In a superb column at AlterNet on our nation's world-leading drug use rates, MPP's Bruce Mirken calls attention to this shocking concession from the Drug Czar's office:

Trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement doesn't make sense, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington. "The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,'' Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. "Should we spend less? We're just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society."

It is just an incredibly strange argument to emerge from the very people who've tirelessly defended the efficacy of law-enforcement as an essential component of our drug policy. I mean seriously, what on earth is he trying to say? Moreover, who are they to boast about our "highly free and mobile society" presiding as they do over our nation's largest campaign to reduce American freedom? There's no freedom or mobility for the 500,000 Americans they've banished behind bars for drug crimes. We wouldn't even have the "higher crime rate" he speaks of if we didn’t make crimes of things that shouldn’t be.

When I first learned of the new World Health Organization data showing that Americans use marijuana and cocaine at dramatically higher rates than the Netherlands, I asked myself how the Drug Czar's office could even begin to respond. It's a point they've been dodging for decades, thrust suddenly upon them in the form of a credible study that focuses directly upon that which they've sought so desperately to disregard. Nonetheless, I am honestly surprised that, in their infinite slipperiness, they couldn't come up with something better than this.

What could more conclusively demonstrate the embarrassing failure of our drug war than this?

Despite tough anti-drug laws, a new survey shows the U.S. has the highest level of illegal drug use in the world.

The World Health Organization's survey of legal and illegal drug use in 17 countries, including the Netherlands and other countries with less stringent drug laws, shows Americans report the highest level of cocaine and marijuana use.

For example, Americans were four times more likely to report using cocaine in their lifetime than the next closest country, New Zealand (16% vs. 4%),

Marijuana use was more widely reported worldwide, and the U.S. also had the highest rate of use at 42.4% compared with 41.9% of New Zealanders.

In contrast, in the Netherlands, which has more liberal drug policies than the U.S., only 1.9% of people reported cocaine use and 19.8% reported marijuana use. [CBSNews]

As Jacob Sullum points out:

…it's striking that the lifetime marijuana use rate in the U.S. (42.4 percent) is more than twice as high as the rate in the Netherlands (19.8 percent), despite the latter country's famously (or notoriously, depending on your perspective) tolerant cannabis policies. The difference for lifetime cocaine use is even bigger: The U.S. rate (16.2 percent) is eight times the Dutch rate (1.9 percet).

The Drug Czar's kneejerk description of Dutch drug policy as a raging trainwreck is thoroughly annihilated for everyone to see, and there's really just nothing else to say about it. Other countries are achieving much more desirable outcomes without incurring the massive social and fiscal costs of our towering war on drugs. Admittedly, Americans may possess a unique predisposition to enjoy these substances, but that's exactly the point; the more drugs we use, the greater the consequences if our policy towards drug use utterly sucks.

A major and underappreciated problem with drug testing is that the stupid tests don’t even work. They say people took drugs when they didn’t. The problem is particularly apparent in the case of pregnant women who are frequently targeted for drug screening, but whose changing body chemistry throws off the results:

Hospitals' initial urine- screening drug tests on pregnant women can produce a high rate of false positives - particularly for methamphetamine and opiates - because they are technically complex and interpretation of the results can be difficult, some experts say.

Tests for methamphetamine are wrong an average of 26 percent - and possibly up to 70 percent - of the time, according to studies by the University of Kansas Medical Center, U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. [DailyNews]

Of course, drug policy and science cannot coexist harmoniously, thus babies are taken from mothers who test positive, even though the tests are constantly wrong. In one tragic case, a child died in foster care after being wrongly separated from her mother:

Growing up in Los Angeles County's foster care system, Elizabeth Espinoza is sure of one thing: A baby needs its mother.

Espinoza, who was separated from her own mother when she was young because of neglect, also had her newborn baby taken by the foster-care system when she tested positive for marijuana and cocaine at the hospital after giving birth.

Just three months later, the baby, Gerardo, died when his foster mother strapped him into a car seat, took him to a neighbor's home and left him in the car seat on a bed, according to a lawsuit filed against the county's Department of Children and Family Services seeking unspecified damages. [DailyNews]

I hope I'm not being generous, but I really think almost anyone would agree that this is just sickening and horrible. The press coverage will hopefully initiate progress towards cleaning up the procedures that contributed to this travesty. I will hold out hope that common sense can prevail over the mindlessness of taking children from their parents based on evidence that is proven to be wrong up to 70% of the time, particularly now that the alternatives we have available for those children have been demonstrated to be fatally inadequate.

