This month at Cato Unbound, we mark a milestone in U.S. public policy. Last month, for the first time ever, the Gallup polling organization recorded 50% support for legalizing the sale of recreational marijuana to adults. (Medical marijuana has had majority approval for many years now.)

So why now? What’s changed lately to bring so many people around? And where are we going from here?

To discuss these questions, we’ve invited a quartet of marijuana reform activists to a roundtable discussion. Each will present an essay on a different facet of marijuana policy, and our conversation this month will be about political strategy, possible future trends, and the interplay among various sub-issues in the field.

Kicking things off will be Paul Armentano of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), writing about the biomedical aspects of cannabis and its prohibition. He will be followed by former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition; Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, who will discuss public education and messaging; and Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project, who will discuss upcoming ballot initiatives and legislative developments.

Although each of the four is fairly well in the same camp on this issue, each also brings to the table different experiences, different perspectives, and different areas of expertise. We hope you will find a discussion among them educational and thought-provoking.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or at other venues. Trackbacks are enabled. We also welcome your letters and may publish them at our option. Send them to jkuznicki at cato​.org

Three weeks ago, Cato released my policy analysis, “The Gulf Oil Spill: Lessons for Public Policy”. I argued that governmental intervention in the energy market was ill-advised and documented the depressingly numerous efforts to do more of just that by those who should have known better. On October 31, a working paper that went far further than any I had criticized appeared on the Internet. That paper — written by Robert Ames, Anthony Corridore, Edward Hirs, and Paul MacAvoy, who curiously label themselves the Yale Graduates Energy Study Group — argues for a Presidential proclamation ordering a moratorium on all oil imports save those from Canada. The withdrawal from global oil markets would be phased in over a decade.

As one might expect, there are many problems with their argument.

First and foremost, their case depends upon far greater certainty than is justified on the danger of foreign-supply disruptions, the effects of an embargo on domestic consumption, and the timely emergence of various domestic alternatives to foreign crude, particularly coal-to-liquid technology and biofuels. This ignores horrendous prior experience (something the authors tacitly recognize at the end of their paper by listing the bad energy initiatives of the past).

Their bottom line, however, is that the supply response will be so great that it will generate producers’ profits that far exceed the losses to consumers. The calculation, however, is Orwellian in its premises and is an analytically invalid measure.

Standard international-trade theory indicates that trade restrictions almost always harm the country that imposes them. Trade, nationally and internationally, arises because it is cheaper to swap other goods to get, say, petroleum, than to produce petroleum at home. The Yale Graduates’ calculation covers only the lesser part of the effect – the gains in the import-replacing industry. The larger cost of losses in export industries is ignored.

The Yale Graduates, moreover, effectively assume away the result possible in theory, but not in practice, of an astute level of import control that produces a net gain from lowering import prices without, as the Yale Graduates propose, severely reducing import volume.

In a country already burdened with enormous costs of ill-advised government policies, the last thing we need is such another governmental plunge into a fantasy world. The resulting waste would make Obamacare seem a bargain.

A second, related technical concern is that their calculation of embargo costs departs from standard practice by including the direct cost to oil consumers. Such costs are generally excluded from such calculations because, if import disruption were as probable as the authors assert, people would hedge against them. If they hedge, the cost will be zero.

The hypothetical indirect costs from alleged inflationary and unemployment effects are the usual concerns regarding foreign-supply disruptions. The standard method is to translate these costs into an estimate of the appropriate offsetting level of defensive import restriction. However, while the vast relevant literature is inconclusive about the magnitude of the impacts, it has never before produced figures that imply total elimination of imports. Regardless, Chantale LaCasse and André Plourde pointed out in 1992 that as long as the United States is engaged in any international trade, it will be affected by any oil shock. There is simply no way to wall-off the United States from major economic events abroad.

Objections also arise at several more fundamental levels.

First, the effort would be a horrendous policy initiative. Decades have been spent since 1933 trying to restore international economic integration to its 1914 level. So drastic a step as embargoing oil imports would set a very bad example.

Second, the exclusion of Mexico would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement and, almost certainly, U.S. obligations to the World Trade Organization. Examination of present and prospective patterns of oil imports indicate that the total ban would hurt clear friends as well as actual or possible enemies.

Third, even if the Presidential power to impose oil-import moratoriums (last exercised by President Eisenhower) still exists, its exercise is even more inadvisable that it was in the Eisenhower case. Critics of President Eisenhower correctly argued that the national-defense rationale for keeping foreign oil out of the United States was a fig leaf designed to disguise the real aim of the policy — to protect the independent oil producers who were the prime beneficiary of state production controls. The proposed phased-in embargo would restore the nightmare of quota allocation that messed up the initial Eisenhower program and its implementation by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Fourth, a presidential moratorium would be another unwise assumption of executive power. No president can be trusted correctly to implement such draconian import restrictions or, for that matter, any similar interventions into industry. To make matters worse, no President could be in office for the whole ten-year phase-in period.

It’s hard to believe that serious people could propose such a thing. Exposure to modern economics has greatly reduced errors as gross as this, but obviously not completely.

Note: The cited paper has a peculiar history. A precursor was Robert M. Ames, Anthony Corridore, and Paul W. MacAvoy, “National Defense, Oil Imports, and Bio-Energy Technology,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 16 no. 1 (Winter 2004) 28–50. The latest version was posted on the Social Science Research Network, but in four different browsers, the link refused to access the paper. A Google search yielded access to a substantially identical article (with the author order reversed) presented in 2010 to the United States Association of Energy Economists.

