Osler's Razor

        In a series of public appearances, Detroit native Mitt Romney has planted the idea that he might run for president again in 2016.  He should resist the idea; that day has passed.  Instead, his experience and passion should be applied to public service in a different way:  The Mitt Romney who founded Bain Capital and saved the Utah Winter Olympics should be the next Drug Czar, and use his financial acumen to destroy narcotics businesses without mass incarceration.

         In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney was celebrated (by Republicans) and eviscerated (by Democrats) for his vocation:  building up and tearing down businesses.  Regardless of how one views the social utility of this enterprise, no one can dispute that Romney is a smart, passionate, well-educated man who loves public service and was very good at what he did while working for Bain Capital.

         Romney’s availability matches up with a special moment for narcotics policy.  There is a broad right-left consensus that the stale tactics of the War on Drugs failed miserably.  It wasted billions of dollars in taxpayer money while failing to limit drug use.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans went to prison, and a disproportionate number of them were black thanks to harsh new laws focused on crack cocaine.  Federalism was trampled as Big Government took over state functions to ineffectively battle street crime.  There was something to offend everyone.

         The shape of our future (and Romney’s) may be embedded in our own history.  In the 1980’s, crack was one of two public health crises that ran side-by-side along parallel tracks.  The other, of course, was AIDS.  At first, both were seen as problems caused by the moral failings of disfavored minorities:  the media and others linked the rise of AIDS to the promiscuity of some gay men, and crack was blamed on African-Americans’ supposed affinity for that drug.  Both of these conclusions were, in some measure, wrong, but these perceptions drove corresponding moral crusades.  Then, in 1986, the paths diverged.  A respected Republican and Reagan appointee, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, shamed the nation into addressing AIDS as a medical problem rather than a moral scourge.  The key line in his epic report on AIDS argued that “It is time to put self-defeating attitudes aside and recognize that we are fighting a disease, not people.” 

         Since illegal narcotics is a business within a market, a modern C. Everett Koop addressing that task should be a businessperson.  Fittingly, Romney’s work at Bain Capital focused on the part of the narcotics business we have not systemically attacked—cash flow.  Primarily, we have fought narcotics by attacking labor (through arrest and incarceration), profits (through forfeitures of drug dealers’ homes and cars), and product (through drug seizures).  These are precisely the factors Romney discounted at Bain, where he cared much more about evaluating a company’s cash flow in analyzing its suitability as a target.  After all, profit, labor, and product can all be replaced so long as there is cash flow, and it was cash flow that promised Bain the possibility of debt being paid off over time.  But if cash flow and credit are cut off (and drug networks don’t have access to traditional credit), the business will fail.  If given a chance to de-construct narcotics businesses Romney’s purpose would be different, but his focus the same:  Take the money, because that is what matters. 

         Finally, Romney-as-Drug Czar would not be deterred by the complexity of international financial networks as he set out to disrupt the cash flow systems of narcotics businesses.  This is a man who lives within those very networks, after all.  In the 2012 campaign, he was harshly criticized for the complexity of his own finances, which involved wholly owned corporations in Bermuda, no fewer than 12 different funds in the Cayman Islands, secretive Swiss bank accounts, and other devices which required his 2010 tax return to include 55 pages just to describe the transactions with foreign entities in that one year. While a comprehensive understanding of such complex cash flows may have hurt Romney in the last campaign, they would be a striking asset if set to the task of curtailing the flow of drug money back to wholesalers and suppliers.  This is not a guy who is scared of tangled financial puzzles.

         We have never had a C. Everett Koop for narcotics, but it’s not too late to fix that mistake.  We can no longer afford to fill our prisons, exacerbate racial tensions, and congratulate ourselves when no progress is made.  With the War on Drugs being dismantled, we effectively have a do-over on policy and tactics.   The new ideas should come from and be implemented by people like Romney—people who know business the way that Koop knew medicine.  After all, the harshest criticism of Romney’s work at Bain Capital was that he sometimes ruthlessly dismantled and bankrupted businesses.  Isn’t that exactly what we want someone to do to the organizations which import cocaine, trade in methmphetamine, and wholesale death in the form of heroin?