Vancouver experienced it's 12 gang hit yesterday.The victim was one of those wounded in the earlier Fortune Happiness hit.As he was evidently the target in the earlier shootings,the shooters were just

Joe Biden! Hello! I just read your new press release and I need help understanding what the hell you're trying to do:

Legislation Takes Aim at the Use of Submarines for Drug Trade;
House Passes Key Biden Provisions Today

Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs and the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, introduced the Drug Trafficking Interdiction Assistance Act of 2008 (S.3351), legislation designed to help disrupt drug trafficking by criminalizing the use of unregistered, un-flagged submersible or semi-submersible vessels in international waters whose operators intend to evade detection. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) joined Sen. Biden in introducing this bill, which will give authorities a new tool to go after the drug lords who have been using this technology to avoid prosecution. [sorry, no link]

Raise your hand if you think anyone who moves drugs by the submarine-full gives a flying crap about the law. Ok, then.

This is the kind of legislation that makes drug lords cough up their caviar with laughter. They're building submarines in the f@#king jungle. They'll dig a tunnel from Bogota to Brooklyn if they have to and I really don’t understand why Joe Biden is even bothering to pretend they give a damn about anything he does. Give us a break, seriously.

The drug war is wasteful, brutal and destructive enough without our politicians goofing around dreaming up ludicrous, useless legislation at our expense. Just stop. You're embarrassing us all.

Yet another needlessly violent drug raid, this time in Louisiana:

HOUMA -- A 26-year-old Crozier man shot by a narcotics agent in a drug raid Thursday morning remains in intensive care, though his condition has stabilized, relatives said.

Floyd Franklin Jr. was shot inside his home at 112 Edgewood Drive after agents from the Terrebonne Narcotics Task Force raided the trailer about 6:45 a.m. and found Franklin pointing a gun at them.

The agents were executing two search warrants that are related to an investigation into the distribution of a "large amount of illegal narcotics," Sheriff Vernon Bourgeois said. [Daily Comet]

A large amount of narcotics, huh? So what did they find?

…two containers of liquid codeine agents found in the house, Bourgeois said. The drug, an opiate available by prescription, is used illegally to lace marijuana cigarettes or add to drinks, the sheriff said.

They've got to be kidding. Yeah, I'm sure people have been known to mix codeine with other drugs, but is that the default assumption we should reach anytime a drug suspect is found in possession of extremely common prescription medicines? The author of the story has yet to return my email inquiring whether the codeine was found in the medicine cabinet.

Regardless, this is just a disgraceful attempt to portray the man they shot as some weirdo poly-drug abuser. Absent evidence that he actually intended to use the codeine for such purposes, there's no justification for including these pathetic smears in the article. The guy probably also had a few steak knives which could be used to murder the elderly, but I didn't see that in the article so spare us the insinuations and put the cough syrup back where you found it cause no one cares.

Moreover, does anyone really think this guy would try to shoot it out with police over that? Officers say they announced, but that doesn't mean Franklin heard them. This could easily be another case of an innocent drug suspect mistaking police for burglars and merely attempting to defend his home. After all, there certainly wasn't a "large amount of illegal narcotics" present for which he might seek to evade capture. How many more innocent people have to get shot before police realize that charging into homes with guns drawn increases rather than reduces the risk of something going wrong?

In my recent televised debate with the UK's Deirdre Boyd, the question came up of whether people involved in the illegal drug trade now would continue to operate -- as drug dealers or other criminals -- following legalization. I argued (video #3) that with all the money that currently goes into the criminal underground through the drug trade not being spent by people in that way anymore, there will be fewer jobs in crime. Illegal drug sellers won't be able to drop their prices enough to compete with the safe and inexpensive alternatives that legalization and regulation will provide for -- a certain level of profitability is needed to make it worth taking the substantial risk involved in being a criminal -- so they would no longer have customers. (Boyd argued that they would turn to "people trafficking," and there was no more time left in the segment, so I didn't get to respond that drug traffickers are investing their money in all kinds of places now, some of them probably illegal and abusive, so the last thing we should want is for them to continue to make even more money from drugs that they'll continue to invest in other places.) A post today in Small Business Trends reports on a study by economist Rob Fairlie which found a statistical relationship between being a teenage drug dealer and being self-employed as an adult. Fairlie accounted for factors like people having less formal education, or having criminal records that would tend to hinder them becoming other people's employees, and found that they didn't explain it. His conclusion is that entrepreneurs in both legal and illegal enterprises have some of the same characteristics. Matt Bandyk has an insightful follow-up on the US News & World Report entrepreneurship blog Risky Business, where he gets to the heart of the matter at hand:

Does drug prohibition change the incentives such that potential entrepreneurs pursue lives of crime rather than legitimate businesses?

My follow-up is to ask the related question: Do the violence and disorder of the illegal drug trade, which exists because of drug prohibition, drive away legitimate businesses that could provide quality job opportunities with the possibility of advancement for bright young people growing up in troubled neighborhoods who want to do something interesting? This is how I see it:

prohibition + continued drug use -> inner city drug crime and opportunity to work in crime crime -> less business investment -> fewer jobs -> difficulty finding work -> poverty crime -> arrests -> criminal records -> difficulty finding work -> poverty poverty -> crime, substance abuse, etc. arrests -> incarceration -> broken family & community relationships, training in crime opportunity to work in crime & training in crime -> people working in crime -> arrests, etc., and on and on and on...

So yes, I'd say that prohibition creates the wrong incentives -- maybe all the wrong incentives.