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Huff Post: UN Drug Policy in the Dark Ages
I'm on Huffington Post again tonight, with a post chastising the UN (and western governments generally) for: 1) continuing the ludicrous coca runaround in South America's Andean region for another year; and 2) turning a blind eye year after year to the indirect support that western funds and cooperation gives to the death penalty for nonviolent drug offenses, mostly in Asia and the Middle East. Check it out here -- comments welcome in either location. If you haven't already, check out our Chronicle articles on these two topics here and here.
What's the Big Deal About Narco-Subs?
The DEA is proud of having helped Ecuadoran authorities capture this "narco-sub":Silly DEA -- don't they realize what the implications are, of drug traffickers having the wherewithal to operate a submarine? It means they have effectively unlimited resources to devote to the task of finding a way to get their product from point A to point B, and to reducing the cost associated with doing so. If it's not over the border, it's under it. If it's not by air, it's on the sea. If not on the sea, then under the sea -- using narco-subs. Apparently lots of narco-subs: Oh, and don't forget, if not here, then there. Silly DEA. Random thought on the DEA photograph: Does this remind anyone else of Yoda in the jungle on his planet, using the force to lift the damaged spacecraft, Empire Strikes Back movie?
it's unfair... marijauna's not bad, it's them that keep it away from us good folks
thankfully some governments have realised the futility of the drug war against innocent drug users.
Marijuana Legalization is a Civil Rights Issue
This week's news that the California NAACP is endorsing Prop. 19 to legalize marijuana in California hasn't exactly been met with universal applause in the black community. Anti-pot crusader Bishop Ron Allen thinks it's a conspiracy, Big Ced at News One thinks NAACP is stoned, and blogger Mo' Kelly thinks they've lost sight of the distinction between civil rights and civil liberties:The issue of decriminalizing marijuana is a separate and distinct discussion from the inherent inequities of the criminal justice system. Both are legitimate issues, but not meant to be commingled. … The NAACP, the nation’s oldest CIVIL RIGHTS organization walking point on the CIVIL LIBERTIES issue of marijuana legalization is a farce and an embarrassment. Let the ACLU do what it does…so the NAACP (in California and beyond) can deal with real CIVIL RIGHTS issues… Ok, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. Let's not forget how these marijuana laws came about in the first place:In the eastern states, the "problem" was attributed to a combination of Latin Americans and black jazz musicians. Marijuana and jazz traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to Harlem, where marijuana became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the time (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles", Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man", Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag"). Again, racism was part of the charge against marijuana, as newspapers in 1934 editorialized: "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice." [Why is Marijuana Illegal?] The decision to prohibit marijuana was fueled by racist hysteria, and many have argued that the decades of racially disparate enforcement that followed weren't entirely coincidental. Whether or not our marijuana laws were intended to serve as an instrument of racial oppression, they've performed that function with staggering precision. And when people of color receive unequal treatment under the law, that's a civil rights issue. Our marijuana laws have never, and will never, be enforced fairly. The brutality of modern drug enforcement reaches every community, but if young white men were given criminal records and subjected to profiling and police harassment at the same rates as people of color, the criminal justice system would quickly come to a crashing halt. The drug war was built on a foundation of fundamental unfairness, and mitigating its catastrophic impact on communities of color requires measures far more drastic than telling police for the millionth time that there's more to their job than searching young black men all day and night. No, legalizing marijuana won't solve the problem. Not even close. But what it will do is remove one of the primary justifications police rely upon when stopping and searching people in urban communities. It will stop the hemorrhaging of employment opportunities lost by those convicted of simple possession. It will cripple the existing distribution model, thereby reducing youth involvement, street violence and the cyclical lure of the prohibition economy and the severe criminal justice consequences faced by its participants. It will shield generations from the fate that our formerly pot-smoking President was so desperately lucky to have avoided. If anyone thinks we can solve these problems while still making nearly a million marijuana arrests every year, then please explain. But don't condemn NAACP for supporting a new approach when the old one has failed as consistently and dramatically as it has.
A Brilliant Exhibit in the Failure of the Drug War
The International Centre for Science in Drug Policy is doing amazing work. Check this out:
Is Bill O'Reilly Helping Us Legalize Drugs?
