Finally making good on his proposal nearly a year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reclassification of marijuana as a class B drug is so obtuse and such poor public policy that the police are refusing their newly-given power:

Nearly six out of 10 cases of cannabis possession used to be dealt with by arrest and formal caution before it was downgraded. But police chiefs are not expected to return to such a practice, blamed for wasting thousands of officers' hours that could be spent on other crime-fighting duties.

The Association of Chief Police Officers told the Guardian: "The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting."

When police go so far as to reject an increase in their power, especially when it comes to drugs, it should be clear that your policies are laughable. Adding to his obtuseness, PM Brown rejected the recommendation of his own panel of 23 highly-qualified drug policy experts when they ruled harsher reclassification was the wrong thing to do. It’s doubtful, but hopefully the combination of objections by UK law enforcement and drug policy experts will finally make him realize, and admit, that the policy is flawed.

Making this reclassification even more ridiculous, the government is having major problems keeping drugs out of the hands of prisoners:

DRUGS worth more than £100million are being traded in prisons every year, it was revealed yesterday.

The claim was made by a former drugs treatment chief who said half of all prisoners are addicts.

As much as 44lb (20kg) of narcotics, mainly heroin, were smuggled into jails every week said the former official, Hussain Djemil.

It seems there should be more pressing concerns for British drug policy officials. If they can’t keep hard drugs out of the prisons (which come complete with strip and body cavity searches, drug dogs, prison guards, constant surveillance, etc.), what’s the point of increasing sentences for a soft drug like marijuana? Of the millions of cannabis users, some of those who will be caught will go to jail for even longer where they will be exposed to a 100 million dollar industry that will provide them cheaper drugs! Once again, how and why is reclassification going to be an effective deterrent?

Police refusing to adhere to the reclassification policy is a wonderful sign. It sets a good precedent of dissonance toward misinformed or abusive authority that is rarely seen directed toward elected officials over drug policy matters. If more police chiefs would follow this example, drug prohibition would be in greater jeopardy. Hopefully this will lead to more reasonable people standing up in civil disobedience against drug policies that they know to be immoral and ineffective.

Yet another SWAT team raid has gone horribly bad. A group of police officers stormed a house looking for suspected drug dealers. But this otherwise normal situation is somewhat out of the ordinary because there was actually a relatively wealthy, affluent person who was unwittingly targeted:

The [police officers] were together Wednesday night, battering down the door of a suspected drug house, when two men on the other side nearly ended their lives, police said.

Gillis and Garrison remained in Grant Medical Center last night, recovering from serious gunshot wounds, as investigators worked to build the case against the two men accused of shooting them during a raid gone awry on the Near East Side.

One of the accused is Derrick Foster, a 38-year-old former defensive end for Ohio State University who police said has no criminal record.

The article also states that a work review called Foster "an asset to the Near East Side" of the neighborhood where he was employed as a Columbus code-enforcement supervisor. He was a pillar of society. When he heard the police bust in the door of his friends house, he mistook them for a team of robbers and fired his legally-owned weapon. He was not under any investigation, others in the house were. Here is the official police story on what took place:

Officers with the narcotics bureau's Investigative and Tactical Unit had received a warrant to search the house at 1781 E. Rich St., just north of Main Street. They approached about 9:45 p.m.

IN/TAC officers are trained for such raids and make eight to 12 a week across the city, police said. They follow a specific procedure that includes announcing their presence immediately.

"The whole time they're pounding on the door, they're yelling, 'Police!'," division spokeswoman Amanda Ford said.

But according to a witness, the only alert given was for the windows to be broken. The police spokeswoman, who wasn't there, apparently knows something that the witness doesn't. In addition, even if the police did yell, I can think of several completely plausible explanations why people in a home may not hear such an announcement – they’re listening to loud music, they’re in the basement working with loud machinery, they’re asleep and using earplugs, etc. Also, the article stated "police didn't know who might be in the house when they raided it." I question the intelligence and responsibility of the decision to raid a house when they had no idea who might be there. In this case, an innocent man (or men) was exposed to a traumatic experience that ended in a horrible way. What if his daughter had been there too?

