War on {noun}
by Tom Temple
4 August 2005
Drugs this time.
Slate has a good one.
NYT has a funny one.
If there are sets of things that I am not allowed to buy all at once, I would like to be notified. Sometimes I buy a lot of stuff all at once. For instance, if I think that the price of cold medicine will not be lower (relative to my income) for n-years, I buy roughly a (1 – e^-gamma*n^)*n year supply, where gamma is a discount factor whose details are beyond our current scope. The only reason I haven’t gotten in trouble is that an n-year supply of cold medicine happens to be zero. What about when I go to Walmart looking for parts for my next Rube-Goldberg machine, there are a lot of ways I could put it together. I’m sure some of those ways make meth at some stage.
Second, if a store is recording a transaction history that can identify me by any means (which in my mind would include a timestamp and security footage), I think they should be obligated to say so outright.
Third, if some guy comes up to me and is like, “Hey, do you have any tinfoil?” I’d be like, “Sure, here you go.” Fine right? It’s got to be. If some guy comes up to me and is like, “Hey, do you have any tinfoil, I need to finish up a cook.” I’d be like, “Sure, here you go. What’s a cook?” Blam, tackled, submission hold, arrested.
Luckily, I’m white so they’d let me off on bail, I’d get a sweet lawyer and beat that those charges like Rocky, seeing as how I am a good (white) kid.
As the Slate article points out, if we just made it legal, there would be no point in having poluting meth labs and people could get cold remedies again. As a bonus the meth users wouldn’t get so messed up on residual solvents.
The case is even stronger for MDMA. It has all the same issues as meth but there I think that safe and potent pharmacuticals could be developed using R&D based on MDMA. You could say the same for meth, but those drugs have already been developed and so meth isn’t particularly interesting anymore.
It isn’t like Phyzer, (or Merck as the case may be) couldn’t get the license you need to study the stuff. It is that they don’t want to spend the money to develop a drug that works too well and gets scheduled level 1.
Aug 5, 09:11 AM
I’ve got a related question on entrapment. If an undercover police officer comes up to me ans says “Do you have any crack?” I’d be like, “no”. Suppose then he pulled out a trillion dollar bill and said “I’ll give you this if you help me find some.” Does that constitute entrapment? What if instead of offering me a trillion dollars, he threatened to kill my girlfriend?
Suppose further that I take him up on the deal. Now he has me for selling crack that I definitely wouldn’t have sold if it weren’t for him. It seems like that isn’t exactly fair.
I’m sure they’ve worked the rules out for this, and a law student could just quote case names.
Aug 5, 09:59 AM
From the dealer’s end this is a solved problem. You ask any buyer that isn’t well known to you if he is a cop. If he is, he can’t lie about it in order to entrap you.
I’m not sure how it works from the police angle.
Aug 5, 10:23 AM
Sweet.
bq. Hi, nice to meet you. Are you a cop?
I think we’re going to have to change the greeting/transaction protocol.
Aug 5, 11:39 AM
Tom, I’ve got a longish outline on entrapment from my first year criminal law class. My computer’s down for the next few weeks, but I’ll send it along later in the month. It’s comprehensive.
Off the top of my head—and with the help of a quick case or two—I remember that there are two main schools of thought on entrapment, the so-called objective and the subjective tests.
The subjective test (also called the “but-for” and “guilty predisposition” test), currently adopted by the Court, focuses on the mind of the defendant. Did he have criminal designs absent government intervention? Would he have been innocent of wrongdoing but for government instigation?
Put another way, the government is not guilty of entrapment if the defendant had a “guilty predisposition.”
The objective test, advanced by Justices Brandeis, Frankfurther, Brennan, Marshall, and probably a bunch of other liberal justices, doesn’t presume to read the defendant’s mind. Rather, it considers only the government’s conduct in any given case.
Justice Stewart wrote, in defense of the objective test: “Furthermore, to say that such a defendant is ‘otherwise innocent’ or not ‘predisposed’ to commit the crime is misleading, at best. The very fact that he has committed an act that Congress has determined to be illegal demonstrates conclusively that he is not innocent of the offense. He may not have originated the precise plan or the precise details, but he was ‘predisposed’ in the sense that he has proved to be quite capable of committing the crime. That he was induced, provoked, or tempted to do so by government agents does not make him any more innocent or any less predisposed than he would be if he had been induced, provoked, or tempted by a private person – which, of course, would not entitle him to cry ‘entrapment.’ Since the only difference between these situations is the identity of the tempter, it follows that the significant focus must be on the conduct of the government agents, and not on the predisposition of the defendant. The purpose of the entrapment defense, then, cannot be to protect persons who are ‘otherwise innocent.’ Rather, it must be to prohibit unlawful governmental activity in instigating crime.”
Frankfurter: “The power of government is abused and directed to an end for which it was not constituted when employed to promote rather than detect crime….”
If an officer threatens to kill your girlfriend, you’re not talking about entrapment. That’s duress or necessity. If you were forced to obtain drugs to save someone’s life, you’d be home free. If you were forced to kill someone to save someone else’s life or your own, it gets a little iffy. Sometimes the law demands heroism.
Aug 8, 06:28 AM
What about for money? What about risking someones life? In my book, drugs for money and drugs for a life are roughly interchangable given the right set of circumstances.
For instance, it is not certain that your trapper will be able to actually kill my girlfriend. Suppose the probability is only 1/1000 if I go to the cops right away. My girlfriend and I are willing to sell a millimort for a trillion dollars.
And that is well abover the going rate. What is military pay these days?
Aug 8, 08:28 AM
I just saw that number somewhere. I think it was closer to $50,000 per tenth mort.
I know you’ve taken millimort risks worth way less than that (and way-way less than a trillion dollars).
Aug 8, 05:30 PM
I have no idea. This may be way off, but my firm belief, after two years in law school, is that judicially crafted tests serve the same purpose as the rubrics teachers hand out to students describing how they’ll grade papers or projects. The teachers are going to give you whatever grade they want, and the point of the rubric is to make the grade seem more objective or scientific. Instead of getting an A or B, you get a 1 through 5 on organization, appearance, persuasiveness, clarity, etc. What I mean is, the judge and the teacher know how it’s going to come down before they start applying the tests. So in entrapment cases, as with just about everything else, you have to present the facts in such a light that the judge thinks a good person might reasonably take the same risk or succumb to criminal seduction in the same way. That’s not very helpful, but I don’t think the law is usually very clear.
Aug 15, 09:42 AM
Hey look,
just like I said.