The NAACP reiterates its call for marijuana legalization and adds a call for workers' rights, Ron DeSantis doubles down on harsh rhetoric directed at Mexican drug cartels, and more.

OxyContin (Creative Commons)

NAACP Renews Support for Marijuana Legalization, Adds Call to Protect Industry Workers' Rights. That National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has adopted a resolution reiterating its support for federal marijuana legalization and added a new call to protect workers' rights in the fledgling industry. The resolution was adopted late last month at the NAACP's 114th National Convention.

"NAACP calls for the legalization and de-scheduling of cannabis at the federal level and reaffirms its past resolutions on cannabis, the cannabis industries, decriminalization, and equity, and expresses an intent to advocate for federal, state, and local medical and adult-use cannabis legislation that includes labor peace agreements as a condition of licensure," the resolution says.

In the call to protect workers' rights, the resolution points out that "the majority of people in the cannabis industry will be workers rather than owners" and advocates that "the workers who grow, process, test, distribute, and sell cannabis deserve a fair and safe workplace and family-sustaining job like every other worker."

And that means union representation, the resolution said: "Access to union representation, training and apprenticeship will help ensure that a broad range of workers can benefit from the cannabis industry, especially workers from communities that have been disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition in the past," it says.

Opiates and Opioids

Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Deal that Protects Sackler Family. The US Supreme Court on Thursday put a hold on a bankruptcy deal with Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, that capped liability for the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, at $6 billion and would have shielded family members from any further civil lawsuits over the opioid epidemic sparked by the introduction and massive marketing of OxyContin.

The Supreme Court issued the order in response to a Justice Department filing objecting to the settlement. The department argued that it allowed Sackler family members to hide behind legal protections meant for debtors in "financial distress," not billionaires. It said it would hear arguments in December to seek whether the settlement complies with the US bankruptcy code.

Under the deal, the Sacklers had agreed to pay billions in exchange for full immunity from all civil cases. The Supreme Court's order is likely to delay payments to the thousands of plaintiffs who have sued Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers.

Foreign Policy

Ron DeSantis Says He Is Open to Using Drones Against Mexican Drug Cartels. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, has once again identified Mexican drug cartels as one of his favorite targets as he seeks to gain traction against former President Donald Trump. At a campaign event in Iowa Thursday, he said he would be open to using drone strikes against Mexican drug cartels.

"We will absolutely reserve the right if they're invading our country and killing our people," DeSantis said in response to a voter's question. When asked to clarify, he said: "I said I would use whatever force we need to defend the country. We'd be willing to lean in against them, and we reserve the right to defend our country," he added.

Earlier in the campaign, DeSantis called for the use of deadly force against migrants suspected of trafficking drugs, a call he reiterated Thursday. "We're authorizing deadly force. They try to break into our country? They will end up stone-cold dead," he said to a rousing round of applause.

International

Ecuador Presidential Candidate's Assassination Linked to Local Drug Gangs with Ties to International Drug Trafficking Organizations. Anti-corruption crusader, journalist, and former legislator Fernando Villavicencio was shot and killed at a campaign event in Quito Tuesday evening not long after receiving threats from local gangs tied to Albanian, Colombian, and Mexican drug cartels.

The assassination came amid a rising tide of violence linked to conflicts betwee two gangs, Los Choneros and Los Lobos. Los Choneros are linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, while Los Lobos have ties to competing international drug organizations. In recent months, judges, prosecutors, journalists, politicians and political candidates have been killed in gang attacks, with the mayor of the western city of Manta assassinated just two weeks ago. Gang-related violence has also roiled the country's overcrowded prisons, with some 600 inmates killed in three separate bouts of prison rioting.

Ecuador is not a producer of cocaine, but is bordered by leading producer countries Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and is an increasingly important transshipment point for cocaine headed to North America and Western Europe.

"The killing of Fernando Villavicencio is a wake-up call for Ecuador's democracy," said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The rise of organized crime is putting the lives of Ecuadorians and their institutions at risk. Urgent, rights-respecting security policies are needed to protect them effectively."

In response to the violence, President Guillermo Lasso has declared a range of localized states of emergencies, suspending constitutional rights. The government has also deployed the military and conducted prison raids. After the killing of Villavicencio, Lasso expanded the state of emergency across the entire country.

But Human Rights Watch said what the country needs is to address the root causes of criminality, including high levels of poverty and social exclusion. The authorities should seek to permanently reduce the power of organized crime groups, including by considering alternative approaches to drug policy that would reduce the profitability of the illegal drug trade, the group said.

"The ongoing states of emergency have not made Ecuadorians safer," Goebertus said. "The government needs to put in place an effective and legitimate security policy that protects them and seeks to dismantle organized crime groups.