But there is also a larger lesson here that must not escape our attention. Think for a moment about how many women have already been falsely accused under this wildly unjust policy. Think about the social consequences of tearing families apart based on deeply flawed science in a criminal justice system that strikes without hesitation but drags its heels when it comes to righting such ubiquitous wrongs. Ask yourself, also, how such a policy was ever implemented in the first place, doomed as it was to destroy innocent families so capriciously.

Once again, we are faced with a monumental travesty, grand in scope, yet remarkably simple in origin; we should protect unborn children from drug-using mothers. We've wreaked unimaginable and undue suffering upon innocent parents and children in pursuit of the noblest of ideals. That, unfortunately, is the story of most aspects of our drug policy when they receive appropriate scrutiny. The totality of such repeated travesties forms a terrifying mosaic, the true, yet largely untold story of how our drug policies destroy innocent lives each and every day in ways we might never expect.

It is precisely because the idea to protect babies from drugs is such a no-brainer that a plan was drafted with no brains.

Just watch how the New York Times editorial board picks apart the Drug Czar's propaganda:

According to the White House, this country is scoring big wins in the war on drugs, especially against the cocaine cartels. Officials celebrate that cocaine seizures are up — leading to higher prices on American streets. Cocaine use by teenagers is down, and, officials say, workplace tests suggest adult use is falling.

John Walters, the White House drug czar, declared earlier this year that “courageous and effective” counternarcotics efforts in Colombia and Mexico “are disrupting the production and flow of cocaine.”

This enthusiasm rests on a very selective reading of the data. Another look suggests that despite the billions of dollars the United States has spent battling the cartels, it has hardly made a dent in the cocaine trade.

The Drug Czar's blog fired back with a predictably off-target, but uncharacteristically hostile response:

Today's New York Times has published an editorial that willfully cherry picks data in order to conform to their tired, 1970's editorial viewpoint that we're "losing the war on drugs."

Despite our numerous efforts to provide the Times with the facts, their editorial staff has chosen to ignore irrefutable data regarding the progress that has been made in making our nation's drug problem smaller.

 And yet, as anyone can see, the NYT piece clearly acknowledges this so-called "irrefutable data." They list the Drug Czar's favorite talking points right in the first paragraph. But then they do something he wasn't prepared for: they say it doesn't matter. The salient point of the whole editorial is that "the drug cartels are not running for cover." In short, for all the Drug Czar's proud proclamations of progress, the drug trade surges on unabated.

It's really just embarrassing that the Drug Czar's only response is to repeat the very points already acknowledged and overcome by NYT. His whole argument is that rates of drug abuse are lower than they were at their highest point in history. That's true, but it's not surprising, not impressive, and not even remotely a result of the Drug Czar's poisonous public policies. With the rage of a shamed tyrant, Walters claims a monopoly on "the facts," as though only the Drug Czar is qualified to interpret the success of his programs. It's like calling CarMax to ask them if they have the best deals on used cars.

Beyond all that, ponder the absurdity of the very notion that we must consult the Drug Czar and his overcooked statistics in order to know whether or not our drug policy is working really well. We can observe these things for ourselves. When we lead the world in incarceration, when we lead the world in drug use, when we drug test our own sewage, and deny organs to medical marijuana patients, and murder innocent people in their homes, and subsidize brutal civil wars in foreign nations, we have nothing to celebrate. All of these grand travesties fester before our eyes and are not mitigated, even to a microscopic extent, by the indignant self-congratulatory fulminations of the very people who visited this spectacular nightmare upon us.

In other words, when the pool is green, no one gives a crap if the lifeguard says the pH balance is normal.

What happens when a crazy person tells local police he's a federal agent and offers to help them fight drugs?

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.
…

Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road. [New York Times]

The whole thing provides yet another exhibit in the colossal incompetence that has become so routine and predictable in the war on drugs. If some nutjob showed up at the fire department with a badge and an axe, they'd tell him to hit the road. They wouldn't follow him in and out of burning buildings.

It is precisely because of the massive multi-tiered drug war bureaucracy that his psychotic scheme seemed somehow plausible to everyone. Drug enforcement is the one occupation so lacking in accountability, so consumed by macho tough-guy posturing, that some maniac can just walk through the door and fit right in. It's a match made in hell.

And it wasn't even the cops who figured out he was an imposter. It was a reporter, months into this mindboggling hoax. Even when he recklessly and routinely violated suspects' constitutional rights, the police who followed him around never thought anything of it. That's how easy it is. His flagrantly illegal and incompetent behavior actually made them think he was real.

That this even happened is a potent testament to the fact that drug enforcement in America is thoroughly rotten and diseased to its core. If you see vultures circling around something, you know it is not healthy.

Anyone who has followed the Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick cases knows how hard it is to convince police and prosecutors that you thought you were being burglarized when you fired on police who charged into your home unexpectedly.