What this shows is that anybody could be the target of one of these raids. This is not just a problem for the underprivileged. Foster is a college-educated middle-class father. He owned a legal firearm, a right granted in part for the purposes of self-protection. Attempting to protect himself, he now faces two counts of felonious assault and attempted murder.

It is extremely fortunate that this didn’t turn out even worse. Both of the policemen that were wounded are thankfully expected to recover. But the sad truth is that Foster’s five-year-old daughter is probably going to have to grow up with her father in prison because of this futile drug prohibition-related insanity. Yet another American family destroyed by the increasingly indiscriminate drug war.

Do you think drug prices are astronomical? Want to find a place where drugs are cheap and plentiful? If you are British, all you have to do is get convicted of a crime and sent to jail where drugs are reportedly cheaper than they are for non-prisoners:

Prisoners are ignoring chances to escape because they would rather stay in their cushy jails where drugs are cheaper than on the outside, a prison chief officers has said.

Lags at Britain's 'toughest' prisons are treated to breakfast in bed, have Sky TV in every cell and are given cash bonuses for good behavior.

At one prison in Yorkshire, drug dealers and hookers regularly break IN to ply their trade by leaning ladders up against prison walls.

But none of the criminals take the opportunity to leave because they have got it so easy, according to assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association Glyn Travis.

Earlier in the month, Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed to increase the length of prison sentences for marijuana smokers by three years. I criticized this move at the time, but maybe I misunderstood his intentions. Perhaps he just wants to give pot smokers access to the cheap stuff.

But seriously, what’s the point of increasing the maximum sentence for marijuana smokers when the jails are overrun with drugs? It is absolutely baffling that the Prime Minister of a country can be concerned with non-violent marijuana smokers when the prison system is a joke. It is literally a joke. People are actually breaking into prison. That is something you would expect to see in a cartoon not actually happening in a developed country.

This situation just further illustrates the failures of prohibition and the ridiculousness of Brown’s marijuana smoker crackdown. The British can’t keep the drugs out of their jails where they have direct surveillance over prisoners. And they somehow expect to win the war on drugs and prevent the circulation of them throughout the regular population? Give me a break.

Editor's Note: Shane G. Trejo is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. His bio is in our "staff" section.

It turns out that prohibition has found an effective way to make marijuana truly toxic. As seen in Germany where marijuana has been tainted with lead in order to increase its weight and increase profits an estimated $682 per pound:

One bag bought from a dealer even contained lead particles big enough to see, which meant the lead must have been added deliberately, rather than being absorbed into the plant from contaminated soil. … The authorities do not know where the tainted marijuana came from or why the lead was added, but the German police suspect that it was done to make money. The samples tested contained 10 percent lead by weight, which translates into an increased profit of about $682 per pound of marijuana.

Maybe Fox News was onto something when they reported about the killer weed. Of course, legalization and regulation would solve any tainted supply problems of not just marijuana but any drug. If policy makers had any concept of history, they would realize this. Look at what happened during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s:

Highly toxic wood alcohols found their way into much of the available bootleg liquor. When denatured industrial alcohol was not sufficiently diluted, or was consumed in large quantities, the result was paralysis, blindness and death. In 1927, almost twelve thousand deaths were attributed to alcohol poisonings, many of these among the urban poor who could not afford imported liquors. In 1930, U.S. public health officials estimated that fifteen thousand persons were afflicted with "jake foot," a debilitating paralysis of the hands and feet brought on by drinking denatured alcohol flavored with ginger root.

