Following is one of the many emails we got from people since beginning our Hinchey amendment medical marijuana effort last week. It speaks for itself -- actually, it speaks volumes:

I am one of thousands of people who need the medicine marijuana. In short, I had an accident in 1983 and fell 20 feet from a ladder. I went through 10 operations and now I have no ankles, my joints do not fuse or mend. Since I have joint arthritis, everything I do is painful. This is just a sample of the problems I have had. All the doctors I have seen tell me I would benefit from the use of marijuana. It won't replace the medicines I am taking now, but it would make life worth living. Some days I ask God to take me from this hell. I have tried the medicine marijuana once before, but just tried. My wife and I have too much to lose if somehow I were arrested for possession. So for now I say to myself, I wish and hope they would legalize the medicine marijuana before I die.

Via I Was the State: DEA discovers marijuana growing a few hundred yards behind their Dallas office, the Dallas News reports. IWTS rhetorically asks if the Texas marijuana market has been shut down, and points out that marijuana is Texas' 6th highest grossing crop. This is almost right up there with the time a marijuana plant was found growing out of a crack in the New Orleans courthouse, or when a patch of marijuana was spotted growing in a traffic median in Israel. (I'd appreciate if anyone can provide links for these; I remember them but couldn't find anything online.

Via John Tierney at the New York Times, posted late last night... Judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced pain physician Dr. William Hurwitz to 57 months, more than pain treatment advocates were hoping for but considerably less than the 25 years handed down in the first trial by Judge Wexler. With time served, he could be out in 17 months. One paragraph in particular from Tierney's blog post encapsulates much of the backwardness inherent in the federal sentencing system, backwardness that affects many much more run-of-the-mill cases as well:

While there was no evidence that Dr. Hurwitz was profiting from the resale of his prescriptions -- and the jurors I interviewed said they didn’t think he intended the drugs to be resold -- he will still spend more time in prison than almost all the patients who admitting lying to him and reselling the drugs. Thanks to the deals they made to cooperate with prosecutors, seven of the nine patients got sentences ranging from 10 to 39 months. Only two got longer sentences than 57 months -- and one of them, who got 72 months, was also guilty of armed robbery and arson.

The other thing that is really troubling about this case is that jurors admitted to Tierney (previously) that they were not clear on what the law says about whether a doctor who screws up and prescribes to the wrong people, but isn't intentionally diverting drugs to the black market, should be held criminally responsible. But that is precisely the point of law on which the verdicts turned. If jurors don't understand the law they are judging, what is the justification for keeping the conviction and imprisoning someone for it? Despite the praise that has been given to Brinkema by Tierney and others for her handling of this case -- which admittedly was far better than other judges have done -- at the end of the day I have to say that I think she failed to do proper justice. I repeat, if the jurors admit that they did not understand the key point of law before them, I see no reasonable way for the verdicts to be considered legitimate, because the process itself is simply unsound. I could see an argument (theoretically) for having a third trial, but Dr. Hurwitz should be at home tonight with his family, and it's a crime that he's not -- not only for his sake, but for all the pain patients who effectively are being tortured by denial of pain medication because doctors don't want to take the risk of getting sent to prison. Lastly on this theme, think about the fact that the first set of convictions were invalidated, and this second set for the aforementioned reasons clearly should have been. That's an extraordinarily poor track record. A criminal justice system that imprisons people even when jurors admit they didn't know what they were doing is a system that is fundamentally corroded and has lost its way. Don't be proud of yourselves, feds! Despite all of the foregoing, I also have to say that I am relieved. 17 months is a long time to spend in prison, even if one hasn't already spent some years there already, but it could be much, much worse. Judge Brinkema could have given him the same 25 years, or life -- or 10 years, or 12 or 15. The trial also had a bright spot in that Brinkema saw through the misrepresentation about dosages that prosecutors had attempted:

Brinkema said she had read news accounts of the first trial and had seen some of the massive prescriptions Hurwitz had given out, including one patient who was given 1,600 pills a day. "The amount of drugs Dr. Hurwitz prescribed struck me as absolutely crazy," the judge said. But after hearing testimony from both sides, "I totally turned around on that issue," Brinkema said. "The mere prescription of huge quantities of opioids doesn’t mean anything."

