct and civilize these wild, dirty, sloshed immigrants who often barely spoke English! Prohibition to the “America: F$%@ Yeah!” rescue. So today’s Trump fanatics might want to consider the potential unintended consequences of their flag waving, wall building xenophobia: a constitutional amendment banning quesadillas and orange chicken. Is this really a high stakes gamble you’re prepared to make?

But the movement was actually somewhat bipartisan. Many social progressives sided with the pro-America conservative Protestants. They saw alcohol as a stumbling block to creating an American utopia. Since many poor people drank like every day was an Irish wake, eliminating alcohol, might remove a stumbling block to social and economic equality. Sure you had to infringe on personal liberty but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet when you’re trying to save the world. When it comes to reducing freedoms to further a noble cause, neither liberals nor conservatives have ever entirely cornered the market.       

Also the suffragette movement had earned women more political power. They gained the right to vote months after Prohibition went into effect. In particular, the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement helped influence the ban of alcohol. Now I can hear some guys saying, “Man, women ruin everything”. To be fair, many were subjected to their idiot husbands coming home drunk and beating them for letting the pot roast get cold, so it’s understandable why they thought ousting liquor might correct and civilize their cavemen husbands. In a world before socially accepted divorce, it must have been temping to think the father of their children’s underlying issue was alcohol, not that he was a garden variety jerk.   

And the crazy thing is Prohibition may have partially worked. Some think it cut alcohol consumption in half during the 20’s. While usage is impossible to measure through sales (since all sales were under the table) medical cases of cirrhosis of the liver went down and since non-alcoholic cirrhosis is rare, it can be inferred fewer people were getting their drink on at the da club or the speakeasy while dancing to the devil’s music. Jazz.    

Of course many still drank and for them things became far less safe. Legal alcohol had adhered to relatively safe production standards but illegal booze produced in hidden stills was often tainted with metals and other impurities which made people sick or dead. An estimated 1,000 people died every year from this impure homebrew. Oh and the government poisoned alcohol. No, really. This is not a crazy conspiracy theory, it’s well documented. Having cut down on illegal gin running from Canada, the government realized bootleggers had resorted to stealing domestic commercial alcohol so they could re-distill it to make it drinkable. Plug one hole and you create another! So in 1927 Uncle Sam decided to add methyl alcohol, kerosene, brucine, gasoline, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and/or acetone to people’s cocktails. No word on whether guys would attempt to woo flapper girls in speakeasies with lines like, “I think you and I have really great chemistry—and that’s not just the carbolic acid talking”.

Some estimate Prohibition caused at least 10,000 people to die from government poisoned moonshine and bathtub gin. And since the poor were less likely to be able to afford the purer stuff, they were disproportionately killed off for their wicked imbibing ways. Apparently the government believed the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for violation of the almighty Volstead Act as well as a potential deterrent to future drinkers. Maybe fewer people got cirrhosis simply because they weren’t lucky enough to live long enough to destroy their livers.   

Making drinking a crime was also an amazing late Christmas gift from the government to criminals. (The law went into effect in January of 1920). In the first year alone, a study of 30 US cities estimated that crime went up 24 percent, including a 13 percent increase in homicides. The distribution of liquor was transferred from legal, regulated respectable salesmen to gangsters. And what is a gangster other than a supplier of products customers can’t get at his or her local convenience store? Prior to 1920 gang affiliated black market merchants’ main products were prostitution and gambling, but for 13 glorious, gin soaked, blood soaked years, crime syndicates would also have a monopoly over alcohol sales. It’s no coincidence that this era features some of the most famous gangsters in US history: Al Capone, John Dillinger, Arnold Rothstein, Bonnie and Clyde… It’s estimated that Capone had an income of $100 million per year---a present from incorruptible Prohibition passing politicians which he used to  pay off corrupt politicians to look the other way on his violation of the law. (Except that do-gooder Kevin Costner—I mean Eliot Ness). Capone said, “All I do is supply a public demand….somebody had to throw a liquor on that thirst, why not me?”. Without illegal products to sell, a gangster’s rug is swept from under him so demonizing a product and making it illegal creates a gangsta’s paradise.

Prohibition was also both a job killer and a job creator. What? You lost your bartending job when the bar was forced to shut down? What? The Depression hit? Don’t worry: your local neighborhood mob boss has a huge demand for gin and whiskey to deal with so he’s hiring. Is it productive to society when the suppliers of a product—harmful vice though it may be-- consider murder a viable business strategy to deal with competitors, late paying customers, employees who call in sick, or just anyone who disrespects them? Are the vices of these illegal salesmen more harmful to society than the vice that is the product itself?

Another problem: Prohibition may have prohibited the government from obtaining necessary revenue more than it prohibited people from drinking. They thought they had gained monetary independence from alcohol after passing the 16^th Amendment in 1913 which created the federal income tax. Prior to this, about 40-50 percent of the government’s revenue came from taxing alcohol. Uncle Sam’s livelihood was no less dependent on booze than a bar owner, a karaoke machine maker, or a country music songwriter. But they discovered incomes seem to fluctuate more than alcohol consumption—whether it’s legal or not--so the income tax was in many ways a less reliable revenue stream. The Depression hit, tax revenue tanked, and, adding insult to injury, they were depriving themselves of an obvious revenue source. All told the US government deprived itself of $11 billion in tax revenue over the 13 years. And Prohibition created a costly increased demand for law enforcement. City police budgets went up by at least 10 percent and the feds had to employ thousands of enforcement agents which cost them an additional $300 million.

