Drug WarRant

Big press conference today from all the dinosaurs of prohibition, with such names as Bill Bennett, John Walters, Peter Bensinger, Robert DuPont, Calvina Faye, David Evans, and more, pushing to get the Attorney General to speak out against the marijuana legalization votes in November. Here’s the press conference announcement. In small print at the bottom of the page:

This campaign was supported by Grant No. 2005-JL-FX-0128 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice….

Here’s another release from the event, featuring Calvina.

Here’s a slide, from the True Compassion site funded by our tax dollars, that apparently, in addition to being fact challenged, has less of a clue about the definition of irony than Alanis.

Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study. Advisors say no serious rise in consumption is likely if possession of small amounts of controlled drugs is allowed.

Front page major article in the Guardian tomorrow. Also front page of the London Times. This is pretty huge.

The panel didn’t go all the way to legalization, but it included decriminalization of all illicit drugs and even “minimal or no sanctions on those growing cannabis for personal use.”

Brad Pitt blasts U.S. ‘War on Drugs,’ calls for policy rethink in Reuters.

(Reuters) – Brad Pitt has thrown his weight behind a documentary that blasts America’s 40-year war on drugs as a failure, calling policies that imprison huge numbers of drug-users a “charade” in urgent need of a rethink.

The Hollywood actor came aboard recently as an executive producer of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in wide release in the United States on Friday.

Ahead of a Los Angeles screening, Pitt and Jarecki spoke passionately about the “War on Drugs” which, according to the documentary, has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for over 45 million arrests since 1971, and which preys largely on poor and minority communities.

“I know people are suffering because of it. I know I’ve lived a very privileged life in comparison and I can’t stand for it,” Pitt told Reuters on Friday, calling the government’s War on Drugs policy a “charade.”

Marijuana Legalization’s Tipping Point in The American Conservative.

“More people are recognizing that we cannot afford to continue arresting and prosecuting and locking up people for marijuana,” Angell says. “State legislators and city councilors across the country are now asking themselves, are we going to pay to arrest people for pot or fill some pot holes in the town?”

Just another isolated incident I can’t even keep track of how many “isolated” incidents Radley’s discussed this week. Go read his site and check them all out.

Will legal marijuana make police less effective? Check out this quote from where he basically admits that the police are completely incompetent at their job, so they need some fake reason to arrest people in order to accidentally get bad guys off the street. They’ve gotten so used to it, they don’t even realize how pathetic they sound.

As for who is being arrested now, Pat Slack, commander of the Snohomish Regional Drug Task Force, says it isn’t usually people who are just out to get high.

“Are there people in jail for possession of marijuana? Ya, there are, but most of ’em have violated a parole or probation,” he said.

In other words, he says, their marijuana use led them to do other things.

“So the judge has said you can’t use marijuana, because when you use marijuana you commit other crimes and then they get caught with it and they go to jail,” Slack said.

A handy tool

Slack, who is opposed to legalizing pot, says marijuana busts are an important part of law enforcement’s arsenal when it comes fighting crime.

For example, he says, as an officer, you might get a call to go to the local 7-11 because of a public disturbance. You get there and find the perpetrators have marijuana on them. You can book them and take them to jail.

Or, perhaps, you have a major crime case. The police can hold the suspect on a marijuana charge to buy time while they investigate.

“Whether it’s a robbery or murder or rape or burglary, or whatever. So, yeah, it’s a tool,” he said.

The ONDCP is wants you to Celebrate National Substance Abuse Month. Celebrate?

But “celebrate” isn’t the word that they keep abusing. It is, in fact, “abuse.” Check out their definition.

Millions of Americans suffer from substance abuse, which includes underage drinking, alcohol dependency, non-medical use of prescription drugs, abuse of over-the-counter medications, and illicit drug use. … This abuse touches all aspects of our communities and contributes to an estimated $193 billion in crime, health, and lost productivity costs.

I don’t think it means what they think it means.

It’s kind of like saying that all sex outside of marriage is sexual abuse since it hasn’t been authorized by some bureaucrat.

40 Years of Drug War Failure Represented in a Single Chart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWr0neESf-M&sns=em

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf9XPlRRvxE&sns=em

The prohibitionists know that the con game they have to sell is a pig in a poke that that the public has seen through, which is why they keep trying to put lipstick on it.

You have Kerlikowske, for example, constantly touting the notion that there is no drug war, and that the ONDCP is moving away from the extremes to a “third way” – a balanced approach including law enforcement. Of course, what all that gobbledegook means is that we have a drug war with some extra money for forced rehab.

It’s also a problem for the nation’s only full-time prohibition-spinner Kevin Sabet, as demonstrated in this debate with Ethan Nadelmann at Reason Marijuana and States’ Rights: A Reason Debate. Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann and Drug Policy Institute’s Kevin Sabet debate state cannabis initiatives.

