Latest

I'm sure the readers of this blog could all be counted on to do the right thing:

Satellite Beach police are asking beachgoers to report any suspicious packages found along the shore following the weekend discovery of a brick of marijuana near Hightower Beach Park.

"Just report it, leave it alone and call the police," said Cmdr. Jeff Pearson of the Satellite Beach Police Department. [FloridaToday]

Yeah right. I'm sure they get calls all the time from concerned surfer dudes who found huge bags of weed and don’t know what to do. Apparently, the ocean is filled with random drugs:

Police say illegal drugs washing up on the beach happens occasionally as smugglers dump their illicit cargo into the Atlantic Ocean to escape detection from authorities.

"It's pretty common. We live on the beach in Florida and it happens," Pearson said.

And you can bet that authorities never even hear about a lot of it, because quick-thinking citizens take responsibility for disposing of the drugs on their own. Heroes.

Really though, this is just another one of those mind-numbingly absurd phenomena that would never occur if our drug policy didn’t completely suck. It requires an epic and sustained campaign of monumental idiocy to create circumstances under which events like this take place routinely. If a smelly dead fish floats ashore, that's one thing, but when large stashes of illegal drugs are just bobbing around in the ocean, it's perfectly symbolic of the enormous mess the drug war has left in its wake.

Many of our readers are familiar with the widely-viewed film Busted: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, produced by the organization Flex Your Rights. The next Flex movie, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police, is set to come out before the end of the year. Filming took place in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago, and it is now in editing. Click here to check out photos; it really is looking pretty nice. narrated by the famous attorney William "Billy" H. Murphy, Jr.

The government's war against pain doctors hit a new low last spring, when federal prosecutor Tanya Treadway, busy prosecuting Kansans Steve and Linda Schneider, subpoenaed pain control advocate Siobhan Reynolds for information on the Pain Relief Network's (PRN) public advocacy in support of the Schneiders. Despite ACLU efforts to quash the subpoena as an attempt to shut down free speech, judge US District Judge Julie Robinson allowed it. Friday, according an update from Jacob Sullum on Reason, Robinson imposed a $200/day civil contempt fine on both Reynolds and PRN, to begin in 10 days if she does not comply with the subpoena. An appeal is planned -- stay tuned. Earlier in the week, Boston-based civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate criticized Treadway in a column in Forbes magazine. We reprint a few paragraphs, also via Sullum:

When Reynolds wrote op-eds in local newspapers and granted interviews to other media outlets, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway attempted to impose a gag order on her public advocacy. The district judge correctly denied this extraordinary request. Undeterred, Treadway filed on March 27 a subpoena demanding a broad range of documents and records, obviously hoping to deter the peripatetic pain relief advocate, or even target her for a criminal trial of her own. Just what was Reynolds' suspected criminal activity? "Obstruction of justice" is the subpoena's listed offense being investigated, but some of the requested records could, in no possible way, prove such a crime. The prosecutor has demanded copies of an ominous-sounding "movie," which, in reality, is a PRN-produced documentary showing the plight of pain physicians. Also requested were records relating to a billboard Reynolds paid to have erected over a busy Wichita highway. It read: "Dr. Schneider never killed anyone." Suddenly, a rather ordinary exercise in free speech and political activism became evidence of an obstruction of justice.

I'm still flabbergasted by a friend saying that he was "morally opposed to marijuana use".

As a child, my folks took me to see the magnificent trees in Sequoia National Park and I'll never forget it as long as I live. It's a precious ecosystem, housing the largest trees in the world as well as countless other unique plant-life not found anywhere else on earth. Not surprisingly, it's also a great place to grow marijuana and that could soon become its downfall:

In Sequoia National Park, $1 million has been spent since 2006 on marijuana plantation cleanup alone, and the damage done to Crystal Cave will be felt for years to come, said the park spokeswoman, Adrienne Freeman.

"We are continually discovering new species in that cave, and we are letting Mexican cartels threaten to wipe that out," she said. [CNN]

She's damn right we're letting them do it. We've surrendered the fate of irreplaceable national treasures to these drug traffickers, simply because we won't allow responsible Americans to produce their own marijuana on private property. The consequences of our failure are catastrophic, yet the solution is painfully simple.

It's really amazing to watch the police, the forest service, and the press just cringing and whining about this awful problem, without uttering a word about how we're going to save our forests from imminent destruction. They seriously don’t have a clue. You can read any of the dozens of recently published stories on this topic without seeing anyone even attempt to figure it out. Their only idea is to keep pulling up pot plants, as the growers plant ever more to ensure that some survive.

Fortunately, there exists one perfect solution to this problem. And it offers far more than the salvation of our precious wilderness. When we fix our marijuana laws, I guarantee you, we will solve problems we didn’t even know we had.

Via Radley Balko, here's another grave tragedy that we can all thank the drug war for making possible. The victim clearly freaked out when police confronted him, but I'm not at all convinced that he understood who they were. They were in plain clothes in an unmarked vehicle jumping out on a guy who'd just drawn money from an ATM. Why would he knowingly try to evade police when he didn’t have anything illegal on him?

It's one more dreadful tragedy that just didn't have to happen. Police pulling guns on harmless people should be a rare event, but it's not. And when it happens, it's almost always the result of some crazy drug investigation with more questions than answers.

When experts like Mark Kleiman say that legalization doesn’t add up, are they factoring events like this into the equation?

Another problem with having laws against certain types of plants is that police don't know anything about plants. The subtleties of botany are inevitably lost on them and the results are amusing, yet tragic:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Dutch police who mowed down what they thought were illicit marijuana plants were red-faced today when it emerged they’d ruined a research group’s giant, officially sanctioned field of harmless hemp.