A couple readers objected to my suggestion last week that Bill O'Reilly's anti-drug scare tactics are actually helping our cause more than they hurt it. Here's what they said:"I'm very displeased with most of these TV interviews. Between Mr. O'Reilly's constant use of voodoo pharmacology and emotional appeals, Mr. Nadelmann never really got a chance to articulate the finer points of legalization. Until we get longer fairer interviews, I'm not convinced that these TV spots do any good.""I have to disagree with Scott's post. Dogmatic idiots like O'Reilly and his 'chronic' (pun intended) listeners can't be schooled. Not by reasoned argument, anyway. That's the big problem re. all the societal problems we face: there's so many dogmatic idiots, and way too many of them, like O'Reilly, have public megaphones via corporate sponsored mass media. Imo, it's better to just accept that quite a few people are unreachable, and instead, try to reach those who still have a modicum of intelligent open-mindedness." I understand how one could conclude that our efforts are undermined when a prominent voice like O'Reilly speaks out against us before a massive television audience, nor would I argue that there's no such thing as bad publicity for the cause of drug policy reform. But Bill O'Reilly's brand of dubious DEA-derived data and authoritarian posturing is unlikely to come as a major revelation to anyone in his audience. His tactics are nothing more than classic prohibitionist nonsense; the same stuff that's failed quite consistently to turn back our momentum.Over and over again, O'Reilly's attacks have come from a defensive stance, as he reacts to our efforts by condemning the latest drug reform book or campaign. In the process, he inadvertently presents and legitimizes our argument before an audience that we'd otherwise struggle to reach. He props up reform leaders with primetime television exposure and further establishes the now-undeniable rise of drug policy reform into the realm of mainstream political debate. In the meantime, support for drug policy reform among conservatives surges like never before and national support for marijuana legalization has never been higher than it is today.So if I had a choice between O'Reilly attacking us every day of the week, or ignoring us entirely, I'd choose the former without hesitation. If you don't think it's possible to advance a political agenda by quarreling with Bill O'Reilly, consider the fact that Al Franken is now a U.S. Senator.
Criminals Arenât the Only Ones Getting Killed in the Drug War
Via Pete Guither, here's another breathtaking example of the drug war's indiscriminate violence:President Calderón has sought to make his drug war palatable by asserting that the countryâs war deadâestimated at 23,000 since January 2006 for the country as a wholeâdeserved to die: their deaths implicate them in illegal activities.When he first learned about what Juarenses have come to call the âmassacre at Villas de Salvarcar,â Calderón hinted that the thirteen teenagers who died at the hands of professional executioners were common criminals and city low life. He could not have been more wrong. In fact they were honor students and athletes who had gathered to celebrate a friendâs seventeenth birthday. They had the misfortune of belonging to a football club whose initials, âAA,â were mistaken for the initials of the Sinaloa cartelâs local enforcers, the Artistic Assassins. And so, in the middle of the night, while the teens danced in a room cleared of furniture, they were gunned down. Seven hours later, when the first daylight photos were taken, the concrete floor where they died still glistened with their clotting blood. [Boston Review]It's sickening that the Mexican President would dare insinuate that these innocent young victims somehow deserved their fate, but misplacing blame is an essential and instinctive defense mechanism when drug warriors are confronted with the consequences of their desperate crusade. None of this comes as a surprise, but it does bother me that this incident happened back in January and I overlooked it amidst the overwhelming number of bloody tragedies just like this one that take place every day in Mexico.We couldn't ask for a more perfect exhibit in the complete failure of drug prohibition on every imaginable level. At this point, the only thing that still surprises me is that so many among us persist in failing to understand what the problem is.
How to Get Away with Growing 100,000 Marijuana Plants
Just plant them in the woods:Nearly 100,000 marijuana plants were found growing at four illegal farms in the San Bernardino National Forest, authorities said Tuesday.â¦No arrests have been made, said officials with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and the U.S. Forest Service. [LA Times]If we can't even catch the people who do this, do you think they're ever going to stop? It should be obvious to anyone who's seen these same stories published every summer that the problem is just getting worse. These ridiculous pot wars in our national forests are profitable for both sides. The cops get to go hiking and collect their paychecks without even seeing an actual criminal, and the growers just plant more every year to ensure that the police never find it all. What fun.That's why police and illegal growers are united in their opposition to the legalization of marijuana.
