MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon
everybody.
Thank you for joining
us this afternoon.
Sorry we're a few
minutes late.
I just want to give
a really quick
introduction to Peter Andreas.
He's a professor at Brown
University, and he's going to
talk to us a little bit
about his book,
"Smuggler Nation." Enjoy.
PETER ANDREAS: Thank
you to Google--
Christopher Jordan
for the invite.
I'm thrilled that Google has
these kind of events, not only
once in awhile, but apparently
all the time.
So it's the kind of place
I'd like to be.
Sort of like a university
campus.
Like where I'm at.
Anyway, the name of the book,
as you know, is called
"Smuggler Nation, How Illicit
Trade Made America." And what
I do in this book is
I basically narrate
the American epic.
A 300-year epic that's
a pretty familiar
story to you all.
But I tell it in a rather
unfamiliar,
unconventional way.
So familiar episodes, the
American Revolution,
industrialization, Westward
expansion, Manifest Destiny,
the American Civil War, the
Progressive era, America's
rise as a global superpower.
These are familiar stories in
our history, but I retell them
through the lens of smuggling
and anti-smuggling campaigns
of various sorts over time.
And I'd like to think--
I hope you'll be convinced by
the talk, but you could look
at the book too, if
you're inspired--
that by looking at our country's
history through this
rather unconventional lens, we
see some things we otherwise
might miss.
And in this case, I want to
hopefully convince you that,
in fact, it turns out that
smuggling and anti-smuggling
crusades were absolutely
essential to the very
founding, and development, and
expansion of the country, so
much so that there's this great
irony, which today,
America is the world's foremost
anti-smuggling
policing superpower, yet founded
and owes much of its
founding and development, I
would argue, to smuggling,
smuggling interests,
and so forth.
And an interesting angle for
me is I teach at Brown
University in Rhode Island.
Providence, Rhode Island.
And it turns out I had no
intention of looking for this,
but I discovered in the process
of the research how
important tiny Rhode Island,
the smallest state in the
nation, is in this history.
So let's backtrack to the
colonial period and look at
the importance of
say, molasses, a
seemingly benign product.
But it's intimately intertwined
with smuggling in
the economy of the Northeast.
Why is that so?
Well, the most important export
of the colonies is rum.
And the most important
ingredient to make rum is, of
course, molasses.
And molasses is coming
from the Caribbean.
But it's supposed to come mostly
from the British West
Indies, but it's coming back
from the French West Indies.
How do we know this?
We know all these distilleries
in Rhode Island and
Massachusetts produce a
certain amount of rum.
And we know that the molasses
they're getting in legally
can't possibly produce
that much rum.
So the difference is made
up by the black market.
And it's crucially important in
terms of the slave trade as
well, because they export rum
to West Africa for slaves,
bring slaves to the Caribbean,
and then they bring back more
molasses to the colonies.
Now the British for many years,
decades in fact, had a
kind of tolerant live and let
live attitude towards this
illicit trade.
But after the Seven Years' War
with the French, the British
were broke.
They desperately needed
more revenue.
And so, they decided to crack
down on the colonies to help
fill the King's coffers.
And instead of accepting
this, the
colonists, in fact, balked.
They balked rather radically,
in fact.
And Rhode Island was one the
first places is to basically
say, enough is enough.
And they had a raiding party on
a customs vessel called the
"Gaspee." It's a famous incident
in Rhode Island.
They celebrate it every
year now, actually.
Called the Gaspee Affair, where
they basically burned
down the vessel in
Narragansett Bay.
And Rhode islanders think of it
as the opening salvo in the
American Revolution, though the
Tea Party in Boston gets
all the credit for that.
So I don't want to overstate
the case, how important
molasses and rum was in the
origins of the American
Revolution, but we should
also not gloss over it.
After all, it was John Adams who
said, we should not blush
to recognize the importance of
rum and molasses in our War of
Independence.
