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.

Mike Gray's famous volume, Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, is now online at Libertary.com. Mike's credits include the Hollywood movie The China Syndrome and the documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, if you didn't already know, and he has been an important part of our movement for as long as I've been involved in it. This is perhaps the best and most fun to read book about the drug war ever written, so I hope you'll check it out and share the link with friends.

Drug Crazy: How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out

Read this eye-opening book free at Libertary.com

Another video from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, this time in partnership with the Swedish Drug Users Union. Sweden's government is one of the world's most prohibitionist, but nevertheless has moved toward harm reduction in recent years by expanding needle exchange into a national policy. Previously needle exchange was happening only in two cities in the nation's south. Well, there's still no needle exchange in Stockholm, according to HCLU, it's even hard to get into a methadone maintenance program, and those who do often face negative attitudes from the program's staff. Check out the video below, or here.

new video from Common Sense for Drug Policy:

Last week we reported that the crime subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee had unanimously passed H.R. 3245, a bill to reduce federal crack cocaine penalties to the same level as those for offenses involving powder cocaine. The full Judiciary Committee approved the bill today, we just heard, by a vote of 16-9. I'll post back with a link to the roll call when it becomes available on Thomas, or follow the link to the bill above to check in the meanwhile. Reports indicate it is expected to be taken up on the floor of the House of Representatives, and that a bipartisan Senate bill is expected out soon too. So this is big news. Not the only big news -- read more in our current top Chronicle feature, "Winds of Change Are Blowing in Washington -- Drug Reforms Finally Move in Congress."

The Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan sits along a drug trafficking route, and has an estimated 80,000-100,000 drug users, more than half of whom inject drugs. Unlike some countries in the region, Kyrgyzstan has embraced harm reduction strategies such as needle exchange and methadone maintenance. Even prisoners in Kyrgyzstan have access to these programs. By going this route, they have been able to curb the country's HIV epidemic. A new video from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union -- in Russian, with English subtitles -- tells the story. Check it out:

As I noted here two weeks ago, legislation to repeal the ban on use of federal AIDS funds for needle exchange programs was included in a House subcommittee's health budget bill. The language survived an attempt on the House floor to repeal it, and so has made it through the full House of Representatives. Satisfyingly, the Congressman who tried to delete the language was Mark Souder, who also lost a committee vote on Tuesday to significantly gut his anti-student aid drug law. Souder's pro-AIDS amendment lost 211-218. The flip side is that 49% percent of Congress voted to continue spreading HIV and Hepatitis throughout our communities.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), H.R. 3245
lead sponsor and long-time champion
for criminal justice reformThe House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security this afternoon unanimously approved H.R. 3245, the "Fairness in Cocaine Sentencing Act of 2009." According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums:

The bill would remove references to "cocaine base" from the US Code, effectively treating all cocaine, including crack, the same for sentencing purposes. Original cosponsors of the bill include all Democratic members of the subcommittee and the sponsors of all other Democratic bills that address the cocaine sentencing disparity.

Click here for the full press release. Exciting times -- as I noted a few minutes ago when writing about another good vote that took place in Congress yesterday, eliminating the loss of financial aid penalty that exists for students convicted of drug possession. That one was part of a larger, high-priority bill that that committee is now sending to the full House of Representatives. Whether this standalone bill, coming out of a subcommittee, will get to that level is less certain. However, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers (D-MI), is an ardent supporter, and the bill passed the subcommittee unanimously, meaning the Republicans on the subcommittee must have voted for it too. (The roll call isn't online yet.) So it is very encouraging nonetheless.

