09-03-25 *INTERVIEW* Jacob Sullum on His New Book 'Beyond Control'

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am so pleased to welcome to the show, Jacob Sullam.
I don't think i've spoken to Jacob before. If I have,
it was one time, many years ago. Even though I've
been reading Jacob's writing for years, even decades. He's one
of the pre eminent libertarian writers in America. He's a
senior editor at Reason Magazine, which is one of my

(00:22):
very favorite magazines ever. I'm a subscriber, and Jacob has
a new book out entitled Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation,
and the Search for Sensible Alternatives. Jacob Sullim, Welcome to KOA.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
It's good to have you here. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Before we went on the air, I mentioned to you
I read the whole book, but I forgot to bring
it in with me. So I'm gonna work for memory
and maybe in no particular order, and we'll and we'll
just dive in. You tie drug prohibition and gun prohibition
slash regulation together in a lot of in very interesting

(01:02):
ways in terms of effectiveness, the basis of some of
the early moves in race and racism, and one area
in which they're different. Though, when you emphasize this, and
I think maybe it'd be an interesting place to start
is how it seems like the folks who support drug
prohibition prohibition are the opposite from the folks who support

(01:25):
gun prohibition, even though in a lot of other ways
those prohibitions seem to have a lot of things in common.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, I mean, by and large, when you look at
the people who are defenders of the Second Amendment and
critics of gun control, they tend to be on the right.
They tend to be conservative, and although there's some exceptions,
are not necessarily troubled by the war on drugs. And
then if you look at the people who are most

(01:54):
vocal about the war on drugs, they tend to be
on the left, and they tend to enthusiastic about gun control.
So they also, of course tend to belong to different parties.
So there's a big gap between them in terms of
their political outlook. But the point I try to make
in the book is that they are raising many of

(02:16):
the same concerns when they talk about the problems with
these policies. First of all, I mean, both these policies
are aimed at essensibly inanimate objects, right, drugs and guns,
things that politicians perceive is dangerous. But in the process
of trying to control access to those products. The government

(02:39):
arrests human beings because those are the people who get prosecuted.
Those the people who go to prison. And the people
on the left say, you know, it's not just to
arrest people for conduct that violates no one's rights. You know,
if you are a drug user or somebody who you
know sells drugs to somebody else who wants to use them,
that that is not properly treated as a crime. It's

(03:02):
not right that people should go to prison for that.
And people on the right who are critical of gun
control say that similarly, it's not right to arrest people
for violating arbitrary gun regulations which may not make any
any sense upon close examination. So, for example, there was

(03:23):
the Supreme Court case involving people who carry guns for
self protection, which the court held is protected by the
Second Amendment and cannot be subject to government review based
on standards that are subjective and give public officials a
lot of discretion and deciding who they exercise that right.
So people on the right who defend the Second Amendment

(03:45):
would say, it's not right to arrest somebody's simply because
he's carrying a gun for self protection. And the government
has said you're not allowed to do that, And we'll get.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
To that leads directly into the conversation I think about
harm reduction. That is more near the end of your book,
and we'll move will keep it also coming near near
the end of this conversation. Do you do you see
what you just described, right, people on the left generally
opposing opposing guns and wanting to go easy on drugs,
people on the right the opposite. Do you see that

(04:14):
as hypocrisy or how do you How do you see that?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
I think, I mean, it's large The explanation is largely
you know, cultural and historical. If people don't like guns,
can't imagine owning them. You know, even though this is
a right that is guaranteed explicitly by the Constitution, they
probably don't care very much about that right. And they

(04:40):
may perceive the people who own guns as being part
of a different political tribe and therefore not very sympathetic,
maybe even Trump supporters, you know, making them even less sympathetic.
But they but they see the consequences of the war
on drugs, and they think that the government exaggerates the
threat posed by drugs, and in any event, is trying

(05:03):
to address that threat in ways that just make matters worse,
and people on the right, certainly historically this is starting
to change, especially with respect in marijuana and to some extent, psychedelics.
People on the right traditionally have been supporters of the
War on drugs, don't tend not to use drugs and