But it's not just a story
about the roots the
Revolution.
The Revolution itself was made
possible by smuggling and
smuggling interests.
So how does George Washington
take on the world's foremost
military power?
Well, he basically relies
deeply on smugglers to
basically provide enough
ammunition, especially
gunpowder, for his desperately
under-supplied Continental Army.
Now it turns out that the people
supplying his army are
not only doing it as patriots,
but they're also doing it as
profiteers.
In fact, John Brown, one of
the founders of Brown
University, there's some great
correspondence between him and
George Washington's buyer of
powder, where the buyer is
basically saying, you're
charging us exorbitant prices
for this powder, but under the
desperate circumstances, we
really have no other
alternatives.
And John Brown actually emerges
from the American War
of Independence as probably
the richest
man in Rhode Island.
So he made some of his fortune
in powder runs.
He was also involved in the
molasses trade and other
illicit trades before
the Revolution.
But part of his fortune was very
much as a war profiteer
of sorts in our very War
of Independence.
So yes, the war was about
patriotism, and
freedom, and liberty.
But they also were able to
harness the profit motive and
greed, frankly, in actually
pulling it off.
In some respects, there's
parallels to today's
insurgencies and civil wars.
There's a sort of vigorous
debate in the literature on
contemporary civil wars, arguing
that somehow, they're
profoundly new and different
because they're so
greed-driven.
And we look at things like
cocaine finance guerrillas in
Colombia, or opium finance
insurgents in Afghanistan, or
blood diamonds in West Africa.
We all know the term
blood diamonds now.
They even made a James
Bond movie about it.
And I think Leonardo DiCaprio
even made a movie with the
title "Blood Diamonds."
But what I argue here and in
more detail in the book is
that the role of conflict
commodities, the importance of
trade in war time, goes all the
way back, not just years
or decades, but in
fact centuries.
So if we fast forward in
American history to the
American Civil War, I cannot
think of a single conflict
commodity that mattered more in
an armed rebellion than the
role of cotton in actually
perpetuating an insurgency.
In fact, the Confederacy
arguably would not have even
had the chutzpah to actually try
to go independent if they
didn't think that King Cotton,
as they called it, could help
them pull it off.
Initially, we thought the
British would come to their
aid formally, intervene on their
side because the British
were so dependent on cotton.
But the British were smart about
it, and realized they
could acquire a significant
amount of cotton through
illicit channels.
They didn't need to formally
intervene on
the side of the South.
That would be very risky, and
too overt blunt and direct.
So they could, in fact, turn a
blind eye to what they called
blockade runners.
So basically, running through
the Union blockade of Southern
ports, smuggling arms and
ammunition in, and bringing
out desperately needed cotton
out for British
factories, and so on.
It wasn't as much, obviously,
as pre-war cotton supplies,
but it was enormously profitable
for those who could
actually successfully get
this commodity out.
There was also a lot of trading
of cotton across the
front lines.
A lot of Northerners made
a lot of money on cotton
speculation, cotton trading,
cotton smuggling.
Abraham Lincoln, known as Honest
Abe, actually had a
pretty tolerant attitude
about this.
He actually pardoned a lot of
cotton smugglers who were
sitting in jail during the
American Civil War.
A lot of it's for political
connections.
He decided not to make
a big deal out of it.
So again, we only need to look
at our own Civil War to
realize it's not that
fundamentally--
today's civil wars are in some
ways not that fundamentally
different in terms of their
dependence on conflict
commodities and keeping
them going.
Now notice, it wasn't enough to
turn the balance of power
on the ground in favor
of the South.
But it actually helped
perpetuate that conflict far
longer and make it far bloodier
than anyone expected.
In fact, more Americans died in
the American Civil War than
any conflict the US has been
involved in since, over
600,000 Americans died
in that war.
And I would argue that cotton
actually played an important
role in keeping it fueled,
if you will.
There's also an interesting
story, and perhaps
particularly interesting to
you folks here at Google,
about intellectual
property theft.