This bizarre story from Alabama puts a new twist on that tragically familiar narrative:

An off-duty Huntsville police officer was shot in the shoulder early Saturday when a friend mistook him for a burglar.

Police Chief Henry Reyes said Tony McElyea, a Strategic Counterdrug Team agent, decided to surprise a good friend and former police academy cadet at his home in the 1300 block of Virginia Boulevard.

McElyea, his girlfriend, and the friend's wife snuck into the home at about 2:30 a.m.

McElyea walked down the hallway and started shouting "Wake up, wake up," at his friend, Reyes said.

The friend, who Reyes said didn't immediately recognize McElyea, grabbed a .38-caliber revolver and shot him.

"It's just one of those things where he got startled and reacted," Reyes said. "It's unfortunate that it happened, but it's fortunate that it's not any worse."
…

The incident has been ruled an accident, and no charges will be filed against the shooter, whose name was not immediately released. [Huntsville Times]

So apparently, when you take the botched drug raid out of the equation, suddenly it makes perfect sense that someone would use force to defend their home when intruders come bursting in. Of course, in this case there was no warrant and no vague criminal activity for which the homeowner could be accused of attempting to evade capture. So maybe it's a little unfair to compare this to the Maye and Frederick cases.

Still, it's just impossible to ignore the fact that Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick are no more guilty than this man, who wasn't even charged. They made the same fundamental error he made: thinking that their lives were in danger and using force against the intruder. It shouldn’t matter whether or not police had a warrant. The bottom line is that if police behave like burglars, they might be mistaken for burglars. Citizens who make that mistake are not guilty of murdering a cop. They are victims of bad policing brought on by a bad drug policy.

The Drug Czar's latest blog post, entitled Is Your Workplace Drug Free? If Not, We Can Help, begins as follows:

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the vast majority of drug users are employed, and when they arrive for work, they don't leave their problems at the door. Of the 17.2 million illicit drug users aged 18 or older in 2005, 12.9 million (74.8 percent) were employed either full or part time.

Ok, so nearly ¾ of illegal drug users are employed. They have jobs, just like everybody else. Interesting. But here's where you're supposed to get freaked out:

Furthermore, research indicates that between 10 and 20 percent of the nation's workers who die on the job test positive for alcohol or other drugs.

Umm, pardon me, but so what? The National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 8.3% of respondents had used illegal drugs in the past month and 50.9% had used alcohol. If that many people are using alcohol and other drugs regularly, then it is not surprising to learn that 10-20% of people who died at work had drugs in their system. It doesn't prove that the drugs caused the accident.

Think about this: 80-90% of people killed at work tested negative for alcohol/drugs, even though more than half the population uses them. If anything, the evidence suggests a frightening link between sobriety and workplace fatalities. But don't take it from me. After all, it was the Drug Czar who brought this up.

The United States Conference of Mayors has put saving lives ahead of drug war politics and rejected the Drug Czar's dangerous public policy ideas. Via the Drug Policy Alliance:

The USCM last year declared the war on drugs a failure and called for a “New Bottom Line” in U.S. drug policy, which should be measured by the number of lives saved rather than the number of people imprisoned. This year’s resolution sets forth a comprehensive strategy for cities and states to reduce overdose morbidity and mortality by:

*Supporting local programs that distribute naloxone – an opiate antagonist medication effective in reversing the respiratory failure that typically causes death from opioid overdose – directly to drug users, their friends, families and communities;

*Urging state governments to adopt emergency “Good Samaritan” immunity policies that shield from prosecution people who are experiencing or have witnessed an accidental or intentional drug overdose and who have contacted 911 to request emergency medical treatment for the victim of drug toxicity or overdose;

*Calling on the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to urgently fund research to evaluate scientifically the effectiveness of overdose prevention interventions and develop model programs; and

*Calling on the Food and Drug Administration to take all necessary and reasonable steps to facilitate the testing and approval of nasal and/or over-the-counter formulations of naloxone and to consider recommending prescription naloxone concurrent with prescribing strong opioid analgesics

None of this should be even remotely controversial, and yet it is. Shockingly, the Drug Czar's office is actually opposed to distributing overdoses prevention kits based on the callous theory that bad outcomes will teach users to behave:

Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras says. [NPR]

Thinking about this, I can't get over how sad and embarrassing it is that our mayors are forced to take a leadership role in developing sensible drug policies at the national level when we have a White House office that's supposed to be doing that. The public officials in Washington, D.C. who've been tasked with addressing the nation's drug problem have abdicated that role, arguing instead for malicious restrictions on proven life-saving interventions.

America's mayors deserve our gratitude for stepping forward and doing what they can to fill the gaping hole created by the Drug Czar's pitiful lack of leadership with regards to preventing overdose deaths.