(This article was prepared by StoptheDrugWar.org's 501(c)(4) lobbying nonprofit, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also pays the cost of maintaining this website. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

Maryland is just the governor's signature away from having a system of taxed and regulated marijuana commerce, Minnesota lawmakers fold a psychedelic task force bill into a must-pass healthcare omnibus bill, and more.

A Washington state bill would allow jail terms of up to a year for drug possession (Creative Commons)

Another Federal Court Rules Banning Marijuana Consumers from Possessing Guns is Unconstitutional. The US District Court for the Western District of Texas has ruled that banning marijuana users from possessing firearms is unconstitutional. The decision comes on the heels of a February ruling in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma that also found the gun ban unconstitutional.

Both decisions come in the wake of a controversial Supreme Court ruling last year that makes it more difficult to restrict gun access. The Justice Department is already set to argue a similar case in the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Texas case involves a woman who was charged with firearms offenses after she admitted being a marijuana consumer, but who was never charged with a marijuana offense.

"The longstanding prohibition on possession of firearms by felons requires the Government to charge and convict an individual before disarming her," the court held. "In short, the historical tradition of disarming 'unlawful' individuals appears to mainly involve disarming those convicted of serious crimes after they have been afforded criminal process," the ruling continues. "Section 922(g)(3), in contrast, disarms those who engage in criminal conduct that would give rise to misdemeanor charges, without affording them the procedural protections enshrined in our criminal justice system. The law thus deviates from our Nation's history of firearm regulation."

Maryland Marijuana Legal Sales Bills Go to Governor. Both the House and the Senate have now passed bills that would launch a system of taxed and regulated marijuana commerce in the state. The bills are now on the desk of Gov. Wes Moore (D), who is expected to sign them. The bills set a marijuana retail sales tax at 9 percent and directs most of the revenues to communities damaged by the war on drugs. It also sets fees for medical marijuana businesses to convert to recreational marijuana licenses, limits the number of licenses a business can own, and sets terms for social equity applicants, who will be able to obtain licenses when a second round is awarded in January.

Psychedelics

Minnesota Lawmakers Include Psychedelic Provisions in Omnibus Health Bill. Lawmakers have folded a bill that would create a psychedelics task force to prepare the state for possible legalization, House File 1884, into a larger, must-pass omnibus health care bill. The action was taken last week by the House Health finance and Policy Committee, which adopted an author's amendment to the omnibus bill that added a revised version of the psychedelics measure. If the bill passes, the Psychedelic Medicine Task Force would be charged with advising lawmakers on "the legal, medical, and policy issues associated with the legalization of psychedelic medicine in the state." The omnibus bill must still be approved the Ways and Means Committee before heading for a House floor vote.

Drug Policy

Washington Bill to Make Drug Possession a Gross Misdemeanor Wins House Committee Vote. After a 2021 state Supreme Court decision invalidated the state's felony drug possession law, the legislature has scrambled to come up with an alternative, and now, a bill that would make simple drug possession a gross misdemeanor, Senate Bill 5536, has passed the Senate and won a vote in the House Appropriations Committee. The bill will allow police to arrest drug possessors on a first offense, but also give them full discretion to divert offenders. The maximum sentence for a gross misdemeanor is one year in jail. The bill also allows drug charges to be wiped from someone's record if he commits no new offenses in a year, even if they have not completed drug treatment.

Shielded: How the Police Became Unaccountable by Joanna Schwartz (2023: Viking Press, 308 pp., $30 HB)

With that pledge, the not-yet-indicted former president played to longstanding but unproven concerns that citizens' ability to seek civil redress for police mistreatment under civil rights laws would force police officers into bankruptcy if they were found liable for heat-of-the-moment lapses. Equally to be feared -- and equally unproven -- is the notion that being able to hold police liable will inhibit them from fully exercising their crime-fighting powers and protecting public safety.

Not to worry, officer! As UCLA law professor Joanna Schwarz makes clear in Shielded, her new book on (the lack of) police accountability, cops get away with murder. And rape. And torture. And beatings. And various other forms of street-tough thuggery. Schwartz has spent years researching how our legal system protects police at all costs through the accretion over decades of Supreme Court decisions interpreted by a non-representative federal bench with cases tried by juries filled with people who have never had a bad encounter with police. (In federal civil cases, felons cannot be jurors, and the voir dire process eliminates potential jurors with negative perceptions of law enforcement.)

Over the course of decades, the Supreme Court first opened the door to civil rights litigation to address police violation of constitutional rights, then, in case after case, effectively pushed it back until it is now barely open a crack. It is no accident that this has occurred under a Supreme Court that has been sliding to the right for the last 50 years and is now the most reactionary court in a century. One technique is to require plaintiffs to show sufficient evidence of patterns of police misconduct before they are allowed to undertake discovery, the process by which both sides in a case are allowed to see and seek relevant evidence. In the case of rogue police departments, this would be records of officer infractions, incident reports, and the like. But under current Supreme Court precedent, federal judges summarily dismiss cases before discovery because plaintiffs have not produced the evidence they have not yet been allowed to seek. That's a hell of a Catch-22.

