The following is a statement from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon about the upcoming UN International Anti-Drugs Day, as it's informally called. They say the focus is on drug treatment, and that is probably what the UN people working on this intend. But we expect the event to prompt a bloodbath as it has in every past recent year in at least one country that uses the death penalty against real or supposed drug offenders. Will some of them be mere addicts who were selling only to supply their own habits and just needed some of this treatment? Also, the UN is in continued denial over the failure of the drug war/prohibition policy. Here's the statement, via the States News Service:

*HEADLINE:* DRUG ABUSE CAN BE PREVENTED, TREATED, CONTROLLED WITH POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, SUFFICIENT RESOURCES, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL IN INTERNATIONAL DAY MESSAGE *DATELINE:* NEW YORK *BODY:* The following information was released by the United Nations: Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's message for the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, observed on 26 June: Drug abuse is a problem that can be prevented, treated and controlled. While efforts must be stepped up to reduce supply -- by helping growers of illicit crops find viable licit alternatives, and ensuring that law enforcement agencies continue their good work in seizing drugs -- the greatest challenge in global drug control is reducing demand. With less demand, there would be less need for supply, and fewer incentives for criminals to traffic drugs. Combating drug abuse is a collective effort. It requires political leadership and sufficient resources -- particularly for more and better treatment facilities. It requires the engagement of parents and teachers, as well as health care and social workers. It requires the media and criminal justice officials to play their part. All walks of life must join forces and devote special attention to the vulnerable: to those who are vulnerable to taking drugs because of their personal or family situation, and to those who are vulnerable because they take drugs. Our mission is to enable them to take control of their lives, rather than allowing their lives to be controlled by drugs. That means giving young people sound guidance, employment opportunities, and the chance to be involved in activities that help organize life and give it meaning and value. It means supporting parents' efforts to provide love and leadership. It means reaching out to marginalized groups and ensuring they receive the care they need to cope with behavioural, psychological or medical problems. It means providing reasons to hope. For those who are grappling with addiction, effective treatment is essential. Drug abuse is a disease that must be treated on the basis of evidence, not ideology. I urge Member States to devote more attention to early detection; to do more to prevent the spread of disease -- particularly HIV and hepatitis -- through drug use; to treat all forms of addiction; and to integrate drug treatment into the mainstream of public health and social services. Drug abuse brings anguish and torment to individuals and their loved ones. It eats away at the fabric of the human being, of the family, of society. It is a subject all of us must take personally. On this International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, let us ensure there is no place for drugs in our lives or our communities.

Drug WarRant spotted the following comments by Justice Alito, printed by the Washington Post, comments that suggest he might go the right way in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" free speech case:

"I'm a very strong believer in the First Amendment and the right of people to speak and to write," [...] "I would be reluctant to support restrictions on what people could say." [...] "it's very dangerous for the government to restrict speech."

View pictures from the March demonstration outside the Court here.

Via EconLog: Official stats from the Dept. of Justice show that the ratio of violent offenders in jail to drug offenders was 2.6:1 in 2003 -- up from 9:1 in 1980. The drug war is for real. And anyone who doesn't think this is a huge distraction from the fight against real crime doesn't know how to multiply or add...

Montel Williams, who suffers with multiple sclerosis, continues to crusade for medical marijuana, this time with a letter to Connecticut's governor, Jodi Rell (R), published on Alternet. Writes Montel:

Medical marijuana has allowed me to live a productive, fruitful life despite having multiple sclerosis. Many thousands of others all over this country -- less well-known than me but whose stories are just as real -- have experienced the same thing.

Now it's up to Gov. Rell to show if she is a reasonable, compassionate leader, or a heartless political hack. Montel at a 2005 press conference with Rep. Maurice Hinchey

The late-breaking news today is that the New York Assembly has passed a medical marijuana bill -- 92-52, according to an email from MPP. Richard Gottfried (D), who has been supporting the issue for years, was the sponsor. Last I checked on Google News, the vote had not made any of the news stories, but I'm sure that will happen anytime now. One encouraging report I gleaned from the articles is that Gov. Spitzer, who opposed medical marijuana during the campaign, says he's rethought the issue. Next stop, the State Senate, probably next week...

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.

... or could ONDCP really intend to take two centuries to respond to SSDP's Freedom of Information Act request? You decide.

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.

