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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 *** finance guerrillas in
Colombia, or *** 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 *** 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 ***, and marijuana, and ***, and
***, 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]