I GUESS THIS WOULD BE A BIGGER DEAL if anybody paid attention to what Dennis Hastert says, but Eugene Volokh is right to note the sliminess of Hastert’s almost-claim that George Soros is financed by drug dealers.

Like me, Soros favors drug legalization. That makes him (as Volokh notes, linking a post by Jesse Walker) a natural enemy of drug dealers, whose profit margins would be shot to hell if drugs were legalized. And Hastert’s followup explanation doesn’t make sense anyway.

While I’m (sort of) on this topic, why doesn’t the United States address the Afghan opium trade by just buying the stuff up? Presumably, farmers would be just as happy to sell their poppies to us, and that would keep them off the market, as well as depriving bad guys of a revenue source. Am I missing something here?

UPDATE: Reader Jacob Proffitt emails:

If you do this, you actually end up increasing opium production as farmers move to a guaranteed crop (all the profit, none of the uncertainty). It’d be better if we guaranteed purchase of an alternative crop at opium production profit levels for the farmers…

Hmm. I don’t know if this would work or not.