Arrests

A massive DEA operation featuring dozens of heavily armed agents and at least four helicopters ended with the arrests of five people in California's Lake County last week. According to California NORML, the arrests are believed to be the first since the Obama administration announced it would not persecute medical marijuana providers in states where it is legal unless they violated both state and federal law. The DEA seized 154 marijuana plants from Upper Lake resident Tom Carter, and arrested him, former UMCC dispensary operator Scott Feil and his wife, Steven Swanson, and Brett Bassignani. Carter is a registered medical marijuana patient and provider, and his wife, Jamie Ceridono, told the Lake County News he was growing for several patients and his grow was legal under state law. The genesis of the bust appears to lie with an alleged May deal between a DEA informant and Bassignani to purchase marijuana. According to documents filed by Carter's federal defenders late last week, the informant claimed to have arranged to buy marijuana from Carter and to have left a voicemail message for Carter to set up the deal. That same informant allegedly made a deal to buy marijuana from Bassignani. In the document, the federal defenders said prosecutors made no claim that Carter ever heard the phone message the informant allegedly called and that they set out no evidence linking Carter and the informant. "All the complaint says is that another individual, Mr. Bassignani, called the informant, claimed he worked for 'Carter Construction,' and arranged a marijuana deal," Carter's defense attorneys wrote. "The deal later took place, and the only other reference to Mr. Carter is the conclusory claim that the informant 'had agreed on the price with Carter.' No context, no specifics, and no other information is provided in the complaint which indicates that Mr. Carter in fact talked to the informant, arranged a marijuana deal, and indicated that he (Carter) was knowingly involved in a marijuana transaction." Moving that the two felony counts of marijuana trafficking against Carter be dismissed, the attorneys added: "This complaint is sadly deficient with regard to whether Mr. Carter has done anything to indicate that he conspired to break the law. It should be dismissed accordingly." It is unclear why Feil and his wife were arrested. They are neighbors of Carter and his wife. Carter and Feil are being held in Oakland, where they are set to have initial detention hearings today and tomorrow. Federal prosecutors have asked that Carter be held pending trial "on the basis of flight risk and danger to the community." Carter is a long-time resident of Upper Lake, prominent construction contractor, and community benefactor. "California already has enough federal marijuana criminals," said CANORML coordinator Dale Gieringer, "It's time for concrete changes in federal law." While the Obama administration has announced it would no go after law-abiding medical marijuana providers, the DEA has conducted at least two raids against providers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, although there have been no arrests in those cases. The administration has not announced any changes in federal laws or regulations around medical marijuana, and Bush appointees continue to serve in the DEA and the US Attorney's Office of Northern California, which is prosecuting the case.

One of the most pernicious lies in the marijuana debate is that police aren't aggressively working to arrest people for small amounts of pot. They are. Although there are parts of the country where marijuana is a low priority for police, there are also places like New York City, where police have developed finely tuned mechanisms for arresting and convicting as many minor marijuana offenders as humanly possible.

What makes New York City's epic war on marijuana so remarkable is not just the staggering number of arrests (more than any other city on earth), but the despicable methods that are used to achieve that result. First, police must work their way around the fact that 1) possession of small amounts of marijuana is decriminalized in New York and 2) the 4th Amendment forbids searching people against their will without evidence of a crime.

Basically, the program consists of stopping large numbers of people (primarily young black and Hispanic men) for no reason and then saying this:

"We're going to have to search you. If you have anything illegal you should show it to us now. If we find something when we search you, you'll have to spend the night in jail. But if you show us what you have now, maybe we can just give you a ticket. And if it’s nothing but a little weed, maybe we can let you go. So if you’ve got anything you’re not supposed to have, take it out and show it now.”

When police say this, the young people usually take out their small amount of marijuana and hand it over. Their marijuana is now "open to public view." And that – having a bit of pot out and open to be seen – technically makes it a crime, a fingerprintable offense. And for cooperating with the police, the young people are handcuffed and jailed. [Alternet]

Amazingly, you're not actually guilty of a crime until you attempt to cooperate with police. It is literally the act of showing them your stash that is a violation of the law and everything they say up until that point is designed to trick you into doing that. As is so often the case, policing in the war on drugs consists of tricking people into breaking the law so that the law can then be enforced.

Don't let anybody tell you we're not waging a war on marijuana users in America. That's exactly what we're doing and that's why marijuana policy reform has nothing do with people wanting to get high. This is about justice, human rights, and common sense. To jettison these principles because of marijuana is an act of unfathomable lunacy.

