Drug War Moron – Rep. Steve King of Iowa

I’ve heard some of Representative King’s rantings on a variety of subjects and already knew he was an idiot, but I didn’t realize how much until I read his extremely long speech in the House of Representatives on Thursday regarding illegal aliens that also discussed illegal drugs.
[Note: His speech begins on H5389 of the Congressional Record (see headline “Immigration”). At the end of H5391 he really gets going on drugs…]

All the while in this stream of humanity comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America, Madam Speaker, 90 percent coming into the United States across
our southern border and all the human carnage that goes with that, the damage to our families, the damage to our productivity, the loss in lives, the children that are abused, the wives and sometimes less often the husbands that are violently assaulted by their spouse, their boyfriend, their significant other, whatever arrangement it might be, the
children that are abused that come because of methamphetamines and because
of marijuana and because of heroin and because of crack cocaine and because of cocaine itself. Those drugs, the marijuana, which often is a gateway drug to the drugs that incite a
higher level of violence, this damage to America‰s society is high. It‰s high in terms of dollars and lost productivity. It‰s high in terms of human suffering. It‰s high in terms of human life.

Yep. This is the kind of stuff he’s spewing.
Now check out his notion of how the drug supply chain works:

And when I ask the Drug Enforcement people what would happen if magically tomorrow morning everyone woke up in their own country, a place where they were legal, what if we had no illegals in America magically tomorrow morning, what would happen to the illegal drug distribution system in the United States? And their answer has consistently been that will suspend immediately illegal drug distribution in America because it‰s at least one link, and every distribution chain is a link that‰s forged by an illegal in the United States. Sometimes every link is an illegal link, but they‰re forging
these links. At least one link in every illegal drug distribution chain is an illegal
immigrant that‰s here transferring drugs.
And I won‰t argue this, so I will say this first hypothetically: If we had full enforcement of our immigration laws overnight, we would shut off illegal drug distribution overnight, Madam Speaker. Now, that‰s not to say that those distribution chains wouldn‰t be
reconstructed, that there wouldn‰t be illegal drug distribution manufacturing entrepreneurs that would fill that demand, because the demand does exist. It exists here in the United States, but the profit is going to Mexico.

It’s an interesting fantasy that feeds into his anti-immigrant passion, but at least he notes that demand will not cease, so, of course, his point about eliminating illegal aliens to eliminate drugs is really rather irrelevant. A smarter man would figure out that legalizing drugs would eliminate the profits for those illegal aliens who are involved in the drug trade.
But he’s got some answers. Wait till you see these ideas.

So we have about two choices on this, or I will say there are three
choices [note: I never found out what the third one is]: We can ramp up the interdiction to the point where it raises the transaction costs so high that bringing it into the United States would get so costly that it would cease. That‰s one thing that we can do.

Of course, like all good little supply-side prohibitionists, he doesn’t say how the hell he’d do that. There is no physical way to ramp up the interdiction to the point where drug distribution ceases. It will always find a way. You could theoretically ramp it up to the point where it would cease crossing the border of U.S./Mexico, but then pretty much all legitimate trade would cease as well (or get prohibitively expensive) and the economic fallout would be disastrous.
What are his other ideas?
Drug testing. Lots and lots of drug testing. He rambles on and on all over the place on this, so I’m just going to excerpt some bits and pieces.

And another thing that we could do would be to turn up the drug testing in
the United States, […]
If every employer had a drug-free workplace, if every employer enforced a drug-free workplace policy, if the employers actually initiated drug testing within their workforce in
four different categories, […] So you would have preemployment testing, you would have post-accident testing, you would have to have reasonable suspicion testing, […] And the fourth way, and I think it‰s most effective, is random drug testing…

Then he goes on to add mandatory random drug testing for anyone receiving government assistance, and continues…

So if we test in the workplace, we test in welfare, the other place to test is in educational institutions. Yes, that includes our colleges and universities, includes our schools to almost every degree, and it includes the employees that are there as well if we had a random drug testing system set up. […]
we have cleaned up the workforce, we have cleaned up the welfare roles. We have cleaned up the educational institution, three huge universes of this society and civilization, and the result of it, who would be left? Who would be left to be on drugs? And the answer is nobody except those who are dealing and those who are stealing.

That’s right – universal drug testing for just about everyone in America.
Now, the guy is a complete flake. If you read his entire speech, it’s a rambling mess. (If you want to watch some of the speech, the drug testing part is available on YouTube.)
The truly bizarre thing in his speech is that he even notes that the country had to make a decision during alcohol prohibition to legalize in order to stop the violence, yet he rejects it for today’s situation. See if you can make any sense out of it…

But if we should fail to do that, and if we are unable to implement a policy
that would be workplace drug testing, then at some point all the violence that comes with this, drugs that we have today, is a mirror of what happened back during the prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties, when this country came to a conclusion they couldn‰t enforce a prohibition on alcohol, and that the violent crime that was coming with it, and then the nonviolent crime, was so great that they would rather tolerate the alcohol than tolerate the violence.
I am not there. We have a tolerance level built into this civilization that‰s the United States of America that accepts the idea that if we don‰t see it in front of us every day, we are not going to score the carnage. But the carnage is high. The loss in lives is high. The loss of lives even at the hands of illegal aliens to Americans is very, very high.

… and then he rants more about illegal aliens, so I have no idea what he means.