Basically, there's a rigorous
debate going on right now, as
you're well aware in Washington
and elsewhere,
about the growth of intellectual
property theft,
and knock-off products,
and so on.
A lot of finger pointing it at
China, especially, but other
countries as well.
Well, from the perspective of my
book, the message that the
United States is sending China
and other countries around the
world is do as I say,
not as I did.
And basically, I don't think
it's too much of an
overstatement to say that the
United States in the 19th
century was the world's
hotbed of
intellectual property theft.
Of outright blatant piracy
of other countries'
and people's products.
So let's start actually with
America's actual own early
industrialization process.
How does an upstart nation, a
backward nation, actually
catch up to its European rivals
that it has just gone
independent from?
Well, it can't do it purely
through indigenous means.
So Alexander Hamilton and others
actually very bluntly
say we need to acquire the
technologies and machinery
from Europe, especially England
through any means necessary.
Now they use words like
borrow, a very
polite word, right?
But it's not like you're
giving the stuff back.
Right?
So it actually meant
outright theft.
And theft, in fact,
meant smuggling.
So early textile equipment,
newly invented in England,
would soon appear in the United
States in various
pieces, and packages,
and so on.
And the British authorities
tried to crack down on this
with mixed results.
It slowed it, but
did not stop it.
And when the equipment got to
the United States, there was
just one problem that the
importers couldn't deal with,
which was, the equipment doesn't
really come with
operating instructions.
And in fact, sometimes it came
in pieces, so you don't even
know how to put it together.
So you not only need the
technology, the machinery, but
you actually need the know-how,
the people, who know
how to operate it.
And guess what?
It's illegal for British skilled
workers, artisans, who
know how to operate the
machinery to leave Britain.
It's actually a violation of
British immigration laws to
actually bring yourself over to
the United States and help
the country industrialize.
So again, this is a
smuggling story.
Some of Britain's most ambitious
artisans, skilled
workers, clandestinely found
their way across the ocean,
sneaking aboard ships,
pretending to be
farmers, and so on.
Some of them were actually
wooed over by agents, US
agents, which would go over
and try to basically tell
people, spread the message,
that there's good
opportunities in the
United States.
The most famous of these
ambitious British artisans who
came to the United States is
a man named Samuel Slater.
You've maybe heard of him.
High school textbooks usually
attribute him as the father of
the American Industrial
Revolution.
It's a bit of an overstatement,
but there's a
lot of truth to it.
When he arrived in New York
looking for work, a man named
Moses Brown, one of the other
founders of Brown University,
heard about him and actually
made him an
offer he couldn't refuse.
So Samuel Slater came up to
Pawtucket, Rhode Island to
create the first textile
mill in the area.
And there's now actually a
museum where you can visit
Slater Mills.
And this was really the very
early industrialization
process in the United States,
but done through Illicit
acquisition of machinery and
illicit acquisition of the
skilled workers necessary
to work the machinery.
It's not just an issue of
patents, though, it's also a
copyright story.
So a famous battle, actually,
in the 19th century between
Charles Dickens in the
United States.
Now, right, it's Steven
Spielberg and other producers
of art and so on, upset that
their movies appear overnight
in China on the black
market, and so on.
Music industry and Hollywood
and so on are obviously
tremendously upset.
But the equivalent in the 19th
century would have been people
like Charles Dickens.
He's only the most famous one,
but there are many of them.
So when he came to the United
States to tour, to do
readings, he was, of course,
thrilled that he had so many
fans on this side
of the ocean.
But he was really not very happy
to find out that all his
books were easily obtainable
without him
seeing any of the proceeds.
In fact, his publisher had
nothing to do with it.
He got no money, royalties,
at all.
And for a number of decades,
he actually was screaming
bloody murder to the US federal
government to please
do something about this.
And the US government turned
a blind eye and
turned a deaf ear.