Kevin had to know that the Reason crowd wouldn’t be too thrilled with prohibition, so he downplayed the effects of it. Ethan countered:

It’s not true – although I wish it were – that “most places punish the use of small amounts of marijuana similarly to a speeding ticket.” Few people are handcuffed or taken to a police station or incarcerated in a jail for speeding tickets, but all those indignities routinely are applied to people arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Government employees won’t lose their jobs for a speeding ticket but they may very well for a marijuana possession arrest. Punishment can be even more severe if the person arrested is among the roughly five million Americans on parole or probation, often for very minor offenses. Millions of Americans have suffered much worse than the equivalent of a speeding ticket in recent years for nothing more than being caught with a little marijuana.

Now Kevin has often tried to suggest that we shouldn’t treat mere possessors of marijuana so harshly and here he doubles down with this rather bizarre response.

Ethan’s points would make good sense only if our choices were so stark. Besides full blown prohibition-enforcement for marijuana on the one hand, and legalization on the other, there are plenty of things we can do to get rid of the worst parts of our current laws (the things Ethan mentions —job loss, being cuffed, etc.). But that is not a good reason for legalization. That’s a compelling reason for some kind of specific reform. Given the risk we would take by legalizing marijuana — including the risks of increased use, accidents, and health and social costs [pdf] — it seems reckless and uncaring to go to such extremes in order to fix parts of the law that we can all agree are especially egregious. Ethan, would you abandon your legalization efforts if we got rid of the indignities you mention and yet kept marijuana illegal?

What would be the point? If you get rid of all the things that make enforcement of possession laws egregious, then you’re essentially creating a semi-legal product that can only be distributed by criminals. Why not regulate and control the distribution?

This is one of the big lies of the prohibition-spinners. They don’t want to reform prohibition. They like it just fine. They’ll tell you that they don’t want to lock up the small-time user, but they don’t discuss how that small-time user gets supplied.

There is no such thing as a kind and gentle prohibition. It’s harsh and ugly and wreaks a tremendous amount of havoc. And we can’t solve those problems unless we deal with drug use and abuse within a non-prohibition model.

…..

The comments at the debate are quite entertaining. This one from Zeb was my favorite (I’ve long hated the “lost productivity” argument).

“alcohol costs society over $200 billion in lost productivity”

Fuck Off, asshole. My potential productivity does not belong to society.

Christie conditionally vetoes Good Samaritan Emergency Act

“This bill as drafted … fails to carefully consider all the interests that must be balanced when crafting immunities to the protections provided in our criminal laws,” Christie, a former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, wrote in a veto statement. “Thus, although the bill addresses perceived impediments to reporting drug overdoses, the proposal fails to consider the existing approaches to deterrence, public safety, prevention of violence, and the many social problems that accompany the rampant proliferation of drug distribution and use.”

This Good Samaritan bill was a bi-partisan effort. You can bet that the veto came from lobbying by law enforcement and prosecutors.

Occasionally in comments for newspaper articles, I’ll see some comment along the lines of:

We don’t need any more unmotivated zoned-out stoners, so let’s keep marijuana illegal.

Wow. What a concept. The “we-don’t-need-any-more” system of legislating. Forget analysis of whether the laws work, or whether they might affect other responsible people. No, this is much easier.

Let’s give it a try!

• We don’t need any more couch potatoes, so let’s outlaw TV.
• We don’t need any more red-neck fisherman leaving beer cans on the shore and pissing in our lakes, so let’s outlaw fishing.
• We don’t need any more overwhelming smells in elevators, so let’s outlaw perfumes and colognes.
• We don’t need any more reckless bicyclists weaving between our cars, so let’s outlaw bicycles.
• We don’t need any more litter, so let’s outlaw packaging.
• We don’t need any more loud sounds waking us up, so let’s outlaw street repair and emergency vehicles.
• We don’t need any more people with slow reaction times behind the wheel of cars, so let’s outlaw drivers over age 65. For that matter…
• We don’t need any more old people sucking up all the health care dollars, so let’s outlaw living past age 65.

What else can we outlaw?

“Think of the children” is one of the most maddeningly ridiculous mantras of the drug warrior, as if the entire world was intended to be some kind of padded child-safe cocoon. It’s certainly a terrible reason to lock up adults (for merely the “message” that their activity sends to children).

It’s nice to see an example of that turned on its head.

King County sheriff makes case for pot

For all the warnings to kids about how marijuana is as illegal and harmful as, say, heroin, the end result is that more kids smoke pot today than smoke cigarettes. And find pot easier to get than alcohol.

“With alcohol being highly regulated, we’re able to have a more reasonable discussion about it, in societies and in our families,” Strachan told The Seattle Times’ Jonathan Martin, in announcing his support for the pot-legalization Initiative 502 on this fall’s ballot.

With pot, “people are sort of winking at it,” he said. “It lives in this kind of limbo — it’s illegal, but also not.” So we have created an “ambiguous, confusing message we’re sending to our kids.”

Exactly. If you must think of the children, then you should support legalization.

Vote to end the insanity of marijuana prohibition in The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon)

Outstanding piece written by our own Allan Erickson