In fact, there are known pain treatment cases in which the dosages were literally four times greater than the largest dosage prescribed by Hurwitz in the cases at stake (as I pointed out in a letter to Judge Wexler before the first sentencing, though obviously to no avail). Now lawyers in other pain cases (current and future) can read Judge Brinkema's comments to judges and jurors to explain why the apparently large doses may have been appropriate. The problem hasn't been a lack of experts willing to say that in trials; the problem has been that for some reason it just seems to wash over people in the face of the large number of pills. I think that having a quote like that from a federal judge will help to break through. I'm not a physician, and I'm not in a position to judge whether or not Dr. Hurwitz practiced good medicine in every case. But I'm completely confident that he did not engage any drug-dealing conspiracy. Perhaps the fact that I've met him several times in the past biases my view. But I've also met many of his former patients -- some of them I know well -- and it's a provable fact that he helped many people whom others doctors wouldn't help and who desperately needed the help, and that he gave them the benefit of thoughtful attention. A lot of these people were left in the lurch when the authorities moved against him, causing at least one suicide and arguably a few of them. Hopefully this outcome, while highly imperfect, has enough good points in it to help move things in the right direction; time will tell. You can keep with all of our pain reporting in our topical archive -- RSS is available here -- email us if you'd like to run our pain feed (or any other feed we offer) on your web site.

Vancouver's former mayor, Larry Campbell (now a member of Canada's Senate) has an editorial in the Winnipeg Free Press criticizing both the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada for the increase in marijuana convictions -- the former for not introducing the decrim bill soon enough -- the latter for being, well, just wrong (Sen. Nolin excepted, of course.) Campbell writes:

It's about time that we get over the stigma associated with many of the false assumptions that dominate this debate, and pragmatically move forward on eliminating pot prohibition. As someone who has both walked the streets as a member of the RCMP's drug squad and examined legislation for passage into law as a Senator, I have a sharp understanding of what constitutes a criminal. Those that use pot just don't fit the profile.

Campbell's rational call for change stands in stark contrast to the strong anti-marijuana stance of another former mayor, New York City's Rudy Giuliani, who radically increased marijuana arrests and even opposes medical marijuana use. Campbell's actually for legalization across the board -- according to our 2003 interview with him, though not optimistic of it. Keep up with Canada drug policy news through our topics page here (or the RSS feed for it here). Or just read our newsletter...

Don't just pardon turkeys, President Bush! We, the undersigned, ask you to save your legacy by releasing thousands of nonviolent drug offenders from federal prison before you leave office. Short of taking such a measure, you will be doomed to go down in history as a hypocrite. Unlike President Clinton, you cannot point to a record of mercy toward people caught in the criminal justice system. While the overall Clinton record in criminal justice was not lenient, he did commute the sentences of 63 people, most of them neither wealthy nor powerful, including 29 nonviolent drug offenders. You, by contrast, commuted only three prisoners' sentences prior to helping Scooter Libby, one every two years. You have pardoned four times as many Thanksgiving turkeys as people you've released from prison. Even worse, in 2003 your attorney general, John Ashcroft, issued guidelines requiring federal prosecutors to always seek the maximum possible amount of prison time for defendants, with only limited exceptions permitted. The measure we've called for will undoubtedly be controversial, but you will have defenders from across the political spectrum. Advocates will assist your staff in finding appropriate cases -- reopening cases you've previously rejected would give the project a good head start. Clemency petitions will undoubtedly start to pour in once you put the word out. You can answer critics by saying we need to redirect our resources toward national security instead. And it will be consistent with the sympathy you've expressed in the past, based on your personal experiences, for people who have struggled with substance abuse. In the nation that is the world's leading jailer, which incarcerates a far greater percentage of its population than any other nation yet calls itself "land of the free," the president who helps to reverse that pattern will ultimately be recognized for it. Indeed, the "tough-on-crime" laws that have led us to this situation were mainly enacted for political reasons. Please pardon or commute the sentences of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders; please rescind the aforementioned Ashcroft directive; renounce your support for the drug war (at least in its current form); and call on Congress to repeal mandatory minimum sentences and authorize downward revision of most federal sentencing guidelines. You have a year and a half left to prove that justice is for everyone -- not just for your friends. Will you rise to the occasion? History is watching.