(05:24):
not to approve of drug use, and therefore are not
very concerned about people who get caught up in the
criminal justice system as a result of using drugs or
selling things. So there's not really any logic to it.
It's consistent. It's largely a matter of personal tastes and
preferences and prejudices that I think explains why one side

(05:46):
does not understand that the other side is making essentially
the same points.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
We're talking with. Jacob Selim and his new book, which
is a really fascinating read is fine. When I picked
it up, I thought this was going to be a
little dry, but I like libertarian stuff, so I'm going
to it and I couldn't put it down. A really
fascinating read. The book is called Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition,
Gun Regulation in the Search for Sensible Alternatives. Talk a
little bit if you would Jacob about and I don't

(06:13):
want to overstate it, and you're careful not to overstate
it in the book, but about the racist roots of
each of these prohibitions.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, I mean, it's very clear if you look at
the early history of gun control in the United States,
that these laws were all about, first of all, preventing
slave insurrections and more generally keeping black people in their place,
even if they were not officially slaves, to prevent them
from aiding insurrections. You know, white people were terrified of that,

(06:46):
and they and they very explicitly sought to disarm black people.
It says it in the statutes, right, and so of
course the war was fought over that, not guns, but slavery.
And what happened after the Civil War and the foeteenth Amendment,

(07:06):
you know, officially made it no longer legal to explicitly
discriminate based on race, but those laws were still used
in practice to disarm black people, especially in the South.
And I show some examples of that in the book
in the nineteenth century during the civil civil rights movement,

(07:30):
that even though people could not openly say we want
to disarm black people, in practice that's what they were doing.
And by the way, that extends not just black people,
but there are examples of other minorities who were seen
as threatening. Italian immigrants, for example, we're assumed to be criminals,
and that explains a lot of the background to the

(07:50):
Sullivan law in New York State. And there were even
concerns about their concerns about Chinese people in California, so
who are also presumed to be criminals carrying weapons, and
there are laws that laws and enforcement eforts that specifically
targeted them. So what you see as a pattern where

(08:13):
out groups will tend to be targeted by laws, even
when they're neutral on their face, they tend to bear
the brunt of the enforcement. And in the case of
the War on drugs, in each of the cases with
early bands, you can see that bigotry played a big
role in the rhetoric. Now there's some argument as to

(08:34):
how to what extent did that bigotry actually drive passage
of these laws, because there were other concerns obviously about
drugs being addictive and dangerous, and the idea that that
not just these minority groups, but that the white majority,
especially young people, were starting to use these drugs. But

(08:55):
what I try to show in the book is that
the shift from taking it for granted that adults could
access to these drugs, which they put legally in the
nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, you could get
you know, all sorts of drugs over the counter or
by mail without any kind of prescription, and it was
not seen as especially troubling initially. But there was a

(09:16):
shift for each of these drugs, whether you were talking
about opiates or cocaine or marijuana, from it being not
particularly alarming to becoming more and more alarming. And I
think that panics about what these drugs. First of all,
what these drugs did to certain minority groups. You know,
cocaine supposedly made blacks especially rebellious and uppity and criminal

(09:41):
and inspired them to you know, rape white women and
attack white people and rendered them, you know, gave them
superhuman strength, the sort of thing. In the case of opium.
Very clearly, the early anti early bands on opium dens
were largely inspired by hostility toward Chinese immigrants. So you
have that concerned about what will these drugs do to

(10:02):
those people, but also those people are spreading this noxious,
you know, foreign habit to the white majority and so
even that concern, although it's extensibly about not just about minorities,
you see that that that those concerns are colored by

(10:22):
the view that this is a sort of exotic foreign
habit that's being introduced to our young people and we
have to stop. So so in both cases you see
that the laws were largely, if not entirely, inspired by
racism and bigotry. And then you also see that today

(10:45):
they continue to have a disproportion and impact on minority groups,
and you can argue over the extent to which that's
driven by racism. You know, is this concept of systemic racism,
which looks at results and say the system is fundamentally
biased against black people. For example, even if the laws,