Another huge hurdle in front of people seeking redress for police misconduct is qualified immunity, a notion constructed out of thin air by the Supreme Court in 1967 and turned into another Catch-22 by the Supreme Court in 1982. Qualified immunity is a defense to civil rights claims that is granted if the law the cop violated is not "clearly established," and if qualified immunity applies, plaintiffs cannot collect monetary damages. Under the 1982 decision, the federal courts find that qualified immunity applies unless the plaintiff can show a previous case with the exact same facts has been decided in federal court.

But Schwartz shows that the Supreme Court is only one of the "shields" protecting police. At the institutional level, police Internal Affairs bureaus generally do not punish nor track misbehavior. At the municipal level, budgets anticipate having to pay out damages for police behavior, with the taxpayers—not the miscreant officers—paying up. At the state level, legislators pass laws that further protect police. And there are more obstacles that Schwartz elucidates, from the makeup of the federal judiciary and federal juries to financial disincentives for attorneys to spend their careers litigating civil rights cases where they could spend thousands of hours preparing cases only to have them settled and end up being paid a pittance for their efforts.

This is not a book about the war on drugs, but the war on drugs is implicated throughout.  Many, many of the encounters between police and citizens that result in civil rights violation complaints arise from the prosecution of the drug war, and many, many of the victims are drug users or suspected drug users.

Schwartz lucidly and cogently explores the mountain of obstacles people seeking justice for police mistreatment face, as well as the obstacles facing people who want to remake the system into something nearer to common notions of justice. Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court and the stalemated state of play in Congress, relief is unlikely to come from the federal government. The problem seems intractable.

But Schwartz sees opportunities for positive change at the state and local levels, and she cites Colorado's 2020 passage of a bill ending qualified immunity, requiring officers found to have operated in bad faith to pay something out of their own pockets (as opposed to being indemnified by the city or state, which pays the judgement), and allows plaintiff attorneys to recover their fees when they prevail.

This is an important, eye-opening work. If you are concerned about who will guard us from the guardians (and how), it is indispensable.

There's a big payout for a Georgia woman falsely arrested on cocaine charges, British police chiefs call for drug decriminalization, and more.

Coca, traditionally grown only in the Andes, is popping up in Central America and Mexico. (DEA)

Bipartisan Group of Lawmakers Urge Biden to Deschedule Marijuana. After marijuana reforms failed to pass as the current Congress winds down, a bipartisan group of 24 lawmakers called on President Biden to "recognize the merits of full descheduling" of marijuana. Despite the spread of marijuana and marijuana legalization in the states, marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act, in the same schedule as heroin and LSD. They reminded Biden that he had launched the first formal review of marijuana scheduling back in October, which they called "a crucial and laudable step," but they called for more action.

"Marijuana does not belong in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a classification intended for exceptionally dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no medical use," the lawmakers wrote. "The decision to schedule marijuana was rooted in stigma rather than an evidence-based process, and it is time to fully remedy this wrong. While Congress works to send you a comprehensive legalization bill, the administration should recognize the merits of full descheduling." The signatories were 20 Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and four Republicans.

Law Enforcement

Federal Jury Awards Georgia Woman $1 Million After Wrongful Cocaine Arrests, Extended Jail Stay. A federal jury in Atlanta has awarded a Georgia woman $1 million in damages after an Atlanta police officer falsely accused her of drug possession and she was jailed for months -- even after testing showed she did not possess cocaine. The officer stopped her on the street for jaywalking and falsely accused her of hiding cocaine inside an exercise ball. She spent a month in jail before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation completed an analysis that found the substance in question was not cocaine and then inexplicably spent another four months in jail before being released. The arresting officer was initially ordered to pay the damages and his pay began to be garnished, but Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has since said the city will take responsibility for the costs.

International

Belize Armed Forces Destroy More Than 100,000 Coca Plants. The Belize Defense Force, the Coast Guard, and the national Police Department destroyed more than 100,000 coca plants in a joint raid southwest of Graham Creek Village this week. No arrests were made, and the plants were burned. Coca has traditionally been cultivated only in the Andes, but in recent years, the international criminal organizations that run the traffic have experimented with coca plantations in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, as well as Belize.

British Police Chiefs Call for Decriminalization of First-Time Drug Offenses. The National Police Chiefs' Council and the College of Policing are calling for the decriminalization of first-time drug possession offenses, with the use and possession of drugs by first-offenders treated as a public health -- not a law enforcement -- matter. Under the plan, people caught with illegal drugs would be offered drug education or treatment programs, but those who do not comply or complete the programs would be subject to criminal prosecution. Police in 14 of the country's 43 police forces have already adopted similar policies, but the plan is opposed by the Conservative government, which has been floating proposals to stiffen drug penalties, including for marijuana.