Update: SSDP has a page where you can contact your state legislators about Good Samaritan policies. It only takes a second, do it.

Anytime you apply pressure in the war on drugs, the market just shifts to accommodate the new conditions. Thus, efforts to crack down on domestic methamphetamine production by limiting access to precursor chemicals may have reduced meth cooking, but they have not stopped people from snorting drugs and getting all tweaked out:

While methamphetamine remains a problem in Oregon City, arrests for possession have been declining. Arrests for cocaine possession, however, increased from 2006 to 2007. That trend is mirrored statewide.
…

Officials point to the similarity of the effects of the drugs as a major reason for cocaine's comeback.

"Meth addicts have a need for a certain amount of energy," said Detective Jim Strovink of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office. "Heroin makes people laid-back, so that's not really for them. They're finding they can get the same high with cocaine. That's where they're getting their jolt." [The Oregonian]

Of course, we were already going after cocaine, so now what? We've restricted access to pseudo-ephedrine based cold medicines in order to stop people from getting high, but all it did was boost the cocaine market. It seems the only people who can't get the drugs they need are allergy sufferers.

Decades of drug war demolition tactics have taken their toll on our diplomacy in South America:

QUITO (Reuters) - From Argentina to Nicaragua, Latin Americans have elected leftist leaders over the last decade who are challenging Washington's aggressive war on drugs in the world's top cocaine-producing region.

These governments are shaking off U.S. influence in the region and building defense and trade alliances that exclude the United States. Some now say they can better fight drugs without U.S. help and are rejecting policies they do not like.

The strongest resistance to U.S. drug policies is in Ecuador and Bolivia, two coca-growing countries of the Andes, and in Venezuela.

This is just the inevitable consequence of bribing foreign governments to let our soldiers run around on their land slashing and burning the livelihoods of impoverished populations. We've declared war on the coca plant itself, insisting that it not be grown even by indigenous people who've used it for thousands of years for altitude sickness and appetite suppression. As it becomes increasingly clear that none of this is accomplishing anything, everyone's starting to realize that we have no intention of ever leaving.

We literally go around giving report cards to sovereign nations rating their cooperation in our own hopeless effort to stop Americans from using drugs. Both sides in the South American drug war are funded with U.S. dollars, yet we bare only the burden of our own indulgence, not the horrific violence and destabilization wrought by the endless war on drugs.

Thanks to democracy, however, the victims of our disastrous policies in South America may elect leaders who want to kick us the hell out. I can’t say I blame them.

Honestly, I've been predicting this for years. It just makes sense. Pigeons like to carry small items from place to place, and drug smugglers are always looking for new ways to deliver the goods:

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A sharp increase in drugs and cellphones found inside a Brazilian prison mystified officials -- until guards spotted some distressed pigeons struggling to stay airborne.

Inmates at the prison in Marilia, Sao Paulo state had been training carrier pigeons to smuggle in goods using cell phone sized pouches on their backs, a low-tech but ingenious way of skipping the high-tech security that visitors faced.
…

Officials said the pigeons, bred and trained inside the prison, lived on the jail's roof, where prisoners would take their deliveries before smuggling the birds out again through friends and family.

The scheme was uncovered when guards on the prison walls saw some pigeons struggling to fly.

For a second I was surprised that no one else thought of this before now, but then I realized. These guys didn't invent using pigeons to smuggle drugs. They got caught using pigeons to smuggle drugs. And only because they got greedy and made the poor things carry cell phones. For all we know, pigeons are being used all over the world to move small amounts of dope around, which can add up to quite a bit if you use a whole flock of 'em.

Add another item to the list of peculiar activities born in the drug prohibition laboratory.

I'll spare you the excrement jokes and just let this idea speak for itself:

Environmental scientists are beginning to use an unsavory new tool -- raw sewage -- to paint an accurate portrait of drug abuse in communities. Like one big, citywide urinalysis, tests at municipal sewage plants in many areas of the United States and Europe, including Los Angeles County, have detected illicit drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.

Law enforcement officials have long sought a way to come up with reliable and verifiable calculations of narcotics use, to identify new trends and formulate policies. Surveys, the backbone of drug-use estimates, are only as reliable as the people who answer them. But sewage does not lie. [Los Angeles Times]

Admittedly, assuming the methodology is sound, this appears to be a breakthrough technique for obtaining accurate drug use demographics. And it's already beginning to cast doubt on existing data, not surprisingly to the effect of indicating that drug use has been widely underreported:

The scientists were even able to use sewage to estimate individual use and weekly trends. For instance, they estimated that people in Milan used twice as much cocaine, about 35 grams per person per year, than Italy's government surveys had suggested.

