Breaking Bad and the Federal Government: Who Is the Real Criminal?

by Gerard Emershaw

On Sunday, AMC’s award winning drama “Breaking Bad” ended its five season run. In many ways, the show’s antihero protagonist Walter White is emblematic of the early 21st century American male. University professors, pop culture aficionados, and fans of the show will be discussing the finer points of the psychology of the tragic Walter White for decades to come. The question that will be considered in what follows is “Who is the real criminal?” Are drug dealers like Walter White the real criminals or are federal employees like White’s brother-in-law Hank Schrader who work for unconstitutional agencies the real criminals?

Walter White is a bad man. There is no doubt about this. He proves himself to be “the danger” and “the one that knocks.” During the course of “Breaking Bad,” he is responsible for the murders of well over a dozen individuals. However, the majority of these murders are the killings of drug dealing rivals, the kinds of murders typical in the narcotics trade. These are the kinds of murders that were once associated with bootleggers during Prohibition. Employees of rival alcohol producing companies do not engage in violence against each other now that alcohol is legal in the United States. Luiz Fernando Edmond, the president of Anheuser-Busch, does not order hits on employees of the Coors Brewing Company. Coors CEO Peter Swinburn does not resort to violence in order to force Anheuser-Busch out of his “territory” in Colorado.

Those in the drug trade are made into criminals by arbitrary laws that outlaw certain classes of intoxicants while allowing other classes to be freely produced, traded, and used. In an important sense, the federal government makes itself one of the major causes of the violence connected with the drug trade by making substances such as crystal methamphetamine illegal.

Walter White’s brother-in-law Hank Schrader works for the federal government at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA is tasked with enforcing federal drug laws by combating drug smuggling and use. The first thing to notice about the DEA is that it is an unconstitutional agency. The DEA was created by President Richard Nixon on July 28, 1973. There is nothing in the Constitution that grants the President the power to create such a law enforcement agency. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to criminalize any drugs. The federal government acknowledged this undeniable fact when it legally amended the Constitution through the Eighteenth Amendment rather than simply passing the Volstead Act in the absence of such an amendment.

Prior to Prohibition, the federal government banned the non-medical use of opiates with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. This was an unconstitutional move since there is nothing in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution which grants Congress the power to ban opiates or any other kinds of drugs. While state legislatures do possess the constitutional authority to ban drugs under the Tenth Amendment, it is likely that drugs would not be so widely banned in states were it not for the federal ban. No state currently bans alcohol, though it would not be unconstitutional for a state to enact prohibition within its borders. Therefore, the federal government has created the environment which gives rise to drug violence and the associated crimes that are committed due to the artificially high price of narcotics through its unconstitutional actions in banning drugs and declaring the destructive War on Drugs.

ASAC Hank Schrader and all other employees of the DEA are essentially criminals. This is actually true of all federal employees who work for unconstitutional agencies. While employees of the Department of Education or the Social Security Agency might not be poisoning people’s tea with ricin, blowing them up with bombs, or strangling them with bicycle locks, they are criminals all the same. Everything that an unconstitutional federal government agency does is illegal. Thus, every official action taken by its employees is illegal. Furthermore, those who work for agencies such as the DEA create the environment that inevitably breeds monsters like Walter “Heisenberg” White.