Skip to main content

Did John Belushi die from cocaine?

Reason's Jacob Sullum posts an interesting discussion in the Hit and Run blog, reacting to a New York Times story last Sunday titled "Cocaine: Hidden in Plain Sight." The NYT article observed:
[F]or a generation that has not had its John Belushi to drive home the dangers of drug abuse, references and even use [of cocaine] are open, casual, even blatant.
Did Belushi actually die from cocaine, though? Sullum quotes addiction psychologist Stanton Peele on the topic:
John Belushi did not die from cocaine and heroin use, and our saying he did is a feeble way of trying to suppress the horrible conclusions his death suggests. This man did everything he could to guarantee he would not survive. It is at least as correct to say that he died of cigarettes, overeating, and alcohol as to blame his death on one or another—or more than one—illicit substance.
Bottom line, there is more than one way to destroy yourself -- it's not always the drugs, even if drugs are in the mix. By the way, former CASA #2 man Herb Kleber figures prominently in the NYT piece. This is a bit of minor history about Kleber from a 1996 article I put together for our original print newsletter, The Activist Guide:
In the June 2 edition of the Jellinek Quarterly, a book review of a Ph.D. dissertation on HIV among drug users in Amsterdam referred to comments made by Dr. Herbert Kleber, of the Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse at Columbia University, that the author felt were motivated by ideology and conflicted with objective scientific findings. In a speech titled "Harm Reduction or Harm Production," Kleber said that HIV rates among drug users in the Netherlands had increased, and attributed it harm reduction programs like low-threshold methadone programs, needle exchange projects that he claimed "extended the addiction." An audience member pointed that HIV among drug users in the Netherlands had gone down, not up, and cited articles published in some of the most prestigious international journals. Dr. Kleber admitted that he was not familiar with those articles.
Check back soon for a Chronicle review of the new book by continuing CASA #1 guy, Joe Califano.

Airport Narcs Fired For Peeing on Luggage

Ok, they were dogs, but it's still funny…

Two of Thailand's top canine agents in the country's war against drugs have been fired for "unbecoming conduct" that included urinating on luggage and rubbing up against female airport passengers.

Despite having two of the highest seizure rates on record, the sniffer dogs working at an airport near the notorious "Golden Triangle" opium-producing region were fired after passengers complained about their behaviour. [CBC News]

So in Thailand, police dogs pee on luggage and get fired. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., an utterly incompetent human narc can terrorize innocent people and get off with a one-day suspension.

It's particularly galling considering that dogs are expected to pee on stuff, whereas police officers certainly aren’t expected to terrorize the innocent. Or are they? The way today's public officials react to gratuitous police violence, you could easily expect more concern from a pet owner who finds a mess on the rug.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the punishment for police peeing on someone's belongings during a wrong address drug raid were remarkably lenient. And unfortunately, at this pace, I'm sure we'll have a chance to find out what it is before long.

Q: Which is worse, an incontinent dog or an incompetent cop?

A: The cop. He'll shoot your dog, at which point it will inevitably release its bowels anyway.

Stop the Drug War Against Addicts

We all need to understand that big business is behind the whole rampant spread of drugs inside the United States. Instead of exposing who the real evildoers are many American people blame drug addicts and many drug addicts become the victim of Amerika's War on Drugs.

Mexico is Bleeding

I can't avoid writing about Mexico again this week. Last week was one of the ugliest yet in President Felipe Calderon's newly energized war on drugs, with at least 46 people killed last week, including five civilians gunned down by soldiers at a roadblock in Sinaloa. So far this year, nearly a thousand have died as the cartels fight each other and the police and the army. It's all part of President Calderon's effort to break the power of the cartels, and it's all so absolutely predictable, with outcomes that are easily foreseeable. The Mexican army and police will undoubtedly effect some big-time captures or killings, the cartels will splinter into micro-cartels, and then begin the process of reformulating themselves into new cartels, killing off rivals and buying off (or killing off) police and soldiers. That's been the case every time a Mexican president has tried to stand tall against the power of the drug traffickers. In fact, the present round of violence is the legacy of former President Fox's 2004 war on drugs, and so far, there is every indication it will end the same way. I'll be talking to as many Mexican observers as I can this week, from academics to human rights watchers, along with Mexico experts here in the US. And Mexico continues to pay the price for America's war on the drugs it loves.

Police deliberately crash truck into car, and then steal car -- in order to search it.

Drug WarRant discusses this incident that even I almost find unbelievable... Okay, they use the word "tap," and not unfairly. But my use of the word "crash" has as much or more connection to reality than the word "conspiracy" has had in many drug cases that have put minor drug offenders in prison for decades. And even bumper taps have a small but non-zero chance of causing medical complications including death. I think all the police officers involved in this should be permanently banned from working in law enforcement or even private security. They have absolutely no reasonable concept of what constitutes responsible behavior with respect to the lives of other people. Or they had an incredibly poor judgment lapse, same difference.

Crack Cocaine Sentencing Headed to Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the U.S. v. Kimbrough case, in which an eastern-Virginia US District Court judge, Raymond Jackson, sentenced a crack cocaine offender -- Derrick Kimbrough -- to a below-guidelines sentence, only to be overruled following an appeal by the government to the 4th Circuit. "Guidelines" here refers to the federal sentencing guidelines (similar to, but not to be confused with the mandatory minimums), in which certain very harsh sentences require only 1/100th the amount of crack cocaine to get triggered as is required of powder cocaine. The "government" here refers to federal prosecutors, who objected that Judge Jackson had based his view that the guidelines sentence for Kimbrough's offense was unreasonable (a requirement for downward departures in the post-Booker ruling federal sentencing world, at least for now) in part on his disagreement over the policy of the harsher sentences for crack offenders. The Court of Appeals in the 4th Circuit agreed, and Kimbrough's sentence was kicked back up to the much-criticized guidelines level. Also before the Court is the case of Victor Rita, another crack cocaine defendant. And the Court has promised to pick a case that deals with the same issue as the one that was at stake in the case of Mario Claiborne, who died earlier this year (info at same link). While there are far more whites who use crack cocaine than blacks, as the Associated Press reported today, "[m]ost crack cocaine offenders in federal courts are black." Why does the 4th Circuit Appeals Court see the intellectual path a judge took to get to a finding of unreasonableness as more important than the self-evidently unreasonable nature of the draconian sentences they are defending? Both Mr. Kimbrough and Judge Jackson are African American, by the way. They are also both veterans -- Kimbrough fought in the first Gulf War; Jackson has a decades-long military career that included a stint as a JAG and includes continuing service as a colonel in the Reserves. The 4th Circuit decision, which is only two paragraphs long, is not published online (or so I've read), but visit the post made about this case on the Sentencing Law and Policy blog and scroll down to the third comment to read it. Our topical archive on the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity is online here (though it only goes back to early fall -- you have to use the search engine for earlier stories). We also have a Federal Courts archive here Last but not least, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, click here to write to Congress in support of H.R. 460, Charlie Rangel's bill to reduce crack cocaine sentences to the same level as sentences for powder cocaine.
Subscribe to