That's kind of neat, I suppose, that they can figure out stuff like that. But ya know what? If our drug policy weren't a raging nightmare, drug testing raw sewage wouldn’t be even remotely necessary. Seriously, the moment the government finds itself digging around in our sewage to figure out what drugs we take, it becomes completely clear that we've screwed up our approach to drugs beyond belief. It shouldn’t even be necessary to formulate arguments as to why this is not the behavior of a healthy society. I mean, really. They're drug testing sewage. What's wrong with them?

All of this is symbolic of the utter lack of information and knowledge about drug use that we've achieved in the course of our abundantly destructive attempts to control this very behavior. Nothing could be easier than determining down to the bottle or butt exactly how many Heinekens™ or Newport Lights™ are consumed by the population, but in order to study marijuana use, we must collect frothing f#%king sewage into test tubes, mix in some noxious chemicals, and run the results through some mindbendingly complex algorithm?

Clueless and reeking of poo, the champions of our failed drug control crusade stand before us straight-faced and swear that everything is going according to plan.

Yesterday, everyone at our office was talking about what a jackass Don Imus was for making yet another racially charged remark. But his excuse is an interesting one:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. radio personality Don Imus on Tuesday defended linking a football player's race to brushes with the police as Imus tried to dampen a brewing race controversy over remarks he made one day earlier.

During his breakfast show on Monday on Citadel Broadcasting Corp's ABC Radio Networks, Imus discussed Adam "Pacman" Jones, who was suspended by the National Football League in April 2007 because of his link to a Las Vegas triple shooting.

A colleague of Imus commented on how many times Jones had been arrested since he had been drafted by the Tennessee Titans in 2005, and Imus asked what color he was. Told that Jones is black, Imus responded: "Well, there you go. Now we know."

But on Tuesday Imus said during his show: "Obviously I already knew what color he was. The point was to make a sarcastic point.

"What people should be outraged about is they arrest blacks for no reason," he said. "There's no reason to arrest this kid six times, maybe he did something once, but I mean everybody does something once."

I just don't know what to make of this, I really don't. If Imus was honestly trying to make point about racial profiling, it would be a real shame to see him get raked over the coals for it. We don't want this to have a chilling effect on others in the entertainment industry raising the issue.

On the other hand, if he seriously just lost his cool and let loose with what everyone initially assumed he meant, then that's unforgivable. He's offended enough people already, and to say something like that is just nasty. Moreover, I can’t stand the thought of Imus successfully covering his ass for a genuinely racist comment by playing on our sympathies for the victims of racial profiling. How shrewd and cynical that would be.

I haven't followed this that closely, so maybe there's some contextual evidence I've missed. I lean towards assuming that he's just an ass, but the thought that he was actually trying to make a point about racial profiling would be mitigating if true. What do you think?

If you take George Will's word for it, you might come away thinking we're 2 million more prisoners away from ending crime in America once and for all. His Sunday Washington Post column, More Prisoners, Less Crime, begins by attacking liberals for not loving incarceration enough, proceeds to deny racial disparities in our criminal justice system, and closes by suggesting that prisons might be better for society than universities. Needless to say, it was linked approvingly by the White House drug czar, John Walters.

Will would have us believe that all progress towards reducing crime rates is the exclusive result of increased incarceration, ignoring all other factors, and even mocking "liberals" who focus on addressing "flawed social conditions." Amazingly, Will manages to reach his singular conclusion without even telling us how far crime rates have actually dropped. It's a glaring and convenient omission, since any criticism of his shallow and needlessly partisan analysis is difficult without knowing what numbers he's looking at. For example, since the incarceration boom began in the 1970's, the biggest drop in crime rates occurred during the mid-90's, a period of increased economic opportunity, which took place under a democratic administration.

In his book "The Great American Crime Decline," crime expert Franklin Zimring, PhD notes:

Since a huge increase in incarceration was the major policy change in
American criminal justice in the last three decades of the twentieth
century, one would expect many observers to give this boom in
imprisonment the lion's share of the credit for declining crime in the
United States. One problem with such an assumption is that massive
doses of increased incarceration had been administered throughout the
1970s and 1980s with no consistent and visible impact on crime.

The Vera Institute reports that only 25% of the crime drop of the mid-90's was attributable to incarceration. Moreover, since the prison population grew by a staggering 638% between 1970 and 2005, any benefits actually derived through incarceration are achieved at a massive cost, both fiscally and in terms of huge numbers of individual people whose imprisonment didn’t actually reduce crime. I mean, crime didn't drop 638%, obviously.