And it wasn't, in fact, until
people like Mark Twain came
along and had their own
self-interest in intellectual
property protection.
In other words, when the United
States actually was
producing intellectual property
of its own, did the
country discover, oh yeah, maybe
there's actually real
logic here for protecting
intellectual property.
So the United States goes in a
relatively short period of
time from being at the
forefront of piracy,
intellectual property theft, to
become the world's foremost
advocate of protection of
intellectual property,
conveniently forgetting
about it illicit past.
And again, it wasn't
just Charles
Dickens and Mark Twain.
They're just representative
of this debate.
So if we were to fast forward
to today, the most benign
reading of what the relevance
of that historical story is
for today is that China and
other countries really are not
going to get totally on-board
intellectual property
protection until they actually
develop much stronger
self-interest, their own
intellectual property to protect.
So in other words, the most
benign reading of the
situation is that we're really
just going through growing
pains here.
If China follows in some form or
fashion US past steps, that
in fact, it will become a
protector, not just an evader
of intellectual property laws.
Another dominant story in the
book carried out throughout,
but in some chapters more
prominent than others, is a
story about borders.
And right now, as you all know,
it's a hot topic in the
news, especially in relation
to immigration control.
Especially, actually, in the
West, here in California.
And the dominant mantra in
Washington about borders is,
in fact, we can't have any
fundamental immigration reform
right now until we so-called
regain control of our border.
Well, the very language of
regaining control of our
border suggests it was
ever under control
in the first place.
Right?
You're like, restoring something
to its previous
idyllic status of being
under control.
But it never existed.
This is kind of a
mythical past.
And I would argue that the
border debate in Washington
and elsewhere has suffered
from a severe case of
historical amnesia, pretending
that, in fact, we're today
facing an unprecedented border
threat, when in fact, quite
arguably, the US-Mexico border
is today more policed, more
surveilled, more militarized,
more monitored, and flooded
with federal resources to seal
it by far than any other time
in American history.
So the norm is actually out
of control borders, for
better or for worse.
Not just the US-Mexico border,
but the US-Canada border.
Seaports as well.
And much of the history of the
United States is one of
gradually trying to gain some
semblance of control over air,
sea, and land flows coming
into the country.
But for much of the nation's
history, it was basically a
wide open story.
They just didn't have the
capacity to even pretend to be
able to control these spaces.
All the attention today is on
Mexico and Mexican migrants
crossing the border.
But one thing I find ironic is
the first migrants who caught
the attention of US authorities
crossing the
border, which was concerned
the serious policy threat,
were actually Chinese coming
from Mexico, not Mexicans.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act
in the late 19th century
right here in San Francisco,
they shut the front door to
entry of Chinese laborers.
And they didn't stop coming.
They were basically dispersed.
And so they start coming in
across the Canadian border.
They were diverted to Canada,
and came across that border.
Then they were diverted to
Mexico, and started coming
across the US-Mexico border.
So towns like Juarez, and
Tijuana, and so became known
as depots or hubs for
smuggling people.
And they weren't Mexicans
being smuggled.
They were Chinese and
nationals from other countries.
In fact, Mexicans were so taken
for granted, it was
basically overlooked
as a problem.
They just came and go as they
wanted, and US authorities
didn't really see that
as a problem.
It was so overlooked, so taken
for granted as a non-issue,
that one way you snuck across
the border from Mexico was to
pretend to be Mexican.
It's hard to imagine today that
that would work as a way
of coming into the
United States.
But in fact, one effort was to
kind of blend in with the
crowds of workers going back and
forth say, across the the
bridge between Juarez
and El Paso, Texas.
Fast forward to today.
It's interesting that in
recent decades, there's
actually been a new influx of
Chinese trying to come into
the country.
And as they were able to
actually put a stop on
maritime smuggling of Chinese
coming in directly, they
actually were then diverted
again, as history showed us in
the past, smuggled in across the
Canadian border and across
the Mexican border.