Please click here to send a copy of this petition in your own name to President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and your US Representative and Senators if you live in the US.

The House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will be holding oversight hearings tomorrow on the DEA's Regulation of Pain and Medicine. This is long overdue. Our position is that DEA is effectively causing the torture by denial of opiate medication of millions of pain patients around the country, by prosecuting doctors and thereby frightening other doctors into not being willing to prescribe them. See our topical archive on the issue for further information. Among the presenters to the committee tomorrow is our friend Siobhan Reynolds, head of the Pain Relief Network. She has posted the prepared version of her testimony here. The Judiciary Committee makes live video feeds of all hearings available on its home page here.

Transcript on Reason web site here. The following quote sums up the root lack of logic at work in the use of SWAT teams for routine drug enforcement:

"[W]hen you’re dealing with nonviolent drug offenders, paramilitary police actions create violence instead of defusing it."

Scott was being silly last Friday night when he published his "D.C. Needle Exchange Ban Lifted: Let's Do Heroin!" blog post. In fact, Scott was being silly in multiple ways. First, the DC needle exchange ban is only a ban on the District using its own tax dollars to fund the program. The PreventionWorks needle exchange program has been operating now for almost nine years, legally, and before that its predecessor program at the Whitman-Walker AIDS Clinic operated the exchange. It has been making do with private funding. Lifting of this ban means that PreventionWorks will be able to expand its operations, and that more needle exchange programs will be able to open, all of them together reaching more of the people who need the help. But it's not a matter of whether Scott personally could have gotten clean needles. Second, the PreventionWorks office is only a 15 minute walk from our office, so if Scott had really wanted to use heroin all this time, he wouldn't even have had to travel far to get clean needles. (It's a pretty walk, too, and there's a nice coffee shop in the neighborhood.) Third, as I pointed out in my editorial this week, the risk created by infected used syringes, while a major one, is by no means the only risk. So long as heroin itself continues to be illegal, the user will continue to be "at risk of overdose from fluctuating purity or poisoning from adulteration," and the addict will continue to suffer "severe financial debilitation from the high street prices created by prohibition," some of them "driven to extreme measures to afford drugs that would cost pennies to produce in a legal market." I know for a fact that Scott understands this as well as I do, and I published that editorial less than 24 hours before Scott wrote his blog post, so it must have been fresh in his mind. (Fourth, Scott was simply being sarcastic, in case anyone didn't realize it. He and I both scoff at the idea that more needle exchange will lead to increased drug use -- and we have the evidence to back us up.) So, I'm afraid that Scott and I will be holding out for legalization before we start shooting smack. I recommend that you wait too. (I'm being sarcastic too -- we also reject the idea that legalization will lead to large numbers of people using intense drugs like heroin who don't already use them now -- I certainly have no interest in it.)

Bush pardons turkeys and political allies but lets
half a million nonviolent drug offenders rot. The news just broke that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, leaving him with a conviction and a $250,000 fine. Most of the fine is going to be paid by his allies. This might not bother me as much -- I'm generally not a big fan of prison -- were it not that Bush has been such a "pardon Scrooge" during all of his now many years in office. In fact, as of last November the total number of commutations he had done numbered a mere two, according to SF Chronicle columnist Deb Saunders. What a coincidence that of all of the two million people languishing behind bars in this country, the vice president's former aide was one of only .00015% of them -- three people -- who deserved to be spared prison time! I've been watching drug policy, and criminal justice generally, for the last 14 years, and the sheer hypocrisy in this instance even blows me away. Either George Bush proceeds now to release nonviolent offenders in droves -- thousands and thousands of them -- or calling him a hypocrite will be the understatement of the millennium. Clarence Aaron and the Garrison twins would be three good people to start with. (Update: The president cannot commute state sentences, so change the .00015% I referred to earlier to .0015% instead. On the other side of the equation, though, a much higher percentage of federal incarcerations are of nonviolent drug offenses than of state incarcerations.)

