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How Not to Legalize Marijuana

Via reason, I’d like to introduce you to Antoine Blalock, who may be the worst activist in the history of drug policy reform:Blalock drove to the Seventh District Police Station on Alabama Avenue S.E. in Washington, D.C., in May 2007. He pulled a handgun from the trunk and started firing, shooting in the air outside the station. Five shots. He shouted, according to court records, "The police should leave us alone and let us sell our weed!"Blalock complied with demands to drop his gun -- and he did not stop there. He dropped his pants, standing naked before officers wrapped him up in a towel. [Law.com]Dude, you’re not helping. Although I suppose if Antoine Blalock starts a blog, I might check it out.

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The truth about "addiction"

I have limited time, but will expound on this later, and clean it up.

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Obama Appoints Temporary Drug Czar

Amidst the inauguration fanfare, we failed to notice that Obama immediately appointed ONDCP’s general counsel Ed Jurith to serve as acting director, i.e. drug czar. You can read Jurith’s bio here and my thoughts on him here.This is interesting because it’s a definite improvement over Bush’s last minute appointment of Patrick Ward, another ONDCP insider, to run the office upon John Walters’s departure. Jurith is hardly a friend of reform on any issue I’m aware of, but his background is in law, while Ward has been directly and heavily involved in interdiction programs.With Jurith being the preferable choice, I’m wondering if Obama actually did this for the right reasons as he looks for a permanent candidate to fill the position. That’s impossible to say, but it’s a small step in the right direction. Let’s hope for a bigger one soon.

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Mexican Drug Cartels Dissolve Corpses in Vats of Acid

Lately, the drug war is sounding less and less like an actual government policy and more like a distopian future from a science fiction movie:As the nation's drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of "The Stewmaker" have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a "disposal expert" working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of caustic liquid. [Washington Post]They call him "The Stewmaker" and his henchmen attacked the police station with machine guns after he was captured. Does any of this sound like the story of a drug policy that works? How much more of this unfathomable gory mayhem do we feel like putting up with? We’ve crossed the line into some seriously dark territory here and it’s way past time something is done about it, something completely different from everything we’ve tried before.

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Letter to Barack Obama

This is the letter I've just mailed to our new president. As I've said before, I'm just one little voice, and each person reading this is just one little voice.

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The World's Smallest Marijuana Joint

Police don’t just get the facts wrong about the dangers of marijuana and the impact of commonsense reforms like decriminalization. Frequently, they’re wrong about marijuana itself, making wild claims about the street value of the latest bust or exaggerating plant yields to make small growers sound like major traffickers. If you think you’ve heard it all, here’s a cop from Massachusetts who says an ounce equals 200-300 joints:According to Lt. Danny Maguire of the Weston Police Department, "The biggest challenge we have is to convince people that, just because the law has changed, marijuana has not become 'legal,' and that the problem of drug addiction is still just as severe as always. There is also the danger that people will think it’s actually OK, under the new law, to smoke a joint or two and get behind the wheel of a car."…One ounce of marijuana is the equivalent of 200 to 300 joints, according to Maguire.This is just shockingly crazy and wrong. Researchers have estimated the average size of a joint between 0.4 and 0.9 grams, which would equal 30-70 joints per ounce. If you roll more than 70 joints from an ounce, they’ll be empty toothpick-sized joints with more paper than pot. They won’t even work and no matter who you are, I’m sure you know someone who can assure that this is true.Claiming that you can roll up to 300 joints from an ounce is a total lie. It’s hilarious to anyone who’s ever smoked or even seen a joint. It’s like claiming a bag of skittles will serve 300 people, when there’s actually only 70 Skittles in the bag and most people don’t find an individual Skittle very satisfying anyhow.So what the hell is this guy talking about? He’s angry that voters in Massachusetts decriminalized possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, and he’s trying to pretend that’s a huge amount of pot. It isn’t. His lie, on the other hand, is enormous.