But it wasn’t all bad. More people joined churches and synagogues! …..because you were still allowed to obtain wine for religious purposes. And more people became pharmacists! …..because you were still allowed to distribute alcohol for medicinal purposes. That’s right, medicinal whiskey was a thing. Anxiety? The flu? 80 proof whiskey is just what the doctor ordered. But fewer people went to the theater or the ballpark. You couldn’t even drink. They must have experienced something similar to Homer Simpson's epiphany when he found himself sober at a baseball game for the first time in his adult life and said, “I never realized how boring this game is”. Prohibition also created the booze cruise! No need to worry about sourpussed federal agents confiscating your stash when you’re over international waters, baby. And the Prohibition did one valuable thing: it fueled modern country radio. Can you imagine a country song without a reference to moonshine? It’s too scary to even imagine.  

So finally Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress decided to end the dry madness and ratified the 21^st Amendment which repealed the 18^th Amendment. Having made abolishing Prohibition a key campaign stance while running for President in 1932, FDR repealed it on March 12, 1933 with the quote, “I think this would be a good time for a beer”. Now this was a guy who knew how to make America great again. 

It seems Prohibition is now universally viewed as one of the biggest epic fails in US Government history. It had disastrous unintended consequences and severely infringed on personal freedoms in the process. Yet advocates at the time had very legitimate reasons to argue for it: alcohol is linked to countless diseases, domestic violence, street violence, loss of productivity, lost finances, accidents, etc. In fact, if you tried to formulate a pro-Prohibition argument today you would probably have more supporting evidence than they had in 1919. Today you have the additional argument of about 17,000 auto fatalities per year from DUI’s. Back then few people had cars, there were essentially no highways, and people were more reliant on mass transit—streetcars, railroads, etc. And yet…..no one in their right mind is proposing going back to a ban on booze.

Here at Blog You Like A Hurricane I really try to ask questions rather than supply answers, but in all of this I find it hard not to see some parallels between the historical alcohol Prohibition and our current Prohibition of drugs. I mean is there any question that drug kingpins owe their livelihoods to drugs being illegal? Murderous thugs like El Chapo would be severely undercut and weakened by legalization of drugs just as alcohol supplying gangsters were after 1933. No one wants a Santa Clause without awesome gifts--let alone a creepy gun toting Santa Clause. 

And just as Prohibition caused skyrocketing deaths from unsafe booze, how many drug OD deaths are caused less by the dosage than by the purity of the drugs? Legal drugs would be subject to safety standards that black market drugs are not. Or what about comparing legal prescription drugs to illegal non-prescription drugs? Is Ritalin safer than cocaine? Probably, yet they are both central nervous system stimulants. Are prescription opiates safer than heroin? Probably, but they both come from the opium poppy plant and undergo chemical processes to release morphine and other mind and body altering chemicals. So are the safety differences simply due to the differences between the substances themselves or are Ritalin and Oxycontin safer because they are legal? Being legal, they are subjected to stricter safety control in the lab and safer dosage control by doctors.

Also, as with banned alcohol in the past, there is the question of money and taxes. Illegal drugs currently cost non-drug users a ton of money. Because others want to buy and sell drugs, we all pay big bucks to to punish them for it. There’s the money we have to pay narcotics agents and the money we pay to arrest, prosecute and imprison drug buyers and sellers. And of course, like they did with alcohol in the Prohibition era, we are denying ourselves large sin tax revenues that would come from any legal sale of drugs. All that revenue might be used to rebuild roads, bridges, and schools.

So potentially more money, less crime, safer drugs…..but we’re passing all of that up and the only thing standing in our way seems to be the fear that legalizing drugs will amount to approving of it and encouraging kids to do them. But how many kids are encouraged to do drugs today because they are illegal? Is there anything more typical of youth than wanting to reach for that forbidden fruit? Wanting to do what your parents and teachers have warned you not to do? Instead, isn’t it possible that the approach we have taken with cigarettes would actually work better? Don’t make it illegal—and potentially more tempting as a result—but educate people (and a little scare tactics and shaming never hurt anyone) on its effects to the point where it stops seeming cool but starts seeming like kind of a loser activity. That strategy has seemed to work—far fewer people smoke than they did 50 years ago. Maybe warning labels, ads, propaganda and peer pressure influence our choices more than laws.

And compared with alcohol, drugs come with more of a shadowy, built-in image problem to begin with. To many, even smoking pot is the hallmark of the loser—let alone snorting coke off a mirror or injecting smack into your veins or becoming a toothless meth fiend. I think it’s doubtful that legalizing drugs would lead to skyrocketing usage. And again, if your kid does screw up and makes bad choices, would you want relatively safe regulated drugs or completely untested, unregulated drugs by a shady drug dealer with a porn stache sold from his dingy 3^rd floor studio apartment that are more likely to kill him or her instantly?

And yes, it must be admitted that even regulated heroin or cocaine might also have the potential to kill the user. But every gun sold in the US has the potential to kill the user through suicide or accident--not to mention killing others. Every automobile sold has the potential to end up as a deadly weapon. Motorcycles, swimming pools…… Yet few are suggesting an outright ban on guns and no one is suggesting a ban on cars, motorcycles, or swimming pools.

So who knows? Maybe our current drug policy is just as wrongheaded and harmful to society as Prohibition was 90 years ago and the only difference is we don’t have the benefit of a before and after litmus test to prove it. Or maybe I’m an idiot for even suggesting it? Anything is possible. Either way…..it’s only the Internet so does it matter? Will even four people read this? But I want to thank YOU for stopping by, dear reader. Until next time…..cheers.