Insite under attack once again
Vancouver's safe injection site is under attack again from the same source as always, the federal government. You would think these guys would learn.
NAACP Endorses Marijuana Legalization in California
This is encouraging: Saying that prohibition takes a heavy toll on minorities, leaders of the NAACP's California chapter announced Monday that they are backing passage of a marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot. The war on drugs is a failure and disproportionately targets young men and women of color, particularly African-American males, said Alice Huffman, president of the NAACP's state conference. The group cited statistics from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice showing that in 2009, 62% of the state's marijuana arrests were of nonwhite suspects and that 42% were under 20. [LA Times] Finding support for reform within communities of color has been a continuing challenge for our movement, and NAACP deserves credit for stepping up and taking the right stance for the right reasons.
Another Cover Story Ruined by Stupid Pot Jokes
Paul Waldman points out the latest example of incredibly dumb marijuana reporting, courtesy of a cover story in National Journal:The matter at hand is typically dearer to the stoner minds of the Grateful Dead "Truckin'" crowd: marijuana legalization -- as in the blissful freedom to light up a bowl in one's own home, purely for one's own pleasure (crank up the stereo and pass the chips, giggle, giggle), and to grow small amounts of the weed on one's own property, too. Says one dazed pot-head to another: Is this a great country, or what? It's an unbelievable mouthful of lame clichés and stereotypes, rendered self-evidently frivolous by the fact that National Journal decided to run a cover story about this in the first place. If only a few wasted hippies cared about the issue, we wouldn’t be talking about it, would we? The modern debate over marijuana policy in America bears no resemblance to these ignorant characterizations, and anyone who still views the issue through that lens has nothing to add to the conversation. If having to read such thoughtless crap is our punishment for driving this issue into the political mainstream, I suppose it's a small price to pay.
Seeing the Trend....
About ~ our privacy is at risk and nobody seems to make heads or tails of this. Ongoing debate? i'm not sure this would even be considered a 'free country' if this were done.'
John Stossel Debates Drug Laws with Sean Hannity
If you haven't seen John Stossel's awesome drug war episode yet, here's Part 1, in which Stossel takes on Sean Hannity:My favorite part is when Hannity says, "Itâs a 100 percent certainty. Crack addicts will kill to get more crack." That's weird, because I see crack users asking for money on the streets of D.C. all the time, and they've never even attempted to kill me. Am I doing something wrong?
The Rape of Justice!
The rape of justice, the guardian of liberty is an assault on the American dream!
Sarah Palin and the Marijuana Legalization Debate
These comments from Sarah Palin last week are continuing to generate discussion:"If we're talking about pot, I'm not for the legalization of pot, because I think that would just encourage our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it and I'm not an advocate for that.However, I think we need to prioritize our law enforcement efforts. And if somebody is going to smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in and clean up some of the other problems we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do and not concentrate on such a, relatively speaking, minimal problem that we have in the country."Mike Huckabee responded with a bizarre joke about Palin doing cocaine on TV, and Ryan McNeely has a good piece addressing the absurdity of defending marijuana laws while simultaneously asking that they not be enforced. Unfortunately, The Economist departed from its typically superb drug policy coverage with a strange defense of Palin's remarks:Basically, while Sarah Palin's position on this issue, as on many others, is semi-deliberately incoherent, it is in this case a semi-deliberate incoherence that has proven to be effective policy in many countries, and I'm not even sure it's the wrong stance on the issue.The full argument is too rambling to quote (see for yourself), but the author's point is that marijuana isn't really even legal in the Netherlands, so maybe there's no need to legalize here either. It might make sense if we didn't have a massive blood-thirsty drug war army literally occupying our cities. Prohibition is a for-profit industry in America. It sustains itself through a vast campaign of propaganda and intimidation, and I doubt the solution is as simple as asking these guys to please calm down. The warriors who invade private homes in bulletproof bodysuits and murder small dogs for having the audacity to bark at them are not responsive to pleas for a more measured enforcement model. That the law authorizes their actions is the go-to excuse when their machine guns go off prematurely, and until that changes, neither will anything else. Nevertheless, the fact that Palin was able to create such a flurry of dialogue with a few casual comments is testament to her potency as an advocate for whatever half-measures she's willing to stand for. And the fact that FOX News is now employing people who will keep posing these questions to prominent political figures is pretty cool, too.
