Category: Uncategorized

I just returned from a two week trip with my wife and daughter to Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam. Been there before; I visited all three cities at different times in the 60s and 70s. The occasion of this trip was to check in with our daughter during her semester abroad. My notes and observations follow:

All three cities were jammed with people. You might think since it was November, things would be pretty quiet, but no… The museums were full, with long lines outside waiting for entry. The sidewalks and restaurants were crowded with residents and tourists. Hotel rooms were all taken. If you wanted a restaurant seat or a hotel room and didn’t have a reservation, pickings might be slim.

Europeans are very interested in US politics, not to say that they are fans, but we do take up a large share of the European conciousness. On our first morning in Berlin, which would have been the 11th, the first four pages of the city newspaper (the MorgenPost?) were taken up by reporting on and analysis of the presidential vote.

English is firmly placed as the lingua franca in any area where tourists are common. On first contact with anyone in a restaurant, hotel, or on the street you are just as likely to be addressed in English as in the local language. The dialect used is American English. In past visits I heard Europeans speak English with an English accent, but no longer. American accents, American idioms.

Blue jeans and casual dress are the rule. I brought along a pair of Dockers and leather shoes for nights out at nice restaurants, but they were not needed. The locals wear jeans, the tourists wear jeans. Further, when I was young it was a casual sport in airports to guess the nationality of individuals walking by. We could distinguish Italians versus Spanish, French from Germans; but no more – or at least Betsy and I can’t. Today good teeth are universal, and everyone wears Levis, North Face rain jackets, and LA Dodger or NY Yankee baseball caps.

Speaking of sports gear and team logos, I found it curious that I could never tell what the popular local sports team was. I expected to see FC Copenhagen gear in Copenhagen or Hertha BSC gear in Berlin, but they don’t do that. No flags flying from cars or logos displayed in windows. The Yankee and Dodger baseball caps were worn as a style statement, not because they were fans, or knew or cared that the ‘LA’ and ‘NY’ logos represented American baseball teams.

Bicycles are much more popular than I remember. Bike lanes are universal and you may get run down if you step into one without looking first. I rented a bike in Copenhagen and found an extensive set of norms and customs around bike riding in the city. Given an arterial with cars down the middle and bike lanes on either side, you’re expected to use the bike lane on the RIGHT side of the street. At a red light pedestrians stand in one spot, bikes gather in another. Hand signals are used. When bicyclists make a left turn in Seattle, they might pull out into the left turn lane with the cars (and slow down the traffic). In Copenhagen OTOH you cross the intersection in the bike lane, then make your left using the crosswalk on the far side. Much safer and tidier. In American cities fancy road bikes are common, not in Europe. They use the clunky city bikes with heavy frames and fat tires. Cargo bikes are common. Moms ferry their kids in cargo bikes. In Copenhagen we didn’t see scooters; but in Amsterdam scooters are common, and in Amsterdam the scooters use the bike lanes.

Germany is trying, with characteristic thoroughness, to acknowledge the dark parts of their recent history. There is a Jewish Museum in Berlin, and on the former site of Gestapo headquarters something called the Topography of Terror Documentation Center which documents the role of the SS and the police in Nazi Germany.

Compared to the US, airport security is intense. Schiphol is a magnificent modern airport, and huge. The airport in Copenhagen was strange: a bazaar of endless retail shops and bright lights with airport gates added here and there almost as an afterthought. And nowhere to sit. Ironically, Tegel in Berlin is crowded and chaotic. I expected different in Germany’s new capital.

The food was great even in places where you wouldn’t expect it, like museum cafes. At the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde I had an open-faced smoked halibut sandwich which was a masterpiece of local ingredients. I only remember one restaurant meal that wasn’t wonderful and different.

Things you see here but not there…
Man buns
fat people
newspapers
helicopters
local TV news
potholes

Things you see there but not here…
French braids worn by men
Chinese tourists, lots of Chinese tourists
dogs off-leash in parks

Things that made me shake my head
Hotel showers. All it takes is two knobs and a hose, but in different trips across different parts of Europe, over and over I see hotels go off the deep end with Rube Goldberg lashups that fall between Fawlty Towers and Saturday Night Live.
Tiny hotel rooms. Tiny rooms are the norm in Europe. I hate it. My opinion – it would be a code violation in the US.

It’s time to end the War on Drugs. It was started by Richard Nixon in 1971, when the world was a very different place. Over the intervening 45 years the War on Drugs has become an unwieldy, costly, robotic monster. Yes, the term ‘War on Drugs’ is retired, but the policies continue: the 2016 budget for the Drug Enforcement Administration is over $2 billion, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the Federal government’s opposition to marijuana legalization in the states.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

— John Stuart Mill

Here are the arguments, pro and con.

