Pablo Montoya (author)

Transcription

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]