So again, there's a sense of
historical deja vu if, in
fact, in the policy debate, they
actually we're interested
in looking back more than
a few years or decades.
There's also an interesting
technology story, perhaps
particular of interest to you
folks here at Google, about
the importance of new
technologies in fueling
illicit trades of
various sort.
The mantra in policy circles
about transnational organized
crime, drug trafficking, migrant
smuggling, and so on
today is that they're all
greatly aided by new
technologies and revolutions
in communication and
transportation.
And it's all true.
Just like new technologies and
transportation methods
facilitate legal flows across
borders, they obviously also
facilitate illegal flows.
But from a larger historical
perspective, it's pretty clear
that this is just the
latest chapter in a
very, very old story.
And I mean basically, if we
go back to the origins of
transoceanic commerce--
the invention the steamship, the
invention of the railroad,
the invention of the automobile,
the airplane, the
telegraph, the telephone--
all these inventions, long
before globalization became a
buzzword that we're all now
familiar with, radically
altered cross border flows,
both legal and illegal.
And it's not just a story about
government authorities
increasingly under siege and
unable and out of control, as
these illicit actors are
taking advantage of new
technologies.
In fact, it's very much
a two-way street, a
double-edged sword.
So the authorities are also
taking advantage of these new
technologies.
So let me just give you a
couple examples of that.
The invention of the telephone
greatly aided
bootleggers in the 1920s.
And they started actually
using the telephone to
basically plan their operations,
coordinated
drops, and so on.
It was very effective.
And they were speaking quite
openly on the telephone,
because they've never heard of
anything called wiretapping.
Yet wiretapping became a bread
and butter basic law
enforcement tool, technique,
that was first developed with
the invention of the telephone
and with bootleggers adopting
it as a favored method
of doing business.
At the time, it was considered
so radical, so new, so
revolutionary as a law
enforcement tool that the
first bootlegger to be busted
with it, a guy named Olmstead
in Seattle, the case went all
the way to the Supreme Court.
It was just unheard of that the
police could listen in on
telephone lines.
Now we just sort of take
it for granted.
If you've gone to the right
paperwork, have a court order,
and so on, you can do
wiretapping it's hard to
imagine law enforcement actually
being able to do its
job in some cases without
wiretapping.
The very show, the HBO show
"The Wire," right?
It was all based on the ability
of wiretapping.
Well, the very origins of that
is in the invention of the
telephone and in the Prohibition
era and so on.
Our Fourth Amendment, which
basically protection against
unreasonable search and seizure,
the origins of it are
actually anger at British
customs officials in the late
colonial period, basically very
abusive, heavy-handed
searches and seizures of US
vessels, and warehouses, and
so on looking for
smuggled goods.
So when they actually wrote
these amendments up, they had
this in the back
of their mind.
Well, I would argue and others
have argued that there's been
a loosening of Fourth Amendment
rights over time.
And some of that loosening
has happened with
battles over smuggling.
And it's very clear in the
case of Prohibition.
The first ability to actually
look at automobiles, to search
automobiles, well, the
justification was, maybe it's
coming across the border
from Canada.
Maybe it's carrying alcohol.
You look at the kind of things
that you can now search that
didn't even exist before that
are sources of information for
authorities.
So when you cross a border,
the power of the federal
government is nowhere stronger
legally than at the point
where you're entering
United States.
They can do pretty much,
not anything to you.
But they can do a lot more than
they can anywhere else.
And that includes looking
through your
belongings, your clothes.
Unfortunately, sometimes
including your body.
But it also includes looking
through your telephone, your
hard drive, your computer.
All these new technologies are
also enormously important
sources of information and
perfectly legitimate things
that authorities
can now search.
So my bottom line here is that
we need to see technology as
not just enabling law evasion
in the history of smuggling,
but also greatly empowering the
federal government in its
efforts to enforce the law.
Obviously, the big story in
recent weeks has been the NSA.