Just remember, the drug war is here to protect potential drug users from danger:



The poor man died on the scene with a broken bone in his throat and according to Chief Deputy Ard of the Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office, "there's no regret" about what happened. Check out Ryan Grim's chilling interview at the Huffington Post, in which Ard rambles in defense of using these sorts of tactics in the war on drugs.

Inevitably, when police are done investigating their own actions, it will be determined that everyone followed procedure. And that may very well be the case, because police are generally encouraged to choke the hell out of anyone who they suspect of attempting to swallow drug evidence.

The larger question -- and the one no police investigation would dare attempt to address – is whether a rational and humane drug policy would produce outcomes like this. How many among us can watch police literally squeeze the life out of this frightened man and say that justice has been served? How many among us would call that a fair sentence for the crime of possessing and attempting to conceal a small bag of drugs?

The police say they released this footage because they believe it vindicates the officers involved. Yet, in the process, they've indicted the very foundations of the war on drugs itself. Once again, we may watch with our own eyes as our drug laws destroy everything they were supposed to protect.

I wrote about the Will Foster case in the Chronicle last week. Here's a brief summary: Foster had a small medical marijuana garden in Tulsa that was raided in 2005. Two years later, he was sentenced to an insane 93 YEARS in prison. Only after a publicity campaign in which DRCNet played a vital role was he resentenced to merely 20 years, and after being twice denied parole, he was paroled to California. Although Oklahoma thought Foster should be on parole until 2011, California decided he didn't need any more state supervision and released him from parole after three years. That wasn't punitive enough for Oklahoma. Although Foster had left the Bible Belt state behind with no intention of ever returning, Oklahoma parole officials issued a parole violation warrant for his extradition to serve out the remainder of his sentence. When Foster had to show ID in a police encounter, the warrant popped up, and he was jailed. Desperate, Foster filed a writ of habeas corpus and won! A California judge ruled the warrant invalid, and Foster was a free man again. But not for long. It's thirst for vengeance still unslaked, the state of Oklahoma issued yet another parole violation warrant for Foster's extradition because he refused to agree to an extension of his parole to 2015--four years past the original Oklahoma parole date. Then he got raided in California, thanks to bad information from an informant with an axe to grind. Foster had a legal medical marijuana grow, but it took a hard-headed Sonoma County prosecutor more than a year to drop charges, and Foster has been jailed the whole time. Now that the charges have been dropped, Foster still isn't free because Oklahoma still wants him back. Extradition warrants have been signed by the governors of both states, and he was days away from being extradited in shackles when he filed a new habeas writ this week. Filing the writ will stop him from being sent back to Oklahoma, but it also means he's stuck in jail for the foreseeable future. The writ is a legal strategy; his real best hope is to get one of those governors to rescind the extradition order. You can help. Click on this link to find out how to write the governors. I think a campaign of letters to the editor of Oklahoma papers might help, too. Those letters might ask why Oklahoma wants to continue to spend valuable tax dollars to persecute a harmless man whose only crime was to try to get some relief for his ailments--and who has no intention of ever returning there. ...So, anyway, I went to see Will at the Sonoma County Jail Saturday night. But I didn't get in. The steel-toes in my footwear set off the metal detector, and I quickly found out such apparel was a security risk. Who knew? I'll go back later this week. I guess I'll wear sandals. In the meantime, there are letters waiting to be written. Keyboard commandos, saddle up!

Law enforcement likes to argue that it needs to resort to heavy-handed tactics such as SWAT-style raids and no-knock warrants because drug law enforcement is just so darned dangerous. You know the spiel: "We're outgunned and up against crazed drug dealers, so we need to come on like gangbusters for our own safety." But I'm in the process of reviewing police deaths in the drug war since the beginning of 2008 for a Chronicle article that will appear Friday, and so far, I've only found two officers who were killed in drug raids during this time. I'm using the Officer Down Memorial Page and the National Law Enforcement Memorial data bases and I still have to dig a little deeper into the numbers and the discrepancies between the two, but so far, it doesn't appear that enforcing the nation's drug laws is that dangerous for police. For civilians, it is perhaps a different story. Nobody's keeping a data base of citizens killed by the police, let alone those killed by police enforcing the drug laws, although I have a few ideas on where to come up with some figures, or at least some especially horrendous cases. I'll be looking into that, as well. I'll be talking to as many cops, criminologists, and other interested parties as I can, but at this point, it seems that it is going to be hard to justify the overwhelming use of force typical of police drug raids. As much as they would like to think they are, cops are not US military Special Forces units, and drug law violators are not terrorist fugitives. Look for the story on Friday.

