When we were young and foolish, it was considered cool to open the doors of perception by licking toad skins, chomping on morning glory seeds, or roasting banana skins and smoking the result. Yes, the US has no bananas, but you have to ask what the administration has been smoking but not inhaling lately. They seem to have expanded their collective mind to the point of hard vacuity.
Since the US doesn’t grow any bananas of its own, companies like Dole and Chiquita cultivate nature’s original convenience food in Central America, albeit with a little help from the chemical corporations. Nearby, strewn across the rocky islets of the Caribbean, blessed with sun, sand and little else, the locals also grow bananas, which the European Union allow in under preferential quotas because of the residual concerns of the former colonialists.
Then the US went bananas and attacked these quotas at the World Trade Organization. As a sop to American pride or Freudian anxiety, let us admit that the Caribbean bananas are shorter than those grown by US companies although the jury’s still out on which has the better shape. However, everyone agrees that without preferences the island bananas would wither unexported on the trees.
The Caribbean governments have warned that almost the only other means of livelihood available for their farmers is to grow that versatile and profitable plant, Cannabis Sativa, known locally as ‘ganja’. Or they could clear the plantations and make convenient landing and refueling strips for the constant light aircraft traffic between the Colombian peasantry and American nostrils.
Since the US is also pressing the same governments to cooperate in its $12 bn drug intervention operation, the WTO reference is not, on the face of it, sound policy. But the effect of campaign financing from the big US fruit companies is the introduction of a quantum effect into politics. Whenever you look for the buck you will find that, like a subatomic particle, it has stopped elsewhere.
The solution, as always, is consistency: free trade all round, not just for commodities with big lobbies behind them. Briefly, Congress should put tobacco and marijuana on the same legal footing as each other – and bananas. They should be frowned upon and discouraged, but not criminalized. And then they should all be taxed very heavily.
This modest proposal, although presently unsupported by campaign financing, will spread universal happiness, of sorts. It will stabilize the politics and boost the economies of the Caribbean basin. In the US, it will empty the prisons that presently house over a million people at considerable expense. And it would boost tobacco shares no end and wipe out the Federal deficit.
Presently, the Feds raise a mere twenty cents a pack of cigarettes, much less than any European country. Tax is a penny an ounce for chewing tobacco, which shows the demographics of political power in the US. Both could be raised as part of a deal which would dwarf the present tobacco compromise being drafted. In addition, the Treasury will be able to get its hands on a cut of the $80 bn a year estimated drug profits, not to mention the money it would save on all those prisons and cops. By reducing the amount of laundered money being hung out to dry offshore on islands too small to grow bananas, it could even dampen down on currency speculation since the drug trade worldwide nets $400 bn a year.
Of course, the problem is that legalization could cause a catastrophic drop in prices as the chain of middlemen, bent customs, cops and politicians are removed from the equation. Hence the importance of proper pricing mechanisms, with due regard to market forces. This should ensure that the original growers are properly recompensed and the originating governments get a direct fiscal kickback, just like the end producers and the governments of the consuming countries. This will need sophisticated pricing mechanisms to minimize market incentives for smugglers.
It has been objected that marijuana, per se, is no more costly than parsley, but this underestimates the effect of branding and marketing. Even without advertising, we can be confident that Madison Avenue would make the joint rock and roll with ideas for a premium branded product. After all, there is no perceptible difference between high-end vodka and industrial spirit but the label, dilution – and the price.
Of course, there should be an intensive retraining program to bring the millions of people presently involved in the business into the legal labor market. In addition, an amnesty for previous money transactions could bring untold billions into the taxed and productive economy of countries that desperately need it. The resulting Third World boom and industrialization would boost world trade and stock markets. Even those who never inhaled a molecule would wander around with happy smiles at this dawning of the age of Aquarius.
A whiff of free trade is all you need for a market high.
The Speculator