But this is all fueled by
counter-terrorism and so on.
The origins, I would argue, is
not in counter-terrorism.
The origins are actually
in counter-smuggling.
It's just that when
anti-terrorism becomes the
dominant motivation, then that
becomes the main driving force
for surveillance and so on.
The last thing I want to talk
about a bit is, everyone talks
about the United States
as a superpower.
And what they usually mean about
that is that it's the
world's largest economy.
And it obviously is the world's
foremost military power.
But I would also emphasize that
it's also the world's
foremost policing power.
A sort of interesting narrative
I weave through the
book is that even as US
authorities are being often
overwhelmed in a sense of siege
by illicit cross border
actors of various sorts over
years and decades, there's
simultaneously an empowering
of the federal government.
And it's no surprise that this
country has the largest prison
population in the world at a
time when it also has the most
draconian--
not the most draconian
drug laws.
But drug laws are, in fact,
the single most important
incarcerater in this country.
So the United States has, I
believe, about 25% of the
world's incarcerated population,
but only 5% of the
world's population.
It puts more people in jail for
drug law violations than
Western Europe puts in jail for
all violations combined.
Right?
So there's a certain
zealousness, if you will,
about enforcing drug laws.
And it's not the only thing
filling our jails, but it's
the single most important one.
So the profile, the face of
the federal government's
criminal justice apparatus, has
been profoundly shaped by
anti-smuggling efforts.
In the modern era, most
profoundly by drug
enforcement.
But I would also argue
increasingly by immigration
law enforcement.
But it goes all the way
back to the founding.
So in a country that was
allergic to the very idea of
creating a strong federal
policing apparatus, there was
a recognition that you had to
actually have some capacity to
police trade.
After all, federal government
had no source of revenue other
than a very modest
impost on trade.
Well, how do you actually have
the policing capacity to
enforce it?
You have to create
a custom service.
So one of the first pillars,
founding pillars of the
federal government, was in
fact the custom service.
It's one thing these previously
fragmented colonies
could all agree on.
And so the very sort of raison
d'etre of having a federal
government which raises revenue
was actually to have
some capacity to enforce customs
duties and not let the
smugglers completely get
away with everything.
Now I want to give you the
impression that my book argues
that nothing's changed in 300
years, and that we shouldn't
be concerned about these various
elicit cross border
activities today.
In fact, far from that.
It's a very serious problem
and deserving
of a lot more attention.
But part of giving it more
serious attention, I think, is
recognizing how important it's
actually been historically,
not just as a contemporary new
and different phenomena.
And I don't want to suggest that
basically it's all story
of continuity rather than
change, but the bottom line of
the book is in a debate about
global organized crime and so
on that emphasizes change and
transformation so much, we
also need to see patterns
of continuity.
So as Mark Twain liked
to put it, history
does not repeat itself.
But in fact, does rhyme.
So I kind of put it
better than him.
So that's kind of the takeaway
message of the book.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: What exactly
makes an illicit product?
It's not necessarily something
that's just
illegal itself, right?
But something that maybe has
a secondhand market that's
willing people to go behind the
backs of the law to make
money off of it?
PETER ANDREAS: Actually, for the
purposes of the book and
definition I use in
the book, it is in
fact something unlawful.
So the law has to be
broken for it to be
included in the book.
I couldn't include everything.
So in fact, I don't have the
book in front of me, but I do
have a definition of smuggling
that is basically to bring in
or take out clandestinely
without authorization.
But the point is, that leaves
open it could be people.
It could be goods.
It could be money.
It could the animals.
And so one striking thing is
that that definition applies,
I think, over a 30-year period,
but the very content
of what's being smuggle
changes over time
dramatically.
So at one point in time, there
were no endangered species
legislation.
Right?
So there's no wildlife, black
market and wildlife trade.
And now, it's actually a
thriving industry, partly
because in the last 30-40
years, we actually have
protections that an unintended
perverse side effect has been
to create a thriving
black market.