Read about the partial repeal of Souder's law included in their student loans bill by the House Education and Labor Committee -- of which Souder is a member -- in Souder's hometown newspaper. This is the third time Congress has moved to scale the law back -- the first two times Souder supported the changes, this time he didn't. Of course this is just one stage of the process, but leadership wouldn't have moved it forward if they didn't think they could make it stick. We've been working on this issue since 1999 when the law first passed. Exciting times. The work will go on, or course, to fully repeal the law for everyone. Look for more news on this soon.
press conference we organized on this issue in 2002, for the
Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform, attended by ten
members of Congress

Epilogue by Walter Cronkite at the close of ""The Drug Dilemma: War or Peace," The Cronkite Report, June 20, 1995:

Every American was shocked when Robert McNamara, one of the master architects of the Vietnam war, acknowledged that not only did he believe the war was, "wrong, terribly wrong," but that he thought so at the very time he was helping to wage it. That's a mistake we must not make in this 10th year of America's all-out War on Drugs. It's surely time for this nation to stop flying blind, stop accepting the assurances of politicians and other officials, that if we only keep doing what we are doing, add a little more cash, break down a few more doors, lock up a few more Jan Warrens and Nicole Richardsons, then we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. Victory will be ours. Tonight we have seen a war that in its broad outline is not working. And we've seen some less war-like ideas that appear to hold promise. We've raised more questions than we've answered, because that's where the Drug War stands today. We're a confused people, desperately in need of answers and leadership. Legalization seems to many like too dangerous an experiment; to others, the War on Drugs, as it is now conducted, seems inhumane and too costly. Is there a middle ground? Well, it seems to this reporter that the time has come for President Clinton to do what President Hoover did when prohibition was tearing the nation apart: appoint a bi-partisan commission of distinguished citizens, perhaps including some of the people we heard tonight, a blue-ribbon panel to re-appraise our drug policy right down to its very core, a commission with full investigative authority and the prestige and power to override bureaucratic concerns and political considerations. Such a commission could help us focus our thinking, escape the cliches of the Drug War in favor of scientific fact, and more rationally analyze the real scope of the problem, answer the questions that bedevil us, and present a comprehensive drug policy for the future. We cannot go into tomorrow with the same formulas that are failing today. We must not blindly add to the body count and the terrible cost of the War on Drugs, only to learn from another Robert McNamara 30 years from now that what we've been doing is, "wrong, terribly wrong." Goodnight.

popular needle exchange logoBIG NEWS: The infamous ban on use of federal AIDS grant funds to support needle exchange programs will soon be history, if the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services of the House Committee on Appropriations has its way. Led by Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the subcommittee left the language which has imposed the ban these many years out of the new bill. According to Obey's office:

This bill deletes the prohibition on the use of funds for needle exchange programs. Scientific studies have documented that needle exchange programs, when implemented as part of a comprehensive prevention strategy, are an effective public health intervention for reducing AIDS/AIV infections and do not promote drug use. The judgment we make is that it is time to lift this ban and let State and local jurisdictions determine if they want to pursue this approach.

The vote followed a protest at the US Capitol in which 26 AIDS activists chained themselves together in the Capitol Rotunda earlier in the day. President Obama pledged during his primary campaign to eliminate the ban. Legislation allows the president to do so if certain scientific findings are made, specifically that needle exchange programs do not increase community drug use levels, and do reduce the spread of HIV. These findings were made long ago, and the Clinton administration acknowledged them, but declined to eliminate the ban. Earlier this year the Obama administration punted the issue to Congress by including the ban in its budget proposal while verbally expressing support for needle exchange. Whether Obey's subcommittee took action because of administration support, or despite a lack of administration support, I don't know. Perhaps a greater savant than I will enlighten us. Now the bill heads to the full committee, after which it will go to the floor of the House of Representatives. Drug warriors may try to add the ban back at either stage. Victory also depends on what happens on the Senate side. Assuming the House and Senate do not approve exactly identical Labor and HHS budgets, it will go to a conference committee that includes both Reps and Senators. Elimination of the ban will neither increase nor decrease the amount of money the federal government spends on AIDS prevention, at least not directly. What it will do is allow state governments who receive federal AIDS grants to choose whether or not to spend some of that money on needle exchange. Those states which are in the habit of using scientific evidence to guide their policies will support needle exchange.