Police proudly announced Wednesday that they’d found more than 47,000 cannabis plants, with an estimated street value of nearly €4.5 million ($6.45 million) concealed in a corn field in the Flevoland province east of Amsterdam.

They mowed down half the plants only to be informed they were the property of Wageningen University and Research Center, a respected agricultural school. [Boston Herald]

That sucks. Sadly, I suspect that the potential for fiascos like this goes a long way towards explaining why law enforcement continues to incoherently oppose hemp cultivation here in the U.S. Police just don't want to be bothered with distinguishing one from the other. If it looks like weed, they'd rather break out a machete than a field manual. It's understandable if you don’t care about, like, freedom and stuff.

Instead of banning hemp, therefore, I propose we just legalize all forms of cannabis and make things a lot easier for everyone.

by Bernd Debusmann Jr. Mexican drug trafficking organizations make billions each year trafficking illegal drugs into the United States, profiting enormously from the prohibitionist drug policies of the US government. Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and called the armed forces into the fight against the so-called cartels, prohibition-related violence has killed over 12,000 people, with a death toll of over 4,000 so far in 2009. The increasing militarization of the drug war and the arrest of several high- profile drug traffickers have failed to stem the flow of drugs -- or the violence -- whatsoever. The Merida initiative, which provides $1.4 billion over three years for the US to assist the Mexican government with training, equipment and intelligence, has so far failed to make a difference. Here are a few of the latest developments in Mexico's drug war: Thursday, August 28 -According to a study released by Mexican non-profit group Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, Ciudad Juarez has become the most violent city on earth. With 130 murders per 100,000 people in 2008, Ciudad Juarez was considerably more violent than other cities with a high murder rate, such as Caracas, Venezuela, Medellin, Colombia, and New Orleans. The murder rate has gone up in 2009, with an average of 250 people being killed in Ciudad Juarez each month. Friday, August 29 -Five police officers and possibly one gunman were killed during a running gun battle in the state of Jalisco. The encounter began when a convoy of seven vehicles carrying at least 30 gunmen approached state policemen on a local highway. Four policemen were killed in the initial battle and the fifth was killed as police chased the assailants. -The aide of a Mexican federal agent who had been investigating the death of a crime reporter was found dead in Ciudad Juarez. Pablo Pasillas, 33, was secretary to the federal agent appointed to investigate the November killing of Armando Gutierrez, a crime reporter for El Diario. The first agent assigned to the case was shot dead outside his home in Ciudad Juarez. Sunday, August 30 - The defense lawyer for a convicted drug trafficker was found stabbed to death in his home in Toluca. America Delgado, 80, was the defense attorney for Tijuana cartel boss Benjamin Arellano Felix, who is now serving a 22-year sentence in prison. Delgado was found with his throat slit and with several stab wounds. The killing comes less than the month after another attorney for high profile drug traffickers was killed. Lawyer Silvia Raquenel Villanueva was gunned down in Monterrey on August 9th. Monday, August 31 -Four men have been arrested on suspicion of having committed 211 drug-related murders. Authorities have said that the four hitmen are tied to the enforcement arm of the Juarez cartel. Three of the men were presented to the media on Saturday in Mexico City. Omar Castro Rivera, 28, is accused of 93 homicides. Edgar Flores Martinez, 30, is accused of 87 homicides, and Cristian Enrique Franco Franco is accused of 22. A fourth suspect, Hector Armando Alcibar Wong, aka “The Korean”, 21, was already in custody and is accused of 15 homicides. The men told authorities that most of their murder victims were involved in drug-dealing, extortion, and other crimes in Ciudad Juarez. Authorities also said that the three men confessed to the killing of five motorcyclists on January 25th in Ciudad Juarez. The five dead were reportedly killed because they were members of the “AA” or Assassin Artists, a rival to the Juarez cartel. The group also confessed to the June 11 killing of five men in a motel. -Eight people were killed in the seaside town of Navolato, in the state of Sinaloa. The killings occurred when at least four heavily armed gunmen in a pickup truck began to fire into a crowd of partygoers. The dead included two boys, aged 15 and 16, and two females, aged 18 and 25. The shootings may be part of a recent wave of apparent vigilante attacks by armed squads suspected of working for drug cartels or the police. Two of the victims of the attack had criminal records for car theft. More than 30 carjackers and other low-level criminals have been murdered in Sinaloa in the last few months, according to local journalists. Tuesday, September 1 -The United States has released $214 million of the $1.4 billion in anti-drug aid promised to Mexico in 2007. The money is intended to fund equipment and training of Mexican security forces. Some detection gear has already been sent to Mexico during the summer, and a delivery of five Bell helicopters is due to be delivered to the Mexican army in the fall. Separately, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border announced an agreement to improve cross-border communications and the creation of cross-border voice and data transmission networks for law enforcement. -In Ciudad Juarez a body was found hanging from a fence in a nightclub parking lot. Eight people were murdered in the same location several weeks ago. Wedneday, September 2 -17 people were killed when a dozen gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation clinic in Ciudad Juarez. The 17 patients killed were lined up before being shot. Cartel gunmen have targeted drug rehab clinics several time in the past, accusing them of protecting rival gang members. In a separate incident, gunmen killed the deputy police chief of Michoacan. Jose Manuel Revueltas, 38, and two bodyguards, were killed after their vehicle was attacked by heavily armed gunmen just blocks away from his office in Morelia. Total reported body count for the week: 149 Total reported body count for the year: 4,736 Read last issue's Mexico drug war report here.