It’s good advice for understanding any human interaction.

“Deep Throat” (now revealed to have been FBI man Mark Felt) gave this advice to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to break the Nixon Watergate conspiracy. If anything in human relations seems confusing, it’s a good way to untangle the snarls.

One of today’s headlines highlights the quarrel that has burbled up between the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and New York City over a new 16 page pamphlet that gives advice to heroin drug users about how to stay alive. New York is giving good, practical advice to druggies. The DEA, however, says that it’s an instruction manual on how to inject drugs. I doubt that many drug users need any advice on how to successfully get high. But they probably can use information about how to do it and not kill themselves quite so quickly at the same time.

It seems to me that the argument really comes down to a more fundamental question: “Are drug users citizens who are entitled to public services? Or should public policy be to simply get rid of them as cheaply and efficiently as possible?” Some states kill them off at maximum expense and risk to other citizens by locking them up for a while in expensive prisons where they receive zero help in kicking drugs but a truly quality education in how to be a better criminal.

It’s time to ask the question, “Who profits from drug use in the United States?” In other words, it’s time to “follow the money.”

Drugs seized by authorities are at least some indication of the volume of the drug business, and there are hard facts about that from the DEA’s own web site. For the most recent year (2008), 4.1 kilograms of heroin was seized in Utah. (For the metrically challenged, that’s slightly more than 9 pounds.) That’s for all of Utah and all of 2008. But over 70,000 pounds of marijuana were seized in Utah in the same year.

There might be more than one way to interpret that statistic. An article of faith for the right wing is that all drugs are evil, evil, evil. (Except for the doctor prescribed addiction that Aunt LaVerne has to anti-depression drugs, of course.) And that marijane is a “gateway drug” for the harder stuff. According to conservative theology, once you touch weed, hard drugs are just a short step away. If that’s true, then we’re in for a hell of a heroin epidemic in the near future.

I suspect (and formal studies prove) that marijuana has very little linkage to harder drugs (not even to Aunt LaVerne’s anti-depression drugs), so I don’t think there’s much to worry about there. But it does show that there’s a lot of money being made both by marijuana growers and sellers, and by people in the business of finding and destroying marijuana. Both groups would be a lot less prosperous if their market went away for some reason.

As a taxpayer … and as a Utah resident who doesn’t want to lose more than I already have to drug criminals … I sincerely question the value of all this money being funnelled to both groups. There’s a better idea that has worked before — right here in Utah. The Ogden Standard Examiner recently published a historical note about Weber State University. It seems like the initiative to legalize the brewing of beer here in Utah was pushed through by Mormons to finance education.

In 1933, “To stabilize funding for the colleges, State Senator Ira Huggins, of Ogden, proposed that the state take over their funding. To pay for them, he introduced a bill to allow the manufacture of 3.05 percent beer in Utah for sale to states that had legalized beer sales. The beer would be a stable source of income and brewing of it would provide jobs. The bill was pushed through and, on July 1, Weber became a state-funded junior college.”

Wotta concept!

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Thanks to “Peggy” for sending the quote from the Ogden Standard Examiner.