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United Nations Admits that Drug Legalization is Gaining Support
For many years now, drug war supporters have relied on a political strategy of pretending that legalization isnât a serious option. Only a crazy person would even consider such a thing, they claim, as exemplified last year by a statement from the UN drug czar that drug policy reformers are a bunch of "lunatics" who are "obviously on drugs." Well, it looks like that's beginning to change. This year's World Drug Report 2009 from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime begins by dedicating its very first page to the idea of legalizing drugs. Of late, there has been a limited but growing chorus among politicians, the press, and even in public opinion saying: drug control is not working. The broadcasting volume is still rising and the message spreading.Much of this public debate is characterized by sweeping generalizations and simplistic solutions. Yet, the very heart of the discussion underlines the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the current approach.What follows is an utterly fact-free attack on the legalization argument, relying on all the typical prohibitionist assumptions we've heard before: use will skyrocket, societies will be thrown into decay, and the decades of drug war progress we've supposedly made will be washed away in a raging torrent of death and despair. It's annoying, to be sure, but it's equally beautiful to behold the sudden desperation and discomfort of the international drug war leadership. They now stand before us, stained and stigmatized by the grand and unambiguous failure of the policies upon which they once proudly placed their names.It is truly a milestone for the drug policy reform movement that the drug war leaders of the world are now decidedly on the defensive.Update: Pete Guither has more over at DrugWarRant.Â
You Don't Need Drug Laws to Punish People Who Steal
The idea that our drug policy should prioritize public health over law enforcement is such common sense that even the drug czar is comfortable saying it. Yet Warren County, OH prosecutor Rachel Hutzel has bravely attempted to refute this emerging conventional wisdom in a perfectly incoherent editorial entitled Many drug offenders need punishment, not just treatment:Many thefts are committed to get drug money. The majority of traffic-related deaths are drug or alcohol-related. And personal crimes such as child endangering and domestic violence are usually fueled by drugs or alcohol.â¦Many drug crimes should continue to be dealt with harshly. The people who are harmed by the selfish, destructive acts of drug users and drug dealers deserve nothing less.Wait, I didn't hear anyone say anything about not punishing thieves, drunk drivers, and child endangerers. I'm pretty sure everyone's in agreement about that. If someone steals, can't you prosecute them for stealing? Am I missing something?The abundance of crimes with actual victims is all the more reason to stop wasting criminal justice resources on people whose only crime was taking a drug that isn't allowed.
Police Raid Innocent Elderly Couple, Blame it on the Weather
Police in Indianapolis burst into the wrong and terrified an elderly couple, but they have an explanation:Officers were trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on drug charges. The address listed on the paperwork was 4042. The Mintonâs home is 4048, with both house numbers clearly marked.But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriffâs Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies.I've heard a lot of weak excuses for botched drug raids, but this is just classic. As is often the case in such scenarios, the explanation serves only to make police sound even more confused and incompetent than they already did. Seriously, if you can't even see what you're doing, then don't burst into private homes with your guns drawn. A word of advice to the Mintons: you should sue these people silly. The admission that their vision was obstructed at the time of the raid, though utterly disingenuous, is tantamount to gross negligence. I'd just love to see them on the stand trying to explain this.
Police Applaud Themselves For Raiding Innocent People and Killing Dogs
Police in Prince George's County, MD have completed their internal investigation of the botched raid on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo. Their disgusting, though unsurprising, conclusion is that they did a terrific job:The findings of the internal review "are consistent with what I've felt all along: My deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities," Sheriff Michael Jackson said at a news conference.â¦"I'm sorry for the loss of their family pets," Jackson said. "But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success." [Washington Post]Except that they could easily have intercepted the package before it was ever delivered, thereby eliminating the need for the violent raid entirely. Killing the dogs was completely unrelated to the goal of intercepting the drugs and it's just supremely dishonest to equate those two outcomes. Radley Balko has more on the fundamental incoherence underlying these latest claims from the PG County Sheriff's Office.In the end, Sheriff Jackson is making a powerful statement to the public: this could happen to you. He's proud of his officers' actions and he has no intention of trying to prevent this from happening again. Cheye Calvo filed a lawsuit today that will hopefully change that.
Marijuana Debate on CNN
Rob Kampia's closing line is right on target. As the debate heats up, we're seeing our opposition desperately invoke the horrors of alcohol and tobacco in a cynical attempt to frame legalization in a familiar and negative context. The simple response is that those drugs are far more dangerous. The harms they cause are only relevant to the discussion insofar as they illustrate the mindless hypocrisy of our marijuana laws. If the most workable alcohol and tobacco policy is legalization, then the same must absolutely be true of marijuana.