The idea of using incarceration to incapacitate the most serious offenders is ancient and perfectly logical in and of itself. A small minority of offenders commit a large percentage of crimes, thus if we can remove the worst recidivists from society, we'll achieve substantial gains in crime control. The problem is that each successive year of heavy incarceration will impact fewer of these serious offenders, precisely because so many of them are already behind bars. These diminishing returns ensure that lock 'em up policies will become progressively less effective over time, thus incapacitation could not achieve a sustained or proportionate crime reduction even if it were the sole factor, which it is not.

Finally, much of this has limited, if any, applicability to the illicit drug market, which has thoroughly withstood the incarceration boom. Drug sales, unlike rapes and murders, never decrease when the people responsible are removed. Thus, the Drug Czar's enthusiasm for Will's conclusions may have more to do with his appreciation for any spirited defense of the prison population than an actual belief that we've made progress towards reducing the drug trade specifically. Disruptions in the drug market actually increase violence, as we're seeing in Mexico, therefore any sustained reductions in violent crime we've achieved through incarceration could be expanded dramatically by ending the drug war and regulating illicit drug sales. There is absolutely no public safety interest in incapacitating non-violent drug offenders, who will only be replaced, while the State continues to foot the bill for their imprisonment.

Fortunately, for anyone frustrated by the mindlessness of those who still defend our embarrassingly massive prison population, understand this: we literally cannot afford to keep doing this. Not because it has ravished urban communities, and thoroughly corrupted the administration of justice in America, nor because it has fostered the growth of a paramilitary police state that routinely steamrolls the due process of our laws. And not even because the people themselves have grown suspicious of our towering prison industrial complex and the tiresome rhetoric employed by its champions. We cannot afford to keep doing this because we just don’t have enough money to indefinitely continue supporting these horrible things.

Eventually, even our most vengeful and ferocious legislators and bureaucrats will have to make better decisions about who to put in our prisons. And when that day arrives, decades of so-called "tough-on-crime" talk will immediately be brushed to the fringes where it has belonged for generations.

Update: Unsurprisingly, Pete Guither is all over this at DrugWarRant.

No matter what happens in the drug war, the people in charge will always tell you that we're making great progress. Obvious ongoing policy failures are referred to as "setbacks" as though we're on a trajectory towards inevitable eventual success. The thing is, we're not.

Colombian peasants devoted 27 percent more land to growing coca last year, the United Nations reported Wednesday, calling the increase "a surprise and a shock" given intense efforts to eradicate cocaine's raw ingredient.
…

"The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and shock: a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Really? Because increased coca cultivation in Colombia is the least surprising thing I've ever heard in my life. Coca eradication has never worked in the history of the world. As Pete Guither points out, Costa recently called drug policy reformers "lunatics," and yet he is the one who gets shocked and surprised by something any of us could have assured him would happen.

At any given moment, the powerful drug warriors of the world can be found talking about drug policy like it's their first day on the job.

A Canadian man has been acquitted after killing a police officer whom he mistook for a burglar during a botched drug raid. Looks like the right verdict was reached for the right reasons. Meanwhile, here in the states, Cory Maye sits in prison and Ryan Frederick awaits a capital murder trail for doing essentially the same thing under the same circumstances.
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Speaking of Ryan Frederick, new evidence points towards a cover up by police. A bullet hole was found in his home and "primer residue" was found on the hands of the officers who conducted the botched raid on his home. Looks like they've been lying about not firing a weapon during the raid. This new evidence casts further doubt on the prosecution's theory that Frederick fired on police while they were still in his front yard. Bottom line, Ryan Frederick wasn't growing marijuana. He'd been burglarized days before. When he fired on the intruders, he thought he was defending his home. This whole murder trial is a sham and the more we learn, the clearer that fact becomes.
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John Stossel says Legalize Every Drug in The New York Sun. It's nice to see someone in the mainstream media who gets the issue – the whole damn thing – not just bits and pieces. Of course, anyone familiar with Stossel knows that he's been on the right page about this for a long time.
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Paul Armentano at NORML is really super exhausted from spending the whole week debunking the potent pot propaganda parade, but he summoned the energy to produce a final post on the topic. Paul calls our attention to a disgraceful CNN report falsely crediting increased potency for increased marijuana treatment, as though skyrocketing marijuana arrests and subsequent treatment referrals had nothing to do with that.
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Pete Guither has a thorough account of Senator Jim Webb's hearing this morning on the economic impact of the war on drugs. It was an important event that I was unfortunately unable to attend. I don’t think Pete was there either because he lives in Illinois, but he's got the story, so that's awesome and you guys should go read about it. This post about drug free zones is good too.

Rumors of a smoking ban in the Netherlands have long threatened Amsterdam's popular coffeeshop scene, where customers can openly buy and smoke marijuana. In a bizarre turn, however, it looks like they've come up with an interesting compromise:

New laws similar to those which took effect in England last summer, will ban the smoking of tobacco - but not cannabis - in enclosed public places in the Netherlands from July 1.

