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A rare, sort-of off-topic post for this blog: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones says of recently-spotted bumper stickers in California’s Humbolt-County pot-growing region that say “Keep Pot Illegal”

....Legalization could take many forms. But the conventional wisdom here is that fully legal weed might fetch no more than a few hundred dollars a pound, as more people grow it and police no longer pull up millions of plants a year. Illegal marijuana “is the government’s best agricultural price-support program ever,” said Gerald Myers, a retired engineer and former volunteer fire chief who moved to the county in 1970. “If they ever want to help the wheat farmers, make wheat illegal.”

Read the quote in context here.

A few hundred dollars a pound? Sorry but it takes more energy, skill, and effort to grow agriculturally-intensive corn and the spot price for that peaked at $7.88/bushel back in 2008 — about thirteen cents a pound.

Commodity price to tobacco growers is maybe a couple dollars a pound, even though retail-quality tobacco is also harder to grow than “retail-quality” pot. Even after intensive processing — which, sorry, pot doesn’t need — fancy imported pipe tobacco costs maybe $35 pound.

Highly-cultivated northern-latitude hot-house tomatoes and green peppers, which are probably most comparable in terms of cultivation technology, cost on the order of four to six dollars a pound.

Therefore its inconceivable that, absent the cost of risk, even highly-cultivated marijuana would cost more per bushel or bale than corn, tobacco, or tomatoes. Consequently I just don’t see the gazillion-dollar gross revenues, let alone tax revenues, materializing should the stuff be legalized.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be legalized. Quite the opposite! The closer to commodity pricing you get, and the lower the profit margin, the less incentive to sell it to those who aren’t already interested.

Of course you’ll notice this sort of policy position isn’t that far off the beaten path for me: I think the same thing is true about roll-your-own porn (which appears to be just killing industrial porn) and destigmatization of “premarital” sex (which in the last 50 years appears to have decimated the traditional market for prostitution.)

The point being that as with opponents and proponents porn and prostitution the positions of both opponents and proponents of legalized pot are almost hopelessly entangled with the taboo/stigma-based status quo than with almost any realistic projections of what’s really going to happen when the cost closes in on zero.

According to Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster, LAPD (ret.) of Criminal Justice Online

Florida Couple Charged in Forced Labor and Document Servitude Conspiracies

April 28, 2010 – WASHINGTON – Sophia Manuel and Alfonso Baldonado Jr. have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a human trafficking scheme to hold Filipino nationals in forced labor in country clubs and hotels in Southeast Florida, the Justice Department announced.

According to the indictment, defendants Manuel, 41, and Baldonado, 46, owners of Quality Staffing Services Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., conspired to obtain a cheap, compliant and readily available labor pool. The indictment details the defendants conspired to hold the workers in their continued service, for little or no pay, and housed them in substandard conditions without adequate food or drinking water.

The indictment alleges that the defendants used false promises to entice the Filipino nationals to incur debts to pay up-front recruitment fees; and then compelled the workers to remain in the defendants’ service, despite inadequate work or income to pay off the debts, using a scheme of threats to have the workers arrested and deported with no way to repay their debts, confiscation of the workers’ passports and rules and controls restricting the workers’ freedom of movement and communications with outsiders.

He said it here.

But wait, from the same website there’s more

Arlington, Texas Couple Convicted of Forced Labor and Other Crimes for Holding Nigerian Woman in Domestic Servitude

February 3, 2010 – WASHINGTON—A federal jury has convicted an Arlington, Texas husband and wife Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji of engaging in a nine-year scheme to compel the labor of a Nigerian victim as their domestic servant, the Justice Department announced today. The jury found the defendants guilty of conspiracy, forced labor, document servitude, alien harboring and false statements. Ngozi and Emmanuel Nnaji each face a maximum sentence of up to 55 years in prison.

According to the evidence at trial, Emmanuel Nnaji and Ngozi Nnaji enticed a widowed Nigerian mother of six to come to the United States to be their domestic servant by falsely promising a salary and support for her children, who she was struggling to support.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of human rights that will not be tolerated in our free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

But wait, there’s still more

Two Brothers Plead Guilty in Conspiracy to Hold Thai Workers in Forced Labor in Hawaii

Defendants Alec Sou and Mike Sou, co-owners of Aloun Farm, pleaded guilty on Jan.13, 2010, in federal district court in Honolulu, to conspiring to commit forced labor. The two defendants, who are brothers, each face up to five years in prison for their respective roles in a labor trafficking scheme that held Thai agricultural workers in service at Aloun Farm through a scheme of debts, threats, and restraint.

During their respective plea hearings, the defendants acknowledged that they conspired with one another and with others to hold 44 Thai men in forced labor on a farm operated by the defendants, using a scheme of physical restraint and threats of serious harm to intimidate the workers and hold them in fear of attempting to leave the defendants’ service.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of individual rights that is intolerable in a free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims, and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

Now why, you might ask, would I be talking about all this domestic, agricultural, sexual, and labor servitude, a.k.a. human trafficking on a nice morning in May, 2010?

One big reason derives from a companion piece to the Dreams Die Hard documentary about trafficking and involuntary servitude in the United States from Free The Slaves. The companion piece is called the Dreams Die Hard Study Guide. In the section “What Happens to Slaves?” the following bullet point really stood out.

