Notes from the underground

How do you think mandatory minimum sentences distort convictions under the drug laws?

We have witnessed an extraordinary increase in prosecutorial power. Once you have the power to charge someone for a mandatory sentence, you have an incredibly strong threat to make in your plea-bargaining sessions.

It's more likely that the prosecutor is going to get what he or she wants, not only from the person being charged but in terms of testimony against others.

In a lot of ways the war on drugs provided a template for how the war on terrorism is now being waged domestically. The PATRIOT Act is in many ways just an extension of the war on drugs that we've had here for the last 15 or 16 years, except that now they don't even have to charge you.

But you write that Democrats have actually been tougher on pot smokers than Republicans. For instance, more people were arrested for marijuana under the Clinton presidency than any other.

And more people were sent to prison under Clinton than any other. My next book is on prisons, and when you look at the war on drugs, and you look at the growth of our gigantic prison system, liberal Democrats bear an enormous responsibility for it.

One of the worst of all is Mario Cuomo. The great liberal hope of the Democratic Party opposed the death penalty on very moral grounds, but by opposing the death penalty he made himself vulnerable to accusations that he was soft on crime ... [So] Cuomo put more people in prison than all the other governors in the history of New York combined. And you see this again and again with liberal Democrats. It's like the McCarthy era. They want to seem tougher than tough, more American.

But meanwhile, New York Mayor Bloomberg has bragged, yes, I smoked pot, and I enjoyed it.

There are a number of very conservative Republicans -- William F. Buckley, George Schultz, Milton Friedman -- who think that the war on drugs, and particularly the war on marijuana, is a disaster.

Then you get someone like [Secretary of Health and Human Services] Donna Shalala, who was probably the most liberal member of Clinton's Cabinet, trying on the Nancy Reagan outfit, making it this moral thing, and it's very sad.

Democrats are afraid of looking like the pot smoker party, so they have to exaggerate in the other direction?

Absolutely. They are afraid of seeming soft on drugs, and soft on crime. And again the people who are getting screwed over are not people who are going to be major contributors.

Yet, pot may actually be the largest cash crop in the United States, without any federal agricultural subsidies. How did pot become such a big cash crop in the Midwest?

Well, no one knows for sure that it's all coming from the Midwest. But it's logical that it would, because this is the agricultural heartland. And marijuana grows very well in the same conditions that corn does. It's just worth a hell of a lot more.

A bushel of corn sells for $2, and a bushel of marijuana for $70,000. And those are the workings of the market right there. When you start sentencing people to life in prison for marijuana, you greatly increase the value of marijuana.

This is a weed. It grows wild in all 50 states. It's hard to kill. Most of us who couldn't grow a thing could probably grow some marijuana if we wanted to. So, in the absence of these really tough laws against it, it's not going to be a very lucrative commodity.

But the toughness of the laws correlate to the price, so a lot of marijuana is now worth more per ounce than gold, which is a huge incentive for people all over the United States to grow it, and sell it, and profit from it.

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