No – Continue Prohibition

The core argument in favor of the current approach is that legalization will lead to increased consumption, and that increased consumption in turn will result in more public health problems and a rise in crime. This was described in a Charles Krauthammer editorial published by the Washington Post:

Do we really want the additional and permanent burden of the other intoxicants, some of which are infinitely more addictive than alcohol? … With cocaine and heroin (and drug cocktails yet to be imagined) readily available, additional transportation deaths alone — think just of the highway toll — would dwarf the current number of drug-related deaths.

Yes – End Prohibition
On the other side, there are two core arguments against what we’re doing today. First, there is plenty of evidence prohibition is counter-productive; and second, there is strong evidence legalization (ending prohibition) works.

Prohibition is Counter-Productive
The current prohibition campaign is very expensive. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron was interviewed by the German news site SPIEGEL ONLINE and asserted “If it legalized drugs, the United States could save $85 billion to $90 billion per year. Roughly half that is spent on the current drugs policy and half that is lost in taxes that the state could have levied on legal drugs.”

Plus, all that spending has not driven down addiction rates. See the following chart from The Atlantic.

Aside from cost and ineffectiveness, the War on Drugs is also destructive. A report published by the London School of Economics said this:

The pursuit of a militarised and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage. These include mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilisation in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.

Legalization Works
The second argument against prohibition is that legalization works. In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. The results were summarized on the web site Business Insider:

• Drug-related HIV infections have plummeted by over 90% since 2001, according to the drug-policy think tank Transform.
• Drug-related deaths in Portugal are the second-lowest in the European Union. Just three in a million people die of overdoses there, compared with the EU average of 17.3 per million.
• The number of adults who have done drugs in the past year has decreased steadily since 2001.
• Compared to rest of the EU, young people in Portugal now use the least amount of “legal high” drugs like synthetic marijuana, which are especially dangerous.
• The percentage of drug-related offenders in Portuguese prisons fell from 44% in 1999 to 21% in 2012.
• The number of people in drug-treatment increased 60% from 1998 to 2011 from 23,600 to 38,000.

The Bottom Line
We can’t win it. We have no strategy to win it.

The War on Drugs is worse than just a lost cause. The 2016 Democratic and Republican party platforms offer no new ideas, and drug enforcement policy is not an issue in the Presidential campaign, so apparently the plan is to continue the same approach.

Given the impact on our own citizens and on friends and allies, it’s obvious that prohibition does more harm than good. It’s an expensive, nonsensical, destructive, dead end.

End it.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated.

— The Economist

It’s really unfair, and very unwise, to go on getting into fights like this. We’ve failed to win four out of our last five major wars since 1945:

• Korea – truce
• Vietnam – defeat
• Gulf war 1 – victory
• Gulf war 2 – withdrew
• Afghanistan – withdrew

Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.

— Contemporary American folk saying

The unfairness lies most egregiously in asking our sons and daughters, to fight and die, to win, and then decide “oh, this is unpleasant and untidy” and quit. Unfairness also lies in asking taxpayers to pay for it; and in asking allies to believe us, to fight on our side when in the end we don’t honor our promises.

Unwisdom lies partly in the messages that we send. With each successive war we engage in, it seems easier and easier to make us quit. We communicate vulnerability and indecisiveness. Also, if you’re considering in joining us as an ally you can expect to be left holding the bag afterwards. Consider the fate of our allies in South Vietnam in 1973. We were able to help some evacuate. Some escaped on their own and eventually came here as refugees. Others were executed or jailed. Consider also the Iraqi and Afghani interpreters, promised visas to the US and then abandoned.

There is a lack of wisdom in so easily giving up what you’ve won. With both the Vietnam War and Gulf War 2, plausible narratives exist that we walked away with those wars essentially won, as summarized below.

The Viet Nam War, Won
By 1972 the process of Vietnamization was complete, American ground troops were gone and the South Vietnamese were doing quite well with American logistics, air and naval support. The North Vietnamese decided in that year to test things with a major offensive and were soundly beaten. The North Vietnamese then decided to enter peace talks, Richard Nixon sold out, and Congress withdrew support from the South Vietnamese. Game over. The previous narrative is condensed from one offered in an article in The New York Sun.

Gulf War 2, Won
By 2008 Iraq was stabilized. The Iraqi Army was able to fight and win battles without support from American ground forces. Oil revenue was flowing, and the economy was rebounding. Charles Krauthammer wrote in a Washington Post column:

Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

History should teach us that wars are messy and dangerous. Don’t get in a war unless you intend to win.

Bottom line
So what do we do? I used to think the fix was ‘don’t get involved in wars without overwhelming public support’. However, the American Revolution and the Civil War were both fought, and won, without overwhelming public support. Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, a former CENTCOM commander and allegedly the ‘most revered Marine in a generation’ says that America doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest. That insight seems to fit well with recent history: if it doesn’t go the way we want, we lose interest.

I wish for two things:

• When (not if) we get into another war, let’s understand it probably won’t go well. Be prepared for adversity. If we don’t have the stomach for it, don’t start.
• Respect our troops and allies by honoring the commitments we make to them.