Critics say the change will encourage users to turn to much stronger forms of the drug.

Users will still be able to light up joints filled with pure cannabis but technically banned from mixing in tobacco. [The Telegraph]

I just don't even know what to say about this. Common sense ought to dictate that businesses be allowed to choose what environment to offer their customers, but if you're gonna have a smoking ban, the marijuana exemption certainly takes the teeth out of it.

For the hardcore marijuana enthusiasts among us, a friend sends this interesting assesment of the smoking ban's potential impact on Dutch marijuana culture:

The popularity of mixing tobacco into joints is due in part to the widespread use of chemical fertilizers used when growing the commercial cannabis that is typically available in Dutch coffeeshops. "Chemmy" pot doesn't burn properly without tobacco, thus we may soon face an epidemic of joints that won’t stay lit.

Lacking the tobacco option, coffeeshop customers may soon find themselves craving properly-grown organic cannabis, currently a rare find at most Dutch coffeeshops. If, to any extent, this change in the law results in increased use of more conscientious cultivation practices, the long term impact on the quality of Dutch cannabis could be substantial.

Organic cannabis is more flavorful, softer on the lungs, and produces a more satisfying high. Moreover, proper organic methods can achieve the same yields as the destructive chemical/hydroponic technique that many growers believe is necessary to produce a sizable harvest. Experts such as Jason King have long lamented the poor quality of commercial cannabis available in Amsterdam and this new law may have the unintended effect of pushing things back in the right direction.

Really? Well that sounds logical enough to me, I guess. You won't find that kind of analysis in The Telegraph, that's for sure.

A disturbing report from NPR illustrates that many police departments have become dependent on confiscated drug proceeds in order to fund their anti-drug operations:

Every year, about $12 billion in drug profits returns to Mexico from the world's largest narcotics market — the United States. As a tactic in the war on drugs, law enforcement pursues that drug money and is then allowed to keep a portion as an incentive to fight crime.
…

Federal and state rules governing asset forfeiture explicitly discourage law enforcement agencies from supplementing their budgets with seized drug money or allowing the prospect of those funds to influence law enforcement decisions.

There is a law enforcement culture — particularly in the South — in which police agencies have grown, in the words of one state senator from South Texas, "addicted to drug money."

Just pause for a second and think about the implications of a drug war that funds itself with dirty money. It is just laughable to think that such conditions could exist without inviting routine corruption, from our disgraceful forfeiture laws to the habitual thefts and misconduct that occur with such frequency that we're able to publish a weekly column dedicated to them.

It is truly symbolic of the drug war's inherent hopelessness that illicit drug proceeds are needed in order to subsidize narcotics operations. If we ever actually succeeded at shrinking the drug market, we'd be defunding law-enforcement! Progress is rather obviously impossible under such circumstances.

Drug enforcement is a job like any other, and police have mouths to feed, bills to pay, maybe a little alimony here or there. So they take their paycheck and sign out; I don’t blame anyone for that in and of itself. But consider that law-enforcement operations artificially inflate the value of drugs, only to then hunt down those same proceeds, collect, and redistribute them within the police department. Morally, is that any better than the dealer who pushes dope to put food on the table?

Really, a structure such as this is not designed to achieve forward momentum towards reducing drug abuse. It's the law-enforcement equivalent of subsistence farming and it ought to warrant income substitution programs not unlike those we push on the peasants of Colombia and Afghanistan. All of this lends substantial credence to the popular conception that "the drug war was meant to be waged, not won."

Each day that the drug war rages on, its finely tuned mechanisms become more effective at sustaining itself and less effective at addressing the issues of drug abuse and public safety that supposedly justify these policies in the first place.

Everyday I read the Drug Czar's blog hoping that one afternoon I might happen upon something vaguely resembling an actual response to the reform movement's detailed and ongoing critiques of his work. Yet it never comes. Instead, I read that marijuana makes people sad, medical marijuana makes people sick, and school children love having their urine collected.

Then today it happened. Overcome, perhaps, by excitement over the newest data on marijuana potency, the Drug Czar's blog linked editorials by MPP's Bruce Mirken and NORML's Paul Armentano. The post even contains quotes by Armentano and attempts to refute them:

Claim 1: "...even by the University of Mississippi's own admission, the average THC in domestically grown marijuana -- which comprises the bulk of the US market -- is less than five percent, a figure that's remained unchanged for nearly a decade." (via the HuffingtonPost)

Not exactly. The "domestic" samples analyzed in the University of Mississippi's report do not represent what's found in the U.S. market. "Domestic" samples refer to marijuana plants that were found in the process of being grown and were then eradicated by law enforcement in the U.S. The potency of these "domestic" specimens is far lower because those specimens are most often taken from immature plants that never reached full cultivation (maturity) for distribution and consumption in the illegal market.