Another short video from Mike Gray, for Common Sense for Drug Policy. This one is from Todd McCormick's recent THC Expo in Los Angeles -- as Mike describes it, the "[l]argest marijuana merchandising exhibit in US History," "draw[ing] crowds and exhibitors from all over the world to the Los Angeles Convention Center." This could not happen if marijuana were not basically accepted by society, or a large part of it, despite the retrograde laws that still see thousands arrested daily. View the first video in the series, "Retirees Demand Marijuana," here. In case anyone doesn't know who Mike Gray is, by the way, you should know that he's a distinguished filmmaker and author, whose credits include the late 1970s Jane Fonda-Jack Lemmon-Michael Douglas movie The China Syndrome, as well as extensive work on the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. In drug policy he is well known as author of the book Drug Crazy, possibly the best introduction to the madness of the drug war yet written. (Mike's a member of our advisory board too.)

Even in a time of Democratic ascendancy, conservative voices for legalization remain important. This video of Milton Friedman discussing marijuana prohibition, posted by MPP, was brought to my attention in an email recently. Check it out, as well as the second part of it at MPP-TV. Check out this interview with Friedman about legalization of all drugs too.

Last month the "Crack the Disparity" Coalition delivered petitions signed by tens of thousands of people, calling for an end to the draconian US crack sentencing laws, to the offices of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Pat Leahy (D-VT), respective chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. This short video on ColorOfChange.org shows one of the deliveries, and features comments from Karen Garrison, whose two sons were unjustly caught up in these laws; and from Nkechi Taifa, who heads up justice reform efforts at the Open Society Policy Center. The ColorOfChange.org page devoted to this petition also features audio from the press conference, including former Major League baseball star Willie Mays Aikens, who served 14 years in federal prison after an untreated cocaine addiction drew him into the federal system with crack charges.

"Shoveling Water" is a 25-minute documentary from the organization Witness for Peace on the impact of chemical spraying of Colombia's coca crop, in the words of people living with the effects on the ground. I have always felt this part of "Plan Colombia" as launched by President George Herbert Walker Bush -- expanded into the "Andean Initiative" by President Clinton -- to be particularly reckless. It doesn't take a chemist, nor even a medical doctor, to expect that dumping poisons into the environment might be bad for the life forms inhabiting that environment, including humans. Hopefully the madmen pushing for aerial fumigation of Afghanistan's opium crop will lose that fight at least, as they have so far. The tide is slowly turning in Andean drug policy as well. In the meanwhile, check out "Shoveling Water":

This video by "Drug Crazy" author Mike Gray is from Orange County, California -- not a liberal bastion, but medical marijuana has been state law there for over 12 years. Senior citizens are calling for access to medical marijuana, local authorities are sympathetic, and advocates are willing help. But they can't find a landlord willing to rent to them, presumably because of threats by the US DEA to use asset forfeiture laws to take the property away. Along with the sheer barbarism of these federal policies, the video also hints at what may be the largest tragedy, people who because of those policies never find out that marijuana could have helped them.

A precisely two minute YouTube ad for the Showtime program "Weeds" offers "A Brief History of Weed." The video begins with medical marijuana use documented in China in 2727 BC -- about 2,300 years too early for the Buddha image they use to represent it, but that's nitpicking. Flamethrower imagery at 1:06, representing the beginning of federal marijuana prohibition, is very effective, and post-Prop. 215 marijuana storefront footage is downright exciting. Check it out -- check out the Weeds season premiere on June 8th too. (Via The Daily Dish blog's "Cool Ad Watch.")

We've made a video -- there's a petition too, sign it here. Spread the word...

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union has released another video from their footage of the UN's anti-drug summit in Vienna earlier this year. While UN drug chief Antonio Maria Costa has described the drug war debate as a "tempest in a teacup," signs are that the movement toward harm reduction, while gradual, is a revolution that will change everything. HCLU also won a landmark decision this week at the European Court of Human Rights. The issue was one of freedom of information in a drug-related case at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. The decision comes after a five year legal battle for the right to read a complaint submitted by a member of Hungary's Parliament, seeking to restrict some drug-related parts of the nation's criminal code, in order to be able to submit an opinion to the court prior to its ruling.