(11:07):
you know, even if the laws don't mention black people,
even though if they're ostensibly neutral, even if the people
support them, include you know, leading black politicians, which was
the case with the crack penalties, you know, back in
the nineteen eighties and nineties, it's people described that as
systemic racism. It's suspicious of that concept because it seems

(11:27):
counterintuitive to say you can have racism without racists, but
certainly you have a disproportionate impact where black people are
much more likely to be arrested for drug possession, even
though they use drugs at about equal the rate of
white people. They're much more likely to be arrested for
drug felonies as well, and they tend to receive more

(11:50):
severe penalties. The crack cocaine laws are a good example
where fairly you have black politicians supporting it. They didn't
think this would hurt their community, they thought it would
help the community. But what you ended up having is
that overwhelmingly the defendants who were who were sentenced to
mandatory minimums under federal law were black. And there was
a difference between crack cocaine, this smokeable form that was

(12:14):
identified with with black people, and snorty to cocaine in
terms of how defendance were trut And if you look
at the gun laws, you also see this disportion impact
where first of all, uh, the jurisdictions that tend to
have the strictest gun laws are ones with tend to
be ones with large black populations. There are also places

(12:35):
where uh, you know, residents might reasonably want to be
armed for self protection because they have relatively high crime rates.
And those are the places where uh, you know, Black
people who just want to have guns for self protection
either can't do that, or if they do it, they
risk being arrested and prosecuted. And that came out very

(12:56):
clearly in the in the Supreme Court case involving New
York's regulation of public possession of firearms, where you had
briefs that were submitted that pointing out this disproportionate impact
on black defendants, especially in New York City, who wanted
to possess guns simply for self protection, not because they

(13:18):
are criminals and couldn't do that, and if they did
do that, were subject to arrest, and if they're convicted,
you know, then they permanently lose the right to own guns.
And if you look at the data and who gets
arrested for drug offenses, who's convicted, and who serves, you know,
the heaviest sentences, they're disproportionately likely to be black defendant.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
All right, So we just talk about two minutes left,
So I want to just jump towards the end of
your book and talk about harm reduction. And for those
just joining, we're talking with Jacob Selim about his fascinating
new book called Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition, gun regulation, and
the Search for Sense of Alternatives that there's a really
great read if you care about these issues. So Jacob,

(14:04):
give me literally one minute each on your thoughts on
harm reduction in each of these two categories, drugs and guns. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
So the idea of harm reduction is that it sounds obvious,
but the idea is that you should aim to reduce
harm that includes the harm that's caused by misguided policy.
So first of all, stop doing things that are unfair
and ineffective that hurt peaceful people, and then try to
target the things you're actually concerned about. So in the

(14:33):
case of drugs, we're concerned about people developing addictions, possibly
dying from overdoses. And you have to ask what actually works.
Is arresting people work. There's cracking down on the supply
of drugs work. No, that actually makes matters worse. Obviously
it hurts the people who get arrested, but it creates

(14:54):
a situation where people don't know what they're getting in
a black market and therefore may die by accidentally taking
too much or taking something they didn't anticipate they were taking.
And that's only compounded the government steps up enforcement, as
we saw with the crackdown on prescription opioids. They did.

(15:15):
The government did succeed in reducing those prescriptions, but what
happened is the non medical users then moved to the
black market, and the upward trend in opid related deaths
not only continue to accelerate because now they're taking drugs
that are much more dangerous because their composition is unpredictable
and uneven. And the case of gun control, what are

(15:37):
we actually worried about? What we're worried about violent crime?

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:40):
So I talked in the book about some strategies that
seem promising in terms of reducing violent crime without necessarily
targeting guns per se. We're also worried about suicide that
actually constitutes most gun related deaths, and so I talk
in the book about some ways of addressing suicidal people,

(16:00):
helping them programs that seem promising but don't involve the
coercive action of the state in arresting people are taking
away their constitutional rights.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Jacob Selim's really interesting new book. I recommend it to
you highly if you care about public policy at all.
In these areas is called beyond control, drug prohibition, gun regulation,
and the search for sensible alternatives Jacob, thanks for your time,
thanks for the excellent book, and thanks for your great
writing over the decades that I've been reading you.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Thank you, thanks a lot. All Right, good to talk
to you.