Is DEA Illegally Forcing Agents to Serve in Afghanistan?
Interesting piece from McClatchy:WASHINGTON â As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not being properly equipped.In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.They're suing and it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Their argument is that DEA agents are technically civilians and can only be sent into a war zone voluntarily. Makes sense to me. Of course, I'm sympathetic to any argument that begins with "the DEA shouldnât be doing thisâ¦"
Undercover Trooper commits suicide after my husbands trial, Corruption in a small town
There was a life that was lost due to the trial of my husbands and several others. the corrupt police in a small town in upstate ny who are racially motivated.
Mac attack
I was playing poker about a week ago and after about 8 beers and half a mickey of rum I whacked the computer table after losing with a boat to a straight flush.It was about the 15th such hand in the s
Cannabis Debate At FOX KMPH
I often post cannabis news on the KMPH Community Correspondent website, and lately there have been some interesting and almost comical responses to my posts.
FOX News Says Marijuana Will Eat Your Soul
Or something like that. It's amazing what passes for science when it comes to selling scare stories about pot. You could send these people a press release saying that marijuana has been proven to increase your chances of turning into a lizard and they would publish something about it immediately. I guarantee it. It would never occur to them that there are no lizard people.
The Feds Are Giving Themselves New Drug War Powers
You see, the reason the drug war is going so badly is because it needs more power:WASHINGTON (AP) â U.S. immigration agents soon will get expanded powers to fight Mexican drug cartels, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Wednesday.Elephants? If he gave them elephants, I'd be impressed for once. But actually it's a little more mundane than that:Under a new deal aimed at settling a long-running turf dispute with the Drug Enforcement Administration, more agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would get authority to investigate drug cases.Hell, they should give me the authority to investigate drug cases, because I see suspicious stuff going down on the streets of D.C. all the time. Of course, if the feds in Washington can't even win the drug war that's happening right under their nose, you gotta wonder why they think more drug investigations are going to change anything at the border.
Sharks Filled With Cocaine!!!
It was really just a matter of time if you think about it:The lengths to which drug smugglers will go to conceal their consignments was revealed when the Mexican navy said it had seized more than a tonne of cocaine stuffed inside frozen shark carcasses.Masked naval officers cut open more than 20 carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a cargo ship in a container port in the state of Yucatan. [The Guardian]Maybe the drug traffickers should train live sharks to smuggle cocaine, because that would be awesome and nobody would mess with them. Actually, if the drug war continues long enough, it's statistically probable that it will happen. Regardless, this is another one of those crazy stories that just shows how ridiculous the drug war has become. Things like this arenât supposed to happen, and if our drug policy made any sense, they wouldn't.
How Many Innocent People Are in Jail on Drug Charges?
It's a question I've often pondered and one that anybody with strong opinions about drug policy should consider, regardless of where you stand on the issue. Surely, there exists no realistic formula with which to approximate an answer, but one need only observe and understand what the drug war is and how it works to know that grave injustices are forever embedded into the drug war equation. The question resurfaced this week in an AP report that tells the story of Jose and Maximo Colon. The brothers were arrested and charged with cocaine distribution stemming from an alleged encounter with undercover officers in a sketchy NY bar. The case imploded when surveillance tape from the establishment revealed that the pair had simply not committed the crime or even interacted with the agents. They were arrested moments later by a back-up team, without a clue as to the reason why. Worse still, an outdoor camera captured footage of the undercover investigators "literally dancing down the street" afterwards, apparently pleased with their accomplishment. It's a striking and gratuitous example of police misconduct to be sure, but the larger question is how many similar cases have led to convictions and prison time for their victims:Jose quickly got the tape to defense attorney Rochelle Berliner, a former narcotics prosecutor. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.''I almost threw up,'' she said. ''Because I must've prosecuted 1,500, 2,000 drug cases ... and all felonies. And I think back, Oh my God, I believed everything everyone told me. Maybe a handful of times did something not sound right to me. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic but I was like, sick.''If it were only possible somehow to reveal the full scope of wrongful, fraudulent convictions in the war on drugs, I don't doubt that the entire nation would be stunned and sickened. Yet, for anyone who's paying attention, it's not necessary to fantasize about the true extent of injustice and corruption that the drug war has unleashed on innocent people. You can read about it in the newspaper all the time.In Ohio, we saw a DEA agent indicted for helping frame 17 innocent people. In Atlanta, we saw police plant drugs in the home of an innocent 88-year-old woman after shooting her to death. In Tulia, TX we saw a rogue narcotics officer frame and arrest most of the black people in town. In Hearne, TX we saw the same damn thing. And across the country, we've seen dozens of innocent people who might well have ended up in prison if they hadn't been killed first by the police who raided their homes.Behind all of this lies a matrix of perverse incentives, loose evidentiary requirements, and diminished accountability mechanisms that make mind-blowing miscarriages of justice more than inevitable. A central element of modern drug enforcement involves the use of informants, who trade information on other people for leniency in their own criminal cases. They have every incentive to lie and they do so constantly, as we've seen over and over again. Prosecutors offer leniency in exchange for "substantial assistance" in helping convict others, a practice that inherently favors the guiltiest party. Inevitably, those most directly involved in a criminal conspiracy are armed with names and other critical details that prosecutors crave, while peripheral players and innocent bystanders who become entangled in drug investigations are placed at a remarkable disadvantage.Of course, it shouldn't be necessary to persuade anyone that our drug laws are designed to make things easy for police and hard for criminal suspects. These vast drug war powers are bestowed on police and prosecutors by legislators who are eager to provide law-enforcement with every necessary tool in the fight against crime. That much power creates countless innocent casualties even at the hands of our most honest public servants, and it's a nightmare when passed along to corrupt cops like the men who framed the Colon brothers. Yet, when these dramatic fiascoes get exposed, police can often be found downplaying it and insisting that you can't fight the drug war without these sorts of aggressive and dirty tactics. If that's even remotely true, then the war on drugs is just far too filthy and corrupt to tolerate in a free and civil society.
Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Are Coming to Rhode Island
It's official:PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The House and Senate on Tuesday each overrode Governor Carcieri's veto of legislation allowing three "compassion centers" to dispense medical marijuana.The Senate vote was 35 to 3. The House vote was unanimous, 67 to 0.For the bill to become law, both houses were required to overide the veto of their own and the other house's bill. The measure is now in effect.It's just inspiring to see an entire state legislature stand up in unison to protect patients. Carcieri's veto was driven by the same petty, false, and widely-refuted propaganda that's been deployed in desperation against medical marijuana legislation for more than a decade now:In vetoing the bills, Carcieri said he thought "the increased availability, along with a complacent attitude, will no doubt result in increased usage, and will negatively impact the children of Rhode Island" and complicate the jobs of law enforcement officers.Think about how remarkable it is that virtually the entire House and Senate of Rhode Island have come forth and firmly rejected this garbage. There was a time when reformers were all alone on this issue, yet today it is our opposition that stands isolated and estranged from public opinion.The folks at the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition deserve a big round of applause for taking on this battle and winning by knockout.
"Tough on Drugs" Politics Just Aren't as Popular Anymore
The Rolling Stone piece I mentioned earlier also contains an excellent observation from drug policy expert/centrist Mark Kleiman, with regards to the new administration's pledge to respect state medical marijuana laws:"There are two striking things about that," says Mark Kleiman, who directs the study of drug policy at UCLA. "One was that the administration thought that they could get away with it. And the other is that they did! There was no outcry, or even an attempt at an outcry. The administration clearly thinks that being 'soft on drugs' is no longer a political vulnerability. And it looks like they're right."This perfectly illustrates the emergence of the new drug war politics. The long-standing consensus within our political culture that the public demands harsh drug laws is just pure fiction. Test that theory any way you want and it will fail to deliver every time. State-level marijuana reforms passed by colossal margins in 2008, support for legalization is polling at record levels, and legalization repeatedly emerged as America's top political issue according to public votes on the president's own website. We are cascading towards a remarkable moment when the politics of drug policy are revealed to be far removed from what many believed them to be.