When Barack Obama became president, many people expected a new approach to drug policy. While running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama said during a campaign event that he favored marijuana decriminalization. And the appointment of Gil Kerlikowske, then chief of the Seattle Police Department as “Drug Czar,” gave many people hope given Seattle’s emphasis on harm reduction policies instead of prosecution for drug offenses. In fact, one of Kerlikowske’s first acts as Drug Czar was to call an end to the term “War on Drugs.”

How people change. Today the New York Times has a story on how the Obama administration has deployed D.E.A. commando-style squads to Central America and the Caribbean to fight drugs cartels. These units were first created in the Bush administration to fight drug traffickers in Afghanistan linked with the Taliban. But in what is definitely an escalation of U.S. involvement in the region, the Obama administration has deployed these commandos 15 times to countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

As the New York Times piece rightly points out, the deployment of D.E.A. squads in Central America and the Caribbean is “blurring the line between law enforcement and military activities, fusing elements of the ‘war on drugs’ with the ‘war on terrorism.’ So much for calling an end to “the war on drugs.” If anything, this development shows that President Obama is an enthusiastic drug warrior.

Some of these governments actually welcome greater U.S. involvement in fighting the increasingly vicious drug cartels. After all, they have even less institutional capacity than Mexico to fight these powerful criminal organizations. However, as professor Bruce Bagley of the University of Miami points out, the strategy could backfire:

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved. If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”

Professor Bagley will be speaking about the effects of the war on drugs in Central America at our conference, “Ending the Global War on Drugs,” which will take place next Tuesday November 15 here in Washington. You can register to attend the event here.

Even though the unwashed masses decided that I didn’t win my stimulus debate in New York City, I continue my fight for the hearts and minds of the American people.

I’m now taking part in a debate for U.S. News & World Report on “Who Is Handling Its Debt Crisis Better: United States or Europe?”

This was a tough question. I asked the organizer whether I could vote none of the above, but I was told I had to pick an option.

As you can see, I said the United States was doing a better job — but only by default.

Our long-run outlook is grim, but at least we still have time to reform the entitlement programs and save America… The only major difference is that European nations are farther down the path to fiscal collapse. The welfare state was adopted earlier in Europe and government spending among euro nations now consumes a staggering 49 percent of economic output. This heavy fiscal burden, especially when combined with onerous tax systems, helps explain why growth is anemic. …the United States still can turn things around. Greece, Italy, and other welfare states have probably passed the point of no return, but it’s still possible for American lawmakers to fix the entitlement crisis by turning Medicaid over to the states , modernizing Medicare into a premium-support system, and transitioning to a system of personal retirement accounts for younger workers. If those reforms don’t take place, the consequences won’t be pleasant. To be blunt, there won’t be an IMF to bail out the United States.

For all intents and purposes, I contend that America can be saved if something like the Ryan budget is approved.

You can vote on this page on whether you like or dislike what I said, as well as what the other participants said.

In this video by the New England Journal of Medicine, Cato adjunct scholar and George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin debates ObamaCare’s individual mandate with Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Transcript here.

In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank urges President Obama to follow President Kennedy’s lead and use the power of the federal government to intimidate business:

Roger Blough, the U.S. Steel president, … defied Kennedy in 1961 by raising prices. “You have made a terrible mistake,” Kennedy told him. Subpoenas flew, FBI agents marched into steel executives’ offices, and Kennedy spoke about IRS agents examining “hotel bills and nightclub expenses [that] would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the country club.”

Yes, that’s a great vision: a president using the far more powerful and far-reaching federal government of today to force every business, every union, every nonprofit in the country to fall in line. Is that really what journalists would like to see — a president deploying subpoenas, FBI agents, and IRS agents to effect political gain? This is just one of the problems with giving any government such powers.

I’ll have more to say later on Mitt Romney’s speech on federal spending, but his banal call for making government more “efficient” gave me an opportunity to share some good commentary on the subject. In a recent piece criticizing Indiana’s Republican-led state government for not doing “anything substantive to improve Indiana’s budgetary, fiscal or economic position,” Craig Ladwig, editor of the Indiana Policy Review, nails it:

Most troubling of all is that few in the leadership of either party share our belief that government must be kept small for smallness’ sake. The goal is not to run it “like a business” or make it more efficient (consolidate), but to ensure that government is simple enough that average citizens can understand and monitor its workings. The constitutional ability to do that and a passion for self-government (governing one’s self), thereby reaping the rewards and accepting the consequences, are what is meant by American exceptionalism.

Nor does the current leadership appreciate that government cannot by nature be proactively involved in prosperity, that it cannot create wealth but only refrain from taking it away or destroying it. Even Republicans busy themselves in such neo-mercantile schemes as tax rebates for politically favored companies and industries, or training programs to win more contracts from the federal government. At the same time, they slap a tax on entrepreneurial activity as soon as it finds success, most recently in Internet commerce.

Look, Democrats already work tirelessly to extract from us the revenue to support a bloated, systemically flawed and misguided state government. Do they need Republican help?

Milton Friedman famously described those trying to reform government without changing its makeup as being engaged in an attempt to transform a cat into a dog. This General Assembly may learn to bark, but it will still be a cat.

The “government efficiency” snake-oil salesmanship from politicians has become tiresome, especially when it comes from high-profile Republicans like Mitch Daniels and Mitt Romney. Unfortunately, I don’t see too many people “on the right” taking these people to task for it. So kudos to Craig.