The marijuana friendly, Danish counter-culture enclave of Christiania is in trouble, according to an article in the UK newspaper The Independent, "On the barricades: Trouble in a hippie paradise." The intro to the article, authored by Cahal Milmo, reads:

[Christiania] was set up in the heart of Copenhagen as an antidote to the selfish society. But Europe's most famous commune is under threat from a right-wing government determined to 'normalise' this relic of the 1970s.

The Legalise Cannabis Alliance (UK) has video footage of what looks like a pretty serious police raid posted to YouTube -- there are links to more video there too. We published a Chronicle news feature in January 2004 when hash sellers on Pusherstrasse burned their own stands in protest of a looming government crackdown, and again two months later when the trouble hit. Reason's Kerry Howley provides some "fun facts" about Christiania here. Why not just leave the hippies alone, conservative Danish government (and US government)?

... and thereby betrays the country. Bad (inexcusable) ruling in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case.

Early this year we criticized Newark, New Jersey's new mayor, Cory Booker, and the city's police director, Garry McCarthy, for a law enforcement-focused response to the city's drug trade problem, the formation of a new narcotics task force. I actually say "we criticized" in the literal sense, as we appear to have three pieces on the topic -- a Chronicle article by Phil, a blog post by Scott, and an editorial by myself -- all published on the same day:

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/468/newark_new_orleans_drug_war_crackdown_crime_murder (Chronicle article) http://stopthedrugwar.org/prohibition_in_the_media/2007/jan/09/irony_new... (blog post) http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/468/newark_drug_force_wont_achieve_i... (editorial)

Booker did say some good things at the time:

"These men are not saints who have died, but they are our sons... Take away my tie, take away my suit, and about 10 years, and I fit that description: young black men dying in our city at rates that are unacceptable."

But as I pointed out in my editorial:

If the people doing the fighting are members of our collective family, to be rescued where possible from a negative environment that has lured them into a criminal lifestyle, why is the centerpiece of the new effort a law enforcement campaign that can only end with the long-term incarceration of many of "our sons"? Youthful confusion and feelings of desperation don't magically end after 17 years and 365 days, and New Jersey's drug laws for adults are harsh, as are federal drug laws. How many of "our sons" will end up in prison for long periods of time, sent there because of this new program?

An article by Tom Moran in the Newark Star-Ledger this weekend has some very interesting comments from both McCarthy and Booker. McCarthy points out the city's homicide rate -- 105 last year -- is the highest in over a decade, even though every other kind of crime has really dropped off. McCarthy is "perplexed," he told Moran. Booker's talk was pretty tough, but it was the kind of tough talk that we like here:

"The drug war is causing crime," Booker says. "It is just chewing up young black men. And it's killing Newark."

According to Moran, Booker likened heavy jail terms and unforgiving policies toward those who have been released to an economic genocide against African American men in his city that is giving Newark's crime wave thousands of new recruits. He wants to state's mandatory minimums to go, at least in their current form -- New Jersey's drug laws are harsh -- and he says that he's ready to fight it out:

"I'm going to battle on this," the mayor says. "We're going to start doing it the gentlemanly way. And then we're going to do the civil disobedience way. Because this is absurd. "I'm talking about marches. I'm talking about sit-ins at the state capitol. I'm talking about whatever it takes."

Let's hope he means it -- kudos in any case for saying such things. In the meanwhile, though, I do have a few questions:

1. Is the narcotics task force he talked about in January operating, and if so, what exactly is it doing?
2. Is the city doing everything it can to prevent these young men from ending up in the clutches of the state's harsh sentencing regime -- through policing prioritization, prosecutorial discretion, etc.?
3. What about ending prohibition? It's not just that people are angry and hopeless, it's also the money in the illegal drug trade that is getting so many people recruited into lives of crime and paying them to stay there. Only legalization can break that link.