An Embarrassing Interview With the Drug Czar
Rolling Stone's June issue takes an in-depth look at the evolving political climate surrounding drug policy (a portion is available online), including a deliciously embarrassing visit with drug czar Gil Kerlikowske. Remember Kerlikowske's recent statement about not calling it a "war on drugs" anymore? Well, guess what he's got in his office:â¦despite this sudden outbreak of sanity, rumors of the drug war's death are greatly exaggerated. Visitors to the drug czar's office in Washington â formally known as the Office of National Drug Control Policy â are greeted by the visage of Uncle Sam on a poster declaring, WE ARE AT WAR. ARE YOU DOING ALL YOU CAN?You really couldnât ask for a better exhibit in the total incoherence and rank dishonesty of the drug czar's claim that our drug policy isnât a war. I don't blame him for trying and it's certainly encouraging that we've reached a point at which the drug war is so controversial that they're trying to change its name. But how could they possibly forget to take down the damn sign? I mean, really, did they forget that Rolling Stone was stopping by?The story goes on to brilliantly juxtapose Kerlikowske's law-enforcement credentials against his comical inability to answer basic questions about the issues he works on:Yet when faced with questions about national drug policy, he can turn as evasive as Sarah Palin without a teleprompter. Does the tripling of marijuana arrests since 1990 represent good policy? He'd like to look at the issue more closely. Would the feds respect the laws of states that vote to legalize marijuana consumption for adults? A great question, he says â but one he wonât venture to answer. Does the U.S. experience with Plan Columbia provide a template for dealing with the violent cartels in Mexico? He just doesn't know. "After three weeks, I'm still finding my way around the office," he says with a laugh.The whole thing is a brutal embarrassment and a vivid illustration of the appalling intellectual bankruptcy that characterizes the government's position on drug policy in general. These are extremely basic policy questions, but they have serious implications. If you can't even begin to make informative statements about federal policy, then what right do you have to dismiss calls for reform? Is there even a shred of legitimacy to Kerlikowke's opposition to legalization if he can't even tell us what the current policy is supposed to be? We spend billions of dollars and imprison millions of people in honor of this great anti-drug crusade and the people running the whole thing in Washington canât even figure out what to call it, let alone give us a straight answer about why any of this is in the best interest of the nation. In fairness, Kerlikowske's reluctance to defend or even discuss drug policy is a product of the reform movement's success at politicizing the issue and his silence likely owes more to caution than bald ignorance. Still, one is generally considered to have won the debate when their opponent refuses to speak.  At this point, I'd only be mildly surprised to see these guys just clam up entirely and announce that our drug policy can't be publicly discussed for national security reasons.
Video: Milton Friedman on Marijuana Legalization
Even in a time of Democratic ascendancy, conservative voices for legalization remain important. This video of Milton Friedman discussing marijuana prohibition, posted by MPP, was brought to my attention in an email recently. Check it out, as well as the second part of it at MPP-TV. Check out this interview with Friedman about legalization of all drugs too.
Video: Crack Sentencing Reform Petition Delivered to Congress -- Former Prisoners, Family Members and Advocates Speak Out
Last month the "Crack the Disparity" Coalition delivered petitions signed by tens of thousands of people, calling for an end to the draconian US crack sentencing laws, to the offices of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Pat Leahy (D-VT), respective chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. This short video on ColorOfChange.org shows one of the deliveries, and features comments from Karen Garrison, whose two sons were unjustly caught up in these laws; and from Nkechi Taifa, who heads up justice reform efforts at the Open Society Policy Center. The ColorOfChange.org page devoted to this petition also features audio from the press conference, including former Major League baseball star Willie Mays Aikens, who served 14 years in federal prison after an untreated cocaine addiction drew him into the federal system with crack charges.
Video on Abuse of the Environment -- and of People -- in Colombia's Drug War, from "Witness for Peace"
"Shoveling Water" is a 25-minute documentary from the organization Witness for Peace on the impact of chemical spraying of Colombia's coca crop, in the words of people living with the effects on the ground. I have always felt this part of "Plan Colombia" as launched by President George Herbert Walker Bush -- expanded into the "Andean Initiative" by President Clinton -- to be particularly reckless. It doesn't take a chemist, nor even a medical doctor, to expect that dumping poisons into the environment might be bad for the life forms inhabiting that environment, including humans. Hopefully the madmen pushing for aerial fumigation of Afghanistan's opium crop will lose that fight at least, as they have so far. The tide is slowly turning in Andean drug policy as well. In the meanwhile, check out "Shoveling Water":
Charlie Lynch Sentenced to Jail for Medical Marijuana
Today, Charlie Lynch was sentenced to one year and one day in jail for operating a medical marijuana clinic that was legal under California state law. U.S. District Court Judge George Wu declined to impose the 5-year mandatory minimum that federal prosecutors deemed appropriate and I've been informed that the U.S. attorney was visibly upset with this outcome. In contrast, Reason reports that Lynch's attorneys "seem extremely happy and relieved with the sentence and are convinced they will knock it down much lower and that Lynch will not be in prison anytime soon."In that respect, today's outcome brings back memories of the government's epic campaign against Ed Rosenthal, in which federal prosecutors exhausted phenomenal resources, drew virulent public criticism, frustrated the trial judge, and ultimately walked away disappointed. Rosenthal's persecution and ultimate vindication galvanized national support for medical marijuana, thus the Lynch trial feels very much like a parting shot from an entrenched clan of desperate drug war demagogues who've all but expended their legal and political resources while alienating the American public at every turn.The fatal flaw in the federal war on medical marijuana has always been that if you try hard enough to put people in jail for it, you'll lend urgency and credibility to the movement for reform.