This is simply jawdropping:



The results of the study are available in the MPP-funded report False Positives Equal False Justice.

This research has quite far-reaching implications when you consider the massive number of drug arrests performed each year based on the results of these inaccurate field tests. With nearly a million marijuana arrests in the U.S. every year, the number of people convicted of marijuana possession who never actually had marijuana is certainly much larger than zero. I'd also like to know what other countries use these tests and what procedures exist to confirm the results before suspects are charged and sentenced.

It's a powerfully disturbing development and yet another reminder that nothing in the war on drugs is what it seems. When you pull back the curtain, every stage in the drug prohibition process is exposed as utterly fraudulent and perverted. Literally nothing that happens in the war on drugs is reliably correct.

I wouldn't have though it possible…but if we can't even trust police to accurately identify the drugs they're arresting people for, the drug war is somehow even more shockingly stupid and unfair than I thought.

Via DrugWarRant:

ERWIN, Tenn. -- A man was been arrested after police said he used counterfeit money to purchase fake OxyContin pills from an undercover officer.

Unicoi County Sheriff's deputies arrested a 21-year-old man on Tuesday and charged him with criminal conspiracy with schedule II drugs, forgery and criminal simulation. [Pantagraph.com]

It's almost funny, except the part where this poor bastard goes to jail for some drugs that never even existed.

Yesterday, we learned that eight people have been arrested in the aftermath of the Michael Phelps bong photo and the infamous bong itself has been captured and taken into custody. As new details emerge, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there really is a serious campaign underway to prosecute Michael Phelps:

The effort to prosecute Phelps on what would be at most a minor drug charge seem extreme compared to similar cases, lawyers said, and have led some to question whether the sheriff is being overzealous because he's dealing with a celebrity.
…
The investigators appear to be trying to build a case against Phelps from others — a tactic normally used to bring down drug dealers with a large amounts of cocaine or methamphetamine, not someone who smoked marijuana five months ago, said Chip Price, a Greenville attorney who has dealt with drug cases for 33 years. [AP]

There’s not much left to say about this that I haven’t said already, so I’ll say it again: Sheriff Leon Lott and his henchmen are unhinged drug war lunatics wielding their unchecked powers as arbitrarily and embarrassingly as humanly possible.

To my knowledge, next to no one on the planet supports this ridiculous crusade. So I can only hope that this very visible example of vindictive marijuana enforcement serves to focus public attention on the often pathetic behavior of our supposedly heroic drug war soldiers. Just look at them. Look at what they are doing. And remember that this episode is hardly the first or only time the drug warriors have allowed childish and obsessive pursuits to triumph over the public interest.

If they think destroying Michael Phelps is a good idea, imagine all the other wretched crap they’ve done that you don’t even know about.

The New York Post has a horrible story alleging that NYPD officers sodomized a marijuana suspect with a walkie talkie. Sounds pretty bad, but I should note that former cop and current LEAP member Peter Moskos has doubts about the accuracy of the reports.

Even if that story turns out to be false, this one is very true.

If anything resembling success ever happens in the drug war, this would be it:

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) — Mexican security forces have arrested the drug cartel leader Eduardo Arellano Félix, one of the international traffickers most sought by the United States, after a shootout in this border city, the government said Sunday.
…
The police arrested Mr. Arellano Félix on Saturday after they chased his car to a three-story home in an upscale neighborhood, according to federal police officials in Tijuana. A three-hour gun battle with more than 100 police officers and soldiers ensued, leaving the home riddled with bullet holes.

The United States indicted Mr. Arellano Félix in 2003 on drug-smuggling and money-laundering charges and had offered a reward of up to $5 million for his capture. [NYT]

In the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, we'll still shell out $5 million for a trivial symbolic victory in the war on drugs. Everything returns to normal tomorrow. The drugs keep flowing, the bullets keep flying, and our generous reward money will help pay for it. Who do you think it was that gave up Eduardo Arellano Félix? Who has that kind of information? You can bet we'll never find out, but I'd give 10 -1 odds it's one of his own people, who now gets a promotion plus a hefty reward, all while making sure the cocaine train never falls a minute behind schedule.

Even in its finest hour, the drug war is nothing but a predictably mindless ritual.