Check out the article, there's lot's more good stuff there. When you're done, send the Star-Ledger a letter to the editor. Congratulations to Mr. Moran for authoring such an important and insightful report.

I chatted briefly with the ACLU's Jesselyn McCurdy Thursday night at the Crime Policy Summit hosted by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA). Coincidentally she had an article on the Huffington Post blog that night, "Racial Profiling: ''Wrong in America,''" in which she reports that Sen. Feingold (D-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) are preparing to introduce an important bill:

In the coming weeks, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) are expected to introduce the End Racial Profiling Act of 2007 (ERPA), which will prohibit federal law enforcement agencies from engaging in racial profiling and encourage states to adopt the same type of ban on the practice. The legislation will also permit victims of racial profiling to take legal action and requires states to establish procedures for victims to file complaints against police officers who racially profile. In addition, the bill provides data collection demonstration and best practice incentive grants to state and local law enforcement agencies.

With Conyers chairing the House Judiciary Committee now, after the Democratic takeover, I'd say it has a real chance. I spoke with Conyers there too, by the way; after 40+ years in Congress he obviously is not a young man anymore, but he's not tired of it at all and is thrilled to be in a position to get some things done. Other members of Congress attending parts of the Summit Thursday included Bobby Scott (there for most of it), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Melvin Watt (D-NC) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). Sadly I couldn't make it to the Friday portion, had to edit the Chronicle. Anyway, there's today's brief report from Washington...

This post is a little more sympathetic than the title might seem to suggest. One of the big news stories today was the indictment of Rudy Giuliani's now-former South Carolina campaign chairman Thomas Ravenel, the state's now-suspended Treasurer, on federal cocaine distribution charges. Drug policy academic Mark Kleiman points out that Ravenel does not appear to have been a drug dealer:

The other guy indicted in the case seems to be the dealer. Ravenel seems to have been one of his customers, who bought cocaine in quantity to share with friends. Under federal law, there's no crime of selling drugs; the crime is "distribution," which includes giving the stuff away.

(Talking Points Memo, linking to Kleiman, observes that Ravenel would have been buying for "what was probably going to be a pretty big bash".) Ravenel should be considered innocent until proven guilty, of course, and Kleiman points out what I think is a pretty good reason why:

The most likely scenario here: The state cops nailed the dealer (he was already in custody on state charges when the indictment was handed up yesterday), and the dealer gave them a prominent customer in order to buy himself some consideration at sentencing time.

As a legalizer, I have to have some sympathy for anyone caught up in the drug war's headlights. Still, Ravenel was a political official at the highest levels in a state that has some real "tough on drugs" policies in place. Unless he was actively involved in working for serious drug policy reform -- and I'm not aware that he was -- and assuming the accusations made against him are accurate, there's a hypocrisy angle here. Furthermore, the candidate he was involved in trying to elect as president, Rudy Giuliani, is a drug warrior who increased arrests in New York when he was mayor, who tried to shut down methadone maintenance in the city, and who opposes needle exchange and medical marijuana. It's especially hypocritical for a drug user to chair a state campaign for a drug warrior trying to be president, who would presumably continue to be a drug warrior if elected president. Then again, maybe Ravenel intended to quietly lobby Giuliani to shift his views/policies on drugs. I tend to doubt it, but I don't know the guy so I can't say for sure. As for Giuliani, did he have no idea about his friend's (alleged) drug proclivities, or no one who could inform him about them? I've heard from a knowledgeable source that when Giuliani was the US Attorney in New York, the safest place to sell drugs was in front of City Hall. Bottom line: If you're a top-level state official, it's probably not a good idea to organize all-out (all night?) cocaine fests. But if you are in the habit of organizing cocaine fests, speak out against the war on drugs too, so at least people won't think you're a hypocrite if you get caught. Actually, speak out against the drug war in any case.