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.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), a one-time drug warrior, made brief remarks on the floor of the US House of Representatives relating to criminal justice, including his support for the Second Chance Act (measures to help people coming out of prison to reenter society successfully) and for restoring the vote to people with past felony convictions, and his sponsorship of H.R. 460 to eliminate the harsher treatment that people convicted for crack cocaine offenses currently receive under the law relative to other cocaine offenses (along with other remarks that don't directly relate to drug policy). (Click here to write your US Representative in support of H.R. 460.) Nothing too huge here, but of interest, and good to see that the chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee is focused on things like this.

Kirk Tousaw, chair of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association's Drug Policy Committee, delivered testimony at the House of Commons in opposition to a so-called "drugged driving" bill now being considered by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. A summary of the issue and his testimony is online here in the Reader Blogs. Read more about Kirk and his past work in our archives here.

There's an interesting article by Ken Dermota in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, "Snow Fall," a discussion of the failure of interdiction and source country efforts to drive up the US street price of cocaine. Dermota points out the two sides of prohibition's price dynamic:

[P]olicing has a big impact on cocaine prices: On the streets of Bogota, a gram of cocaine can be had for under $2. Recreational users in America, on the other hand, typically pay upward of $50 a gram... Yet over time, cocaine prices per pure gram in the United States have steadily fallen, from $600 in the early 1980s to less than $200 by the mid-1990s.

The government's stated purpose for engaging in supply-side drug enforcement measures is to drive up the price, in order to reduce use. Given that prices have fallen so dramatically, it is safe to say that the supply-side strategy of increase prices has not decreased use (because the price increases never happened). Prohibition itself drives up the price of drugs (with calamitous effects on the people who are addicted to the drugs, indeed driving many of them to commit crimes that affect the rest of us, but that's a separate issue), but supply-side enforcement appears to have failed completely by its own measures. The period of time Dermota cited is about a quarter century, by the way, enough time to conduct a pretty conclusive test, IMHO. Dermota explains why the seizures of illicit drugs that government officials like to hype so much may actually illustrate failure, not success:

In March, the US Coast Guard intercepted a freighter off Panama laden with 20 tons of cocaine, in the largest maritime bust ever. That was followed in April by Colombian authorities' seizure of a 15-ton cache most likely awaiting shipment to Mexico... Of course, the good news is soured by the fact that cocaine production remains robust enough to allow shipment in 20-ton batches.

Drug policy reformer Judge James P. Gray of Santa Ana County in California has made this point as well. He should know -- as a prosecutor prior to joining the Superior Court he was involved in a seizure of heroin that at the time set the quantity record. When he delivered the speech that the link above points to in 1994, that record had long been dwarfed. (I helped to organize that conference, by the way, at Harvard Law School with the Civil Liberties Union of Mass., early during my activist career when I was still a volunteer. Afterwards I guided Judge Gray, former NORML director Dick Cowan and actor Michael Moriarty to the bed-and-breakfast where we put them up.) Dermota may be a legalizer, though not an optimistic one, and he doesn't directly say he is:

Sea changes in policy, such as decriminalization or legalization of drugs, look politically untenable.

Unfortunately, the link above to the article only gets you the beginning, you need to be a subscriber to see the whole thing, or get a hold of a copy of the magazine. Anyway, there's at least one good drug reporter in the country. :) Besides DRCNet's Phil Smith, that is. :) Thanks to Steve Heath for the heads-up.

Jeralyn Merritt discusses the NORML Legal Seminar going on right now in Aspen, on TalkLeft.

Last week we reported in Drug War Chronicle that Rhode Island's medical marijuana bill, to make the law passed last year a permanent one, had passed both houses of the legislature. As anticipated, Gov. Carcieri (to be referred to henceforth as "The Blue Meanie") vetoed the bill. He vetoed the last one, and the legislature overrode the veto and made the bill law anyway, and it's expected that that will happen again this time. But the status at the moment of this writing is that it's vetoed. Here's a Google news link to coverage of the bill. Also, a shout out to whoever sent our story around on StumbleUpon: thank you, it got us tons of hits.

Interesting Washington Post piece on unenforceable laws, featuring long-time academic drug policy reformer Douglas Husak.