The "non-domestic" specimens in the report are from actual DEA street or border seizures, which are a different set of specimens from the "domestic" eradications. These samples more accurately represent the quality of marijuana that's smoked in the U.S. (The "non-domestic" label has been misinterpreted because the origin of the seized marijuana is not known.)

It's just a jaw-dropping lecture to receive from the Drug Czar, who previously claimed that marijuana potency had increased "as much as 30 times" precisely by using weak domestic samples as his baseline. Well thanks for clarifying that, finally. Maybe ONDCP should send a press release to 2002 to warn everyone how full of crap they are.

Moreover, if I understand this correctly, the Drug Czar is saying that all cultivated marijuana was labeled as "non-domestic" for the purposes of the latest report. It's true that police can't determine where the finished product originated, but calling it all "non-domestic" ignores the reality that most U.S. marijuana is grown here by Americans and not some terrorist overseas. The study thus implies wrongly that all domestic marijuana was seized before cultivation and that our entire market is dominated by imported foreign pot. And remember, they brought all this up in order to assure us that we don’t know what we're talking about.

The Drug Czar's second point is similarly problematic:

Claim 2: "If and when consumers encounter unusually strong varieties of marijuana, they adjust their use accordingly and smoke less."

The research cited in this argument undermines the author's own claim. The almost 20-year old study found that the effects of the marijuana were greater for the high THC doses of marijuana. Even though the 12 experienced users in the study were titrating, they ended up more intoxicated, and that was with marijuana that only had 1.3 percent versus 2.7 percent THC.

It's just not true. As "Understanding Marijuana" author Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D. explains via email:

…the Pushing Back website says "Even though the 12 experienced users in the study were titrating, they ended up more intoxicated," while the abstract of the article they are mentioning says "Active marijuana also increased subjective reports of drug effect over placebo, but not dose dependently" That is, the folks smoking real pot got higher than folks smoking placebo, but the folks with the stronger dose didn't get higher than the folks with the weaker dose.

As always, it is just impossible to overstate the factual vacuum from which the Drug Czar's claims emerge before being tossed into the public debate like a turd into a hot sauna. These reflexive, involuntary fabrications are all the more galling when one considers that marijuana potency actually has increased and could theoretically be demonstrated without lying at all.

We'd just as soon let them have their day if these recent reports didn’t contradict numerous hysterical prior claims by these very same people, and if they didn’t give rise to all sorts of nonsense about the fictitious risks of marijuana with more THC in it. Anyone struggling with that concept need look no further than the fact that FDA has approved a 100% THC pill called Marinol and the Drug Czar doesn't even pretend to worry about that.

Increasing potency is not an argument against reforming marijuana laws; it's a symptom of marijuana prohibition as well as a towering exhibit of its failure.

Note: For more on this, visit Marijuana Evolves Faster Than Human Beings, which I'm proud to say generated quite a bit of traffic to this site.

It's a popular tactic in an emergency, but it can easily backfire:

His mouth packed with marijuana, a teenager asked a deputy if he could spit the cannabis out before he was arrested on multiple drug charges, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office.

Andrew Alexander Alvarez, 17, of Merioneth Drive, Fort Walton Beach, is charged with possession of Percocet, tampering with evidence, possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.

A deputy stopped a vehicle in front of the Coast Guard station and noticed the driver and Alvarez seemed to be hiding something, he wrote in the arrest report.

Alvarez would only mumble after he got out for questioning. Then he "requested that I allow him to spit the cannabis out onto the shoulder," the deputy wrote. [nwfdailynews.com]

I've never tried eating a bag of pot, but I suspect it's considerably more chewy than panicked potheads anticipate. Good stuff is like gum, and the schwag is full of gross seeds and stems. You can't win. A gram or less might go down easily enough, but you're left with skunk breath and green teeth.

The advantage of no longer having actual pot may be tipped on its head when a pissed off cop charges you with tampering and DUI. At the very least, don't try to eat your pot when you absolutely have no chance of eating it all. Come on, have some respect for yourself and other people who enjoy marijuana and don’t want to be associated with this silliness.

That said, I cannot blame anyone who lives in fear of our cruel laws and endeavors desperately to protect themselves from the pernicious, haunting consequences of even the pettiest drug arrest. I understand. If our drug laws cause people to freak out and try to eat all their drugs when they get pulled over, then there's something wrong with our drug laws.

But as long as you're living amidst this madness, you're better off knowing your rights than making a meal of your marijuana.