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Norm Stamper is Awesome

Here's another old LEAP video that's been making the rounds this week:

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Matt Fogg is Awesome

Back in April, the Metropolitan Police Dept. here in D.C. announced plans to go door-to-door asking to search homes in high-crime neighborhoods. Flex Your Rights joined with several local groups to oppose the measure and we shot this great video of Matt Fogg from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition speaking at a community meeting.I post it now because it randomly popped up at The Agitator and DrugWarRant last week and I realized I’d never shared this here. Matt Fogg is wildly entertaining and gets me riled up every time I run into him.MPD cancelled the home-search program due to public opposition, proving that events like this can really make a difference.

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Ryan Frederick Trial

Radley Balko has been covering the trial of Ryan Frederick, the Virginia man who was charged with murder for killing a police officer who he mistook for a burglar during a questionable drug raid. I’ve been doing my best to report new developments, but it’s an insanely complicated situation and I just don’t have time to cover it adequately. I recommend Radley’s excellent blog The Agitator to those of you who are following the case closely.

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Save 440,000 lives each year – with Cannabis. It's high time.

How? We can do it through the use of some innovative social technology: Mandate a compulsory substitution of cannabis for tobacco in all manufactured tobacco products.

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Video: Drug Tourism in the Netherlands -- Is It Really Only the Problem of the Dutch?

The latest video from our friends at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union

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Video: SSDP and LEAP Talk Drug Legalization at El Paso City Council

Nubia Legarda is a Students for Sensible Drug Policy activist from El Paso. Legarda hasn't visited her family in neighboring Ciudad Juárez for months because of the drug trade violence ravaging many of Mexico's cities -- her reason for joining SSDP last year. Texan Terry Nelson is a 30-year law enforcement veteran who worked for the US Border Patrol, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. He is now a leading spokesperson for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

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CNBC’s Marijuana, Inc: Propaganda, Pot Porn, or Both?

They might as well have displayed a link to ONDCP.gov across the screen for an hour. CNBC's Marijuana, Inc. couldn’t have been more sensationalist if John Walters wrote the screenplay and Bill O’Reilly did the interviews. I’m serious, it was that bad. Of course, it’s impossible to know how the casual observer may interpret a propaganda trainwreck such as this, but for me it crossed the threshold of absurdity to the point of almost becoming useful. If one factual concept emerged unscathed from this, it is that there is simply nothing you can do to stop the marijuana economy. Marijuana, Inc. painted California as a veritable narco-state, thrown into anarchy by liberal values and unscrupulous profiteers. If there’s a lesson in there other than the fact that our marijuana laws are a disaster, I must have missed it.The great irony of this is that, whether they like it or not, CNBC is selling their product to the same exact market. Who do they think watches this stuff? Just turn off the sound and you’ve got sixty minutes of first-rate pot porno to accompany the musical selection of your choice. They used blatant pot porn to promote it, so they know exactly what they’re doing. Something is seriously out of balance when CNBC puts out an obnoxious propaganda program, while simultaneously hosting an online poll that favors decriminalization at 97%. They even felt compelled to put this disclaimer on their comment section:**As of this posting, CNBC has only received comments favoring decriminalization of marijuana.Marijuana sells in the media for the same exact reason it sells in the street. The only difference is the media still feels the need to cut their marijuana merchandise with some nasty shit. If the mainstream media wants to sell us pot, that’s fine. But give it to us straight.

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DEA’s Medical Marijuana Raids Continue Under Obama Administration

Uh-oh. Looks like Obama has yet to deliver on his promise to end the medical marijuana raids:Oakland, CA -- The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided a medical marijuana dispensary today in South Lake Tahoe, California, in the first days of the new Obama Administration. Even though President Barack Obama had made repeated promises during his election campaign to end federal raids in medical marijuana states, many high-ranking Bush Administration officials have yet to leave office. For example, still at the helm of the DEA is acting Administrator Michele Leonhart, who has been responsible for numerous federal raids in California, following in the footsteps of her predecessor Karen Tandy. Neither Eric Holder, President Obama's pick for U.S. Attorney General, nor a new DEA Administrator, have taken office yet. [Americans for Safe Access]It’s too early to accuse Obama of turning his back on the patients he pledged to defend, but it’s a clear sign that the new president will have to take concrete steps towards ending the DEA’s controversial crusade in California. It won’t stop just because he said it would. He has to actually do something to stop this. We’ll soon have new leadership at the Dept. of Justice and it will become perfectly clear to everyone what Obama’s priorities really are. Until then, we’re stuck with George Bush’s drug war under Barack Obama’s watch. The new administration has done its best to avoid publicly discussing marijuana policy, so let’s hope they understand that ending these raids promptly is the best way to avoid ugly headlines.