So good for you to ask that
question, because a basic
definitional issue is
at stake here now.
Now typically, you can
categorize these things as
untaxed activities.
Stolen.
So basically, things
that stolen and
then crossing borders.
Or prohibited.
Outright prohibitions.
And early in history, much
of what is of concern is
basically tax evasion.
But as history progresses,
there's more and more things
that are actually in the
outright prohibited category,
like drugs and so on.
Notice I hardly said anything
about drug trafficking, right?
The reason is, it's the longest
chapter in the book.
But it's a 20th century story.
So it's a relative late comer
to a much larger important
story of smuggling and anti
smuggling campaigns in US
history, though arguably the
single most important one in
terms of its consequences
and longevity.
I mean, it's a 100-year
drug war, if you will.
I also, on this topic, I teach
a senior seminar, just 20
students, typically seniors,
doing research papers on
states in illegal
global markets.
And basically, what we do is we
spend much of the semester
studying the best known
illicit trades.
Drug trafficking, migrant
smuggling, sex trafficking,
money laundering, arms trade,
intellectual property theft.
But then we devote the last
few weeks of the semester
where students have done
research on illicit markets
and trades that we haven't
covered in class.
So I've actually learned, I've
been teaching that seminar off
and on for the last decade.
I've learned as much from my
students from my classes as
they've learned from me giving
them the more conventional
illicit trades that everyone
knows about.
So I never knew there was a bear
bile trade, for example.
I learned a lot about some
exotic drugs that otherwise,
other than the meth, and
marijuana, and cocaine, and
heroin, a lot of the
human organ trade.
The cadaver trade.
There's a black market in
cadavers that we rarely even
talk about.
I could go on and on.
But basically, students come up
with research projects on
illicit trades not otherwise
covered in the class.
So those are the two classes
I teach related to this.
I also teach some basic
introduction to international
relations, a lecture class.
And also, a graduate seminar
on the post-Cold
War conflict issues.
So, security issues.
AUDIENCE: In seeing things about
the era of Prohibition
in this country, I thought to
myself, that's probably one of
the reasons why there's such
fear and anger at the United
States government when it tries
to get additional powers
or enforce the powers that
it supposedly has.
And in the last decade, we've
seen great outcries against
the United States from the Tea
Party and others saying that
the federal government is
basically an evil thing and we
should not allow it to have any
powers, or increase its
powers at all.
But it seems to me it goes much,
much further back than
Prohibition.
So, you've kind of opened
my eyes to that.
Can you talk about smuggling,
and powers, and fears, and
oppositions to governments
in general?
PETER ANDREAS: Yeah.
I don't know if I can fully
answer that question, since it
deserves a lot more attention
than just a quick answer.
But it's not just myth that the
country was founded in a
kind of anti-statused political
culture and
environment.
But as I mentioned earlier very
briefly, the ability to
regulate trade to some extent in
order to raise the minimal
amount of revenue to have a
functioning government, even
the most extreme libertarian
probably thinks there should
be some form of government,
and that means
revenue to run it.
Right?
And so a 5% impost on trade
helps in that respect.
There was no national
income tax until
early in the 20th century.
So much of the nation's history
is one of federal
government dependence almost
exclusively on a
modest tax on trade.
And its policing powers were
very constrained at the
federal level.
We have local and state
police, and so on.
Well, the federal government,
the cornerstone of its
policing powers were
actually regulation
of interstate commerce.
And so it's fascinating to me as
they used that basic power
to then extend to illicit trades
of various sorts, not
just taxing trade, but other
vices that they want to stop
was based on that--
the first anti-sex trafficking
laws in the United States
written in the 20th century
were party based on this.
The Mann Act, for example.
So there has been, whether one
likes it or not, a kind of
creeping federal policing power
through decades, in fact
centuries, of fighting various
illicit trades.