When they turn to officials, trafficking victims may get harsh treatment if the police officer or immigration staff regards the escaped victim as an illegal immigrant. Although some law enforcement officials have immediately rescued and protected people in slavery, there have been tragic situations where police simply failed to recognize slavery. Proper training is crucial.

Source: Pg. 3

It just made me wonder how much better off Arizona’s de facto slave owners are now that the state legislature has made it even more illegal to be an undocumented immigrant. And, given the gleeful promises of ever-more draconian enforcement by sadists like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, how much further is this law going to shift the balance of power even further in the direction of those who already abuse trafficked people.

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Note: I was inspired to write this post by search results that showed up while I was trying to verify whether the authors of the website Citizens Against Trafficking were living up to their claim that they’re “a broad based coalition formed in 2009 to combat all forms of human trafficking.”

The short answer appears to be no: they instead appear to have been primarily opposed to prostitution, which they say is a hotbed of trafficking, and only in the state of Rhode Island. They were particularly opposed to a loophole in Rhode Island that made some forms of prostitution legal there.

The law has recently been amended, with much applause and support from the website’s authors: it’s now as illegal to be a sex-worker in Rhode Island as it is to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. With what will turn out to be, I’m afraid, similar consequences for sex workers.

As I’ve mentioned relatively often I personally don’t care much for sex work in the current dominant paradigm since I believe, strongly, that it reinforces rather than relieves our expectations that all sex between men and women is ultimately transactional. And I strongly regret when people cross borders illegally. On the other hand I don’t think either sex work nor immigration ought to be illegal primarily because it increases rather than mitigates the underworld environments serious anti-traffickers are concerned puts victims most at risk — whether they’re “massage parlor” workers in Rhode Island, or “nannies” in Maryland, or “lettuce pickers” in Arizona.

Sometimes it seems to me that if you announce to the world that you’re, say, a “self-admitted sociopath” or a misanthrope or a separatist, and you use the rhetoric of sociopathology or misanthropy or separatism to advance your causes of, say, sex-worker rights or recognition of women as human beings… that you’re going to encounter quite a bit of, um, resistance. Or resentment. Or misunderstanding. Or exclusion.

Which is fine. Sociopaths, misanthropes, and separatists expect and perhaps demand resistance, resentment, misunderstanding, or even exclusion. And so when they get it they’re happy. Indeed one gets the impression sometimes that when such individuals detect acceptance or adoption of their positions they flee extremeward… sometimes further than their own comfort zones… in order to re-establish the adversity their self-identity demands.

And that’s fine too. Just yesterday… somewhere on Twitter or a post or in a PDF or comments to someone else’s post or somewhere else… someone I wish I could identify raised the perfectly valid point that almost by definition change is not initiated by well-adjusted people. So thank goodness for misanthropes, sociopaths, and separatists!

The problem arises, I think, when one confuses rejection of one’s unpleasant or adversarial rhetoric or personality with rejection of one’s cause. Because after a certain point ones audience can begin to entertain the same confusion. With the result that in addition to closing their ears to one’s asshole behavior they close their ears to one’s perfectly legitimate cause.

Update: See also risk identified by Ezra Klein re: Sen. Inhofe as conservative id rather than crazy uncle.

Jessica Van Sack, O’Ryan Johnson and Edward Mason of The Boston Herald report that the so-called Craigslist killer who seemed to be preying on sex-workers, has been arrested.

A clean-cut Boston University medical student preparing to wed a blond beauty was charged last night as the notorious Craigslist killer, cops said, announcing a bombshell break in a case that has attracted national attention.

...

The Craigslist killer is believed to have preyed on women advertising erotic services on the popular Web site. Boston police say Markoff is responsible for the violent robbery of a Las Vegas hooker at the Westin Copley April 10, the brutal April 14 murder of masseuse Julissa Brisman, 26, of New York City, and Thursday’s attack on a lap-dancer in her room at the Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, R.I.

They said it here.

So late this morning I was trapped in front of cable television and some talking heads on Fox were discussing the case. One said the motive appeared to be robbery. Another asked why target sex workers? Another answered that there are the following considerations:

1) “Remember, sex work is illegal so [the robber] would know they’d probably be carrying cash.”

2) The robber appeared to be timing his attacks for late in the evening when, at least on average, the sex workers would have already seen multiple clients.

3) They’d probably have the cash on them because… something like… they can’t just go around making bank drops with all this unreported income.

And finally

4) He knew they couldn’t go to the cops.

I would add that if you were going to go that route you’d look for independent, non-escort-service, non-pimped sex workers. Booking agencies evidently take credit cards so I’m assuming escorts typically carry only tips. Pimps are allegedly a lot more attentive both about the customers they send their workers to and about collecting the cash.

So! We all just love keeping sex work illegal because, you know, prostitutes are victimized. And yet… and yet… as the talking head said, the only thing stopping the victims from taking cards themselves, from making frequent bank drops, from doing better vetting, from having more open presence with hotels is that the non-booked, non-pimped work they arrange through venues like Craigslist are illegal.

As I usually say, charming little system opponents have worked out for themselves: they help create the system of exploitation and then they click their tongues and shake their heads and say “told you so” when their system works.

%#_(*@!