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Drug Smuggling Robots are the Future

I told you we’d be seeing more of this kind of thing:A toy helicopter is believed to have been used in an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison.Guards at Elmley Prison in Sheerness, Kent, spotted the remote control miniature aircraft flying over the walls of the jail and heading for the accommodation blocks one night after it was picked up by CCTV cameras.It had a small load beneath the fuselage, thought to contain drugs.The toy or its cargo was not found. [Daily Mail]Face it, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop drug smuggling robots. They’re just gonna get cheaper and more sophisticated. You can’t chase them because they’re faster than you. You can’t shoot them down because you’ll miss and your bullets will land in a school yard miles away. And you can’t fingerprint them because they’ll kick your ass.Pretty much the only way to stop drug smuggling robots from wreaking major havoc is to legalize drugs.

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Marijuana, Inc. Tonight on CNBC

This looks interesting. Tonight at 9 ET on CNBC.Update: I hated it. My comments here.

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Drug Policy at WhiteHouse.gov

President Obama’s new WhiteHouse.gov site has several drug policy related items worth noting:* End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.* Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.* Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.* Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior....The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. Seeing racial profiling, sentencing reform and needle exchange on the White House website ain’t bad at all. If these are the issues the new administration is prepared to address immediately, that’s a respectable forward step for criminal justice reform. Heck, its decent enough that I wonder why his transition team didn’t mash this together into a response to that tricky drug war question they so blatantly dodged over at Change.gov. Regardless, it’s interesting to consider these policy statements in light of the unresolved drug czar selection process. Any candidate who embraces this stuff would be a major improvement to be sure.Unfortunately, the site isn’t completely devoid of tough-guy drug war talk:Obama and Biden will demand the Afghan government do more, including cracking down on corruption and the illicit opium trade.Thus, despite the positive steps outlined above, Obama still suffers from the notion that drug prohibition can be a stabilizing force in international politics. This will prove to be our greatest obstacle under the new administration, as we’ve heard nothing encouraging from Obama with regards to international drug policy and things are getting damn ugly out there.

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Wsted Resources to Protect the Present Status

Our money coud be better spent supporting companies that provide equipment and training to help upgrade our security and infrastructure.

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Barack Obama is the President

We’ve talked a lot here about Obama’s reluctance to openly discuss drug policy. We’ve been disappointed if not surprised that our domination of his Change.gov website failed to provoke an intelligent response. As activists, that’s just what we do and we won’t stop anytime soon. But we’d be foolish to let our frustration obscure the magnitude of what just happened. The American people just put a person of color in the White House. How many of you thought you’d see this in your lifetime? I didn’t. It’s so incredible to me, I still struggle to process it as the reality of all this periodically penetrates my entrenched political cynicism and I summon for a moment a hope-like sensation that must be what everyone’s been talking about.It’s not about Obama or his policies, it’s about the American people. It shows that we’re capable of transcending centuries of prejudice and idiocy, provided that circumstances are properly aligned. It’s purely symbolic, of course, but powerfully so. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I thought we’d end the drug war long before electing an African-American president. I’m amazed to learn that legalizing drugs is actually the more difficult undertaking. But so be it. To anyone who says overcoming drug prohibition is just an impossible fantasy, I say "Barack Obama is the president."

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POLICE BRUTALITY ,. THESE GUYS ARE ON DRUGS . READ ON

Witness says mentally unstable teen victim of police brutality, racial slurs by By PAMELA SCOTT JOHNSON Staff Calvin Wilkerson

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