Government officials in some
ways end up very bruised and
battered through
the experience,
but also more empowered.
So Prohibition was
a lesson in--
it was almost an embarrassment
to the federal government in
terms of just huge amounts
of corruption.
Probably the most corrupt period
in American history was
the corruption in actually
organized crime and violence
created by that.
But in some ways, the, federal
government, the legacy of
that, was more empowerment.
And so the agencies and
officials and strategies
developed during Prohibition,
they then just turned around
and applied to drugs.
Right?
So alcohol prohibition was
lifted, but drug prohibitions
started in 1914 were not.
In fact, they got stricter
and stricter over time.
In fact, America's first drug
czar, if you will, actually
earned his stripes first
inviting the alcohol trade.
AUDIENCE: So you made a really
clean case in some sense for
the IP situation, in which a
country potentially flips its
position because it's
now producing that.
And I'm wondering to what extent
that parallels, or are
there other cases
that for like--
so we've been talking
about drugs.
So is there a parallel in terms
of rationale for that?
Or what are the ways in which
societies take ownership over,
and then start making
things illegal?
I mean, sex trafficking,
everyone produces humans.
Why is it that some people have
decided that they need
protection, and others
perhaps haven't?
Like I mean, are there parallels
in terms of when
people take ownership and decide
to make things illicit
or prohibited?
PETER ANDREAS: That's
a good question.
The IP theft debate, I think
is as you pointed out, the
most transparent flip.
And not only flipping, but
forgetting, of the past.
But in the other cases, it's not
so obviously a particular
economic self-interest
going on.
The turnaround right now going
on about marijuana in this
country, especially in Colorado,
which I was in
Denver just a couple days, or
Washington State and so on,
it's very hard to actually
pinpoint that turnaround in
laws to some particular
economic interest.
Alcohol prohibition.
Some very powerful economic
interests
were actually subverted.
Brewing was the fifth largest
industry in the country, I
believe, when they still
had Prohibition.
It did take very powerful rich
people like the DuPonts and so
on turning against Prohibition
to make people realize, to
help people realize, that
these were dumb laws.
But I'd be curious to think
through some of the parallels
that it sounds like you maybe
have seen that I haven't
latched onto yet.
It's not that hard see the
connection say, for example,
sex trafficking.
There, actually, I'm in the
critique of the International
Campaign Against
Sex-Trafficking, which the US
is very much at the forefront
of, is that it seems more
intent on criminalizing the
trade than actually protecting
the rights of those
being trafficked.
That's the basic critique, I
would say, of those who have
found the whole campaign
lacking and having some
negative repercussions.
Driving it more underground
in some ways and making
trafficked women even more
vulnerable depending on their
pimps, and so on.
I think maybe a case would be
the slave trade, where an
extraordinarily divided country
over the slavery
issue, and they just
basically punted.
They put a pause on making
a decision at the time of
independence.
And just sort of said, we'll
deal with that later.
So they said, freedom, but
only for some of us.
But it actually in that case
took a full-blown civil war to
actually take ownership in a
way that people could feel
unified in saying that slavery
should not exist.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PETER ANDREAS: Yeah, right.
You know, I didn't even
mention it, frankly.
Now that I brought it up,
slave trafficking.
There was a period between 1808
and the Civil War where
bringing in more slaves was
actually banned at the federal
level, but the slave trade
domestically and slavery
domestically in the South was
completely allowed legally.
And so it was a weird situation
where you actually
had the criminalization
international slave trade,
including by the United States,
but a kind of not just
tolerance, but state backing
of slavery domestically.
But it wasn't until after a war
that you actually had more
of a unified view of
that as something
that should be banned.
It's arguably the most
successful case of abolishing
an illicit trade.
And arguably, a huge thing that
made it possible was that
the state was no longer backing
slavery domestically.
And the international slave
trade pretty much dried up
once, at the local level where
slaves were being used, you no
longer had the support
of governments.
[APPLAUSE]