On Friday I posted a piece on China's use of the death penalty for drug offenses, criticizing the UN, and secondarily the US, for programs that I believe are inadvertently feeding into this. My criticism of the US related to a drug enforcement cooperation agreement with China that was put in place in 2000 by then-Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Barry McCaffrey. I got an email over the weekend from Bob Weiner, who served as ONDCP's Director of Public Affairs from 1995-2001, submitting these comments for the blog:

David, Saw your piece… The arrangement with China never was intended to mandate or magnify their death penalty -- they are choosing their own enforcement tools, which as so many human rights abuses in China are excessive. The arrangement—and I was there and organized the news conference with US (including Gen. McCaffrey) and Chinese officials—was simply to get them to agree with us in enforcing international drug laws and treaties. What we saw there, including thousands of people in treatment factories but not getting real treatment, and the unbridled flow of methamphetamine and opium, was unconscionable.

Why couldn't police tell the difference between house number 74 and house number 82 before they burst into a home with guns drawn? And why did they feel the need to handcuff an elderly woman and force her to the ground? Wrong home, for no good reason, no meth there. Via the Agitator...

The DEA is at it again, as Drug WarRant blogger Peter Guither puts it, and is holding another "vigil for lost promise" for people who have died from drugs, this one in Chicago (chicagovigil.org). The problem isn't so much what the DEA says -- some people do die from drugs -- but what they don't say. Hence Guither's vigil for lost promise for people who have died from the drug war (chicagovigil.com redirecting to it). It's too simplistic to blame it all on drugs. Even when it looks like drugs (e.g. it's not someone who was imprisoned under a law or shot by a SWAT team, someone actually died from some kind of drug use), it's often the combination of drugs with the drug laws that created the most deadly mix. Guess who has the top link in Google when searching on "vigil for lost promise," at least right now when I'm posting this?

Via the Sentencing Law and Policy blog: The high cost of imprisonment has created openings for sentencing reform. An article on Stateline.org explores recent moves in Texas and Kansas to find alternatives to building more prisons. It's easy in this issue a lot of the time to feel like things are hopeless, and certainly the pace of change is frustratingly slow. But it's a different debate now, on drugs and on crime in general, than was taking place 13 or so years ago when I first got involved in this. I can't remember the last time I heard a politician talk about how prisoners are being "coddled" and shouldn't have access to exercise rooms -- routine stuff back then -- and while menaces to society like US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still want more mandatory minimums, it has become noticeably harder for them to get them passed -- Pat Leahy isn't the only reason Gonzales' horrible idea isn't likely to go anywhere. Attitudes are changing, policy will follow suit, but we have to keep working at it to make it happen...

Radley Balko has posted a Flash-video interview he recorded with drug war victim Regina Kelly, one of the 27 black residents of Hearne, Texas, who were arrested in a Tulia-like incident involving an "informant" of the most scurrilous variety. Kelly, like most of the victims, was later exonerated. Balko and Kelly were both speakers at an ACLU conference in Seattle last weekend.

Seattle is a beautiful city -- with great drug reformers -- as I commented two weekends ago while the NORML Legal Seminar was convening in Aspen, "wish I were there..."

The Supreme Court actually issued a good ruling on traffic stops today, and it was unanimous. In BRENDLIN v. CALIFORNIA, Bruce Brendlin, who was convicted of drug possession after a car in which he was a passenger was pulled over by a sheriff's deputy in Yuba County, California, appealed his conviction based on the fact that the traffic stop was later conceded by the state to be illegal. The state argued that because Brendlin was not the driver of the car, he was not the subject of the illegal stop, and so did not have the right to have the evidence suppressed because of the stop's illegality. In the unanimous opinion written by David Souter, the Court found:

Brendlin was seized because no reasonable person in his position when the car was stopped would have believed himself free to "terminate the encounter" between the police and himself. Bostick, supra, at 436. Any reasonable passenger would have understood the officers to be exercising control to the point that no one in the car was free to depart without police permission.

Sad that the California Supreme Court bought the argument, though. Read more about the case here.