Drug WarRant

by Stuart McMillen. Good read.

There have been a few questions in comments as to whether it makes sense to vote for Gary Johnson. After all, is it possible that Obama/Romney is better than Obama/Romney when it comes to the drug war? So what if my wasted vote on Johnson causes Obama/Romney to win?

Let’s break it down.

1. Check the electoral maps to see what kind of state you’re in (Here’s one example). If your state is blue, dark blue, red, or dark red, then your vote isn’t going to make a bit of difference in the Obama-Romney question. You’ll just be one more on a vast winning or losing side for the state. After all, it’s the electoral votes that chooses the President, not the popular vote. So you might as well vote for someone who actually cares about you! No brainer.

2. Let’s assume you’re in one of those few swing states, and it actually comes down to the wire in the electoral vote and your state will make the difference, and after all the re-counts and hanging chads, it turns out that one vote makes the difference between Obama or Romney winning… You should still vote for Gary Johnson.

Ultimately, as we have found, Presidents are unlikely leaders in drug policy reform. Even more so with these two. There has been absolutely no interest in talking about drug policy by either candidate, so if they win with your vote, they won’t even have a campaign promise to break. There won’t be a single reason for them to care about you, and so many reasons to support the DEA, Law Enforcement, Pharmaceutical Industries, Drug Testing Industries, Prison Industries, and so on.

On the other hand, if one of them loses and it can be shown that Gary Johnson is why they lost, then that could make a real difference.

3. You must vote for Gary Johnson because he’s the only one giving your message. Johnson has, more than any other candidate in recent knowledge, run largely on his views of the drug war. Sure, he has other issues, but this is his signature issue, and it’s even reflected in his choice of running mate.

If Johnson has a strong showing and even has an impact on a state, then both parties will have to pay attention, and perhaps address drug policy in the future in order to prevent a third party candidate from challenging them. If Johnson does extremely poorly, then they’ll be able to say “He didn’t even get 1% of the vote. The voters don’t care enough about marijuana or drug policy for it to affect their votes, so we don’t have to address it.”

A brilliant blog post by musician Vivian McPeak. I’m not even going to quote from it. Just go read. And share.

Happy birthday, prohibition. Now die.

I swear I would like to stop talking about him, but Sabet seems to be everywhere — a full time shill for marijuana prohibition. Now he’s apparently drawing on the wealth of irresponsible material that the witless enablers Kleiman, Caulkins, Kilmer, and Hawken provided in their latest book to promote UNCERTAINTY as a reason for not changing bad public policy.

It’s tremendously uncertain,” said Kevin Sabet, a former official with the Office of National Drug Control Policy who opposes legalization. “It’s never been done before. So the question Coloradans have to ask themselves is: Do we want to be guinea pigs?”

No, that’s not the question at all. That is, however, the question that Sabet and others would like to have them thinking about rather than the actual facts of the matter.

That’s the real danger of a book like “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know”. As I pointed out in the book salon…

Henry N. Pollack, author of “Uncertain Science… Uncertain World,” said: “Frequently, ‘scientific uncertainty’ is offered as an excuse to avoid making important policy decisions. We must recognize, however, that delaying decisions because of uncertainty is an implicit endorsement of the status quo and often a thinly veiled excuse for maintaining it. It is a bulwark of the take-no-action policy popularly known as ‘business as usual.'”

And in this case, it’s intended to induce a state of paralysis in public policy reform — fear of the unknown.

Just in case you got the deluded notion from our bashing of the Obama administration that Romney was a good choice as a neighbor or President…

Mitt Romney Once Harangued a Neighbor for Smoking Pot, Then Called the Cops by Mike Riggs

Mitt Romney is one uptight sonofabitch, according to his neighbors in La Jolla, Calif., where the GOP presidential nominee is known to be the kind of guy who will bust your chops if he catches you having a brew and a toke on the sand…

There are so many destructive elements of our drug war, and this is just another one. It’s one that we’ve talked about here numerous times, but The Nation has a new article discussing the impact this year.

Has Florida Created a Trap at the Polls for Ex-Felons?

Lewis runs into Blair Bass, a 44-year-old customer service attendant. He was released from prison in 2009 for a felony conviction from 2001. Upon release, he says he was notified by the state’s elections division that his voting rights had been restored. A few months ago, Bass received another letter from the county telling him that he’s no longer eligible to vote because of his felony conviction. This confused him, because the county had also just sent him his voter identification card. He displays it from his wallet; it shows he registered in April 2011.

Bass wants to know if he should vote in November, but Lewis can’t be sure if he qualifies. She’s worked for years trying to get more black people to the polls, so it pains her to say what comes next. She tells Bass, as she has many others like him, not to vote.

Lewis fears that the former felons are headed into a “trap” set for them, and for the whole voting rights movement—one in which confused felons could end up in legal trouble and accused of voter fraud. Her suspicions are not unfounded.

The unbalanced drug war has created the largest increase in black ex-felons, and states like Florida sure seem to have been trying hard to use voter laws and the drug war as a way of silencing the black vote.

Link

A Staten Island politician called Lady Gaga a “slut” Monday for openly smoking what appeared to be marijuana at a recent concert, and following a day of outrage, repeated the slur on Tuesday.

“There’s Gaga. Here’s this, this, I would call her a slut. This slut is influencing many, many children,” Borough President James Molinaro said on Monday, according to the Staten Island Advance. “My niece has two daughters, 12 and 14, they love this woman. Why? Why? So we have a job to do with these actresses, these actors, these ball players. They use drugs as it