Supporting Harsh Drug Laws is Political Suicide in NY
Now that New York's famous Rockefeller drug laws have been scaled back, the issue is being used as a political weapon against those who failed to support reform:For many Democrats in Albany, it was a landmark achievement: the long-sought overhaul of New Yorkâs strict Rockefeller-era drug laws, repealing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders that critics said disproportionately and unfairly fell on blacks and Latinos.But that legislative victory last year has emerged as a litmus test in the increasingly bitter five-way Democratic primary battle for attorney general.â¦"The reforms resonate powerfully in the African-American community," said David S. Birdsell, dean of the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College. "It is also a signature piece of progressive legislation for an increasingly large part of the Democratic primary base. It's a litmus test for progressive voters and an appeal to a group that was disproportionately harmed by the old laws." [NYT]You couldnât ask for a better example of how quickly drug war politics are evolving. For decades, our political culture has clung to the conventional wisdom that endorsing drug law reform was instant career suicide. Now we're beginning to see candidates getting burned for failing to endorse reform. That doesn't mean you can now get elected president on a meth legalization platform, but it should come as a harsh warning to any elected official who thinks they can still sell voters on stupid anti-drug stereotypes from the Reagan years. Certain reform issues now enjoy majority public support and others are surging in that direction. If you're not ready to embrace and champion reform, that's one thing, but it should at least be clear that shrouding yourself proudly in the drug war battle-flag is no longer a smart campaign strategy.
Ethan Nadelmann Destroys Bill O'Reilly in Drug War Debate
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up:As I've said in the past, we should be nothing short of thrilled that Bill O'Reilly is as big a drug war idiot as he is. Sure, he has his devotees, but an awful lot of people form their political identity around believing the opposite of anything he says. O'Reilly's recent obsession with trashing Sting and the Drug Policy Alliance is exposing his audience to ideas you won't often hear on primetime FOX News programming.Hopefully, getting schooled by Ethan hasn't dampened O'Reilly's enthusiasm for ranting mindlessly about drugs.
Radley Balko Discusses Botched Drug Raids on FOX
John Stossel's new show on Fox Business Network is off to an impressive start with an hour-long assault on prohibition titled Drug War Disaster. Here's a segment featuring Radley Balko and Cheye Calvo: You can (and should) watch the entire episode here. At the very least, check out the opening segment in which Stossel crushes Sean Hannity in a drug policy debate. It's truly priceless.
Government-Sponsored Murder in the Name of Prohibition
This fascinating piece in Slate recalls the government's seldom-discussed effort to enforce alcohol prohibition by poisoning people:Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.It's a nightmarish tale of prohibitionist lunacy that's worth reading in its entirety. Government officials were viciously calculating in their actions and callously blamed naïve drinkers for the consequences. Today, prohibition kills people in different, yet equally abhorrent and unnecessary ways. Its advocates continue to deny responsibility for the predictable and inevitable consequences of the policies they defend and the death toll has grown to incalculable proportions, spanning the globe. The drug war leaves sickness and murder in its wake at every turn, yet many among us remain blind to the lessons learned nearly a century ago.
StoptheDrugWar.org on Huffington Post
I have started blogging on Huffington Post. Check out my first post there, SWAT Raids: No One Is Safe. This is a basic statement laying out the case for why SWAT deployments are now out-of-control and need to be dramatically reined in. Sadly, even more outrageous and infuriating evidence of the need for SWAT to be reined in has already come out, as Scott's latest post here last night demonstrates. If you'd like to follow me on Huffington Post on a regular basis, visit my page there to make use one of the subscription options -- make sure to "like" the page on Facebook too. I will also be writing more editorials over the coming months in our own Drug War Chronicle newsletter; check out the latest one if you haven't already, here.