Friday night (too late for last week's Chronicle), Connecticut's state senate passed a medical marijuana bill, already passed by the House, and it is now heading to Gov. Jodi Rell's desk to be signed or vetoed. Rell has said she is "torn" over it. DPA's Gabriel Sayegh sent us the following links to media stories about it:

Canadian Member of Parliament Libby Davies distributed this letter yesterday about the Conservative drug strategy and attacks on the InSite safe injection site: June 4, 2007 Dear Friends, I am deeply concerned about the Conservative government's plans to unveil a so-called New Drug Strategy for Canada and its efforts to discredit InSite. I made the following statement in the House of Commons today outlining my concerns.

Libby Davies, MP Vancouver East HANSARD, House of Commons June 4, 2007 Mr. Speaker, health and addictions professionals across Canada are bracing themselves for the worst when the Conservative government reveals its so-called new drug strategy that will sacrifice the successes of harm reduction and a balanced approach to drug use, for a heavy handed US style enforcement regime. Time and again, empirical evidence has proven that harm reduction works. Programs like needle exchanges and Vancouver's safe injection site, InSite, are reducing the transmission of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, and increasing the number of people accessing treatment. I am alarmed that despite this evidence, the government is accelerating the criminalization of drug users. The 2007 budget quietly removed harm reduction from Canada's new drug strategy. It now reads like a carbon copy of George Bush's war on drugs - which has seen drug use rise, along with skyrocketing social and economic costs of incarceration. In 2006, the Conservatives refused to renew the exemption that allows InSite to keep its doors open until pressure from the community forced them to grant a temporary extension. We know the Health Minister and the RCMP are now resorting to propaganda tactics to try and close InSite. Attacking InSite and adopting US drug policies will fail as dramatically here as it has in the US.

Read our feature report about this published Friday, "Battle Royal Looms as Canadian Government Set to Unveil Tough Anti-Drug Strategy." Also, we have a fair amount published about Libby Davies, including interviews she's given directly to the Chronicle -- use this search link to review it.

Back during our jury civil disobedience in 2004, David Guard and I did our community service time at the needle exchange program here in Washington and got to know the people there. They've been doing a lot for the community, all of it with privately-raised funds, but more is needed to be able to reach all the people who are at risk from contracting diseases like AIDS or Hepatitis C through needle sharing. The District of Columbia government would almost certainly fund needle exchange work, but Congress gets to control what our budget looks like if they want to, and in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm) they decided to forbid DC from spending even its own taxpayer dollars on needle exchange. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY), who chairs the Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, which has jurisdiction over this area of the US Code, has said he wants to undo the restriction. Today the New York Times ran a strongly supportive editorial:

Washington, D.C., is one of America’s AIDS hot spots. A significant proportion of infections can be traced back to intravenous drug users who shared contaminated needles and then passed on the infection to spouses, lovers or unborn children. This public health disaster is partly the fault of Congress. It has wrongly and disastrously used its power over the District of Columbia’s budget to bar the city from spending even locally raised tax dollars on programs that have slowed the spread of disease by giving drug addicts access to clean needles.

The Times titled the editorial "Congress Hobbles the AIDS Fight." The activist paraphrase of that, which is how the editorial was first presented to me, would be "Congress has blood on its hands." Last week the Times also ran a news feature about DC's needle exchange, and an online "slide show" featuring the program's Ron Daniels. The larger legislation in which the DC funding ban could get repealed is expected to move quickly, with markups scheduled for Serrano's subcommittee tomorrow and the Appropriations Committee of which it is a part next week -- you never know how quickly something will really move in Congress, but that's how it looks right now. Stay tuned.

I am sad to report the passing of Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a leading and long-time advocate for medical marijuana, scientific and historical marijuana researcher, physician and drug policy reformer. Tod was a member of DRCNet's advisory board and a long-time friend. Phil has written a memorial to Tod for this week's Chronicle, and I am also posting it here. Click the "read full post" link below, if you don't already see it, or read it online here. Tod Mikuriya addressing a NORML conference

According to the New Jersey Law Journal, via Law.com, the NJ Supreme Court has shifted away from a 20-year-old policy of suspending lawyers convicted of cocaine possession, instead merely censuring a Wayne-based workers compensation and personal injury attorney for it:

The court, in an order made public on Tuesday, took one step further a recommendation for lenience made by the Disciplinary Review Board, which suggested a "suspended" three-month suspension for the lawyer, Wayne, N.J., solo Anthony Filomeno, in view of his demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation and early release from a year-long pretrial intervention program.

Now maybe they'll go a little softer on the rest of the drug-using public...