When was the last time you saw an American alcohol consumer come down with a case of jake foot? That’s right, never. Because when a person goes to the store to buy liquor or beer, they know exactly what they are getting. I can’t for the life of me remember any deception-related scandals or recalls related to alcohol suppliers. Elected officials choose to ignore the lessons that history has taught us. And as a result, over 100 people have been poisoned in Germany after having to buy marijuana from an unregulated, criminal market. Society suffers while the perpetrators can continue to sell the lead-laced pot with no accountability or consequences.

Editor's Note: Shane G. Trejo is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. His bio is in our "staff" section.

As touched upon in Friday’s edition of the Drug War Chronicle, United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to reclassify marijuana as a Class B drug. This would restore its pre-2004 classification and change the penalties of marijuana possession from an already draconian two year maximum sentence to five years:

Gordon Brown said: "I believe that if we're sending out a signal, particularly to teenagers – and particular those at the most vulnerable age, young teenagers – that in any way we find cannabis acceptable, given all we know about the way that cannabis is being sold in this country, that that is not the right thing to do. "There's a stronger case now for sending out a signal that cannabis is not only illegal, it's unacceptable."

What is with all these politicians wanting to send a message to youth that certain activities are bad? It shouldn’t be the government’s job to act like the mommy and daddy of its citizens. And as always, the push for increased toughness has been sparked for no good reason and without any rationality:

The mental health charity Rethink said Mr. Brown should heed the committee's advice. The charity spokesman Paul Corry said: "Gordon Brown should put aside his personal views on cannabis and accept the fact that it does not make sense to reclassify. "Use of the drug has gone down since it was downgraded in 2004 and research by Rethink shows that only 3% of users would consider stopping on the grounds of illegality." … Steve Rolles, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, told the Today programme reclassification was not the most effective way to alert people to the dangers associated with cannabis. He said: "Class C is still illegal. No one is saying it's harmless. I don't think increasing the prison sentence from two years to five years for possession is necessarily the way to do it. I think if we want to send out messages to young people, rather than mass criminalisation of millions of young people, I think the way to do it would be in effective, targeted public health education."

This message-sending nonsense is not only disgusting, it is ineffective. It should be common sense to know that while young people mature, some of them tend to rebel against authority. Taking a hard-line stance on marijuana is only going to make it seem cool and increase its usage amongst young people. In Switzerland, medicalization and harm reduction strategies related to heroin not only reduced crime, reduced usage and allowed addicts to be able to live functional lives but also managed to make the drug less cool to youth. From Issue #439 of the Drug War Chronicle:

And the Swiss may have succeeded in making heroin boring, the researchers suggested. "As the Swiss population supported this drug policy, this medicalization of opiate dependence changed the image of heroin use as a rebellious act to an illness that needs therapy," Drs. Nordt and Stohler wrote. "Finally," they add, "heroin seems to have become a 'loser drug,' with its attractiveness fading for young people."

You’d think politicians in general would try to become informed on the issues that they are deciding. But they often don’t, and some of them actually pride themselves on being uninformed. Here is a very telling quote from Conservative Party leader David Cameron:

"The Conservative party has a very clear view that it should be class B. People have had enough of reviews and the prime minister should stop dithering and get on and make a decision."

I am continuously shocked by the attitudes of people like these. Wouldn’t you want to wait for reviews and studies to happen before making a decision? This is a decision that will potentially put otherwise law-abiding citizens who happen to smoke pot in jail for up to five years. Wouldn’t you want to be as informed as possible before making a decision that could destroy lives and waste precious law enforcement dollars?

A disturbing trend amongst some politicians is the belief in state-enforced morality. This misguided belief keeps them from thinking rationally. Out of the issues he could possibly be worried about, PM Brown is worried about pot smokers? His moral grandstanding has made him seemingly oblivious to the fact that the result of marijuana reclassification will be potentially three more years in prison for a completely nonviolent personal act.

State-enforced morality is based on the faulty premise that the law needs to protect a societal purity. That is why that in spite of it being obvious that the war on drugs is a failure, it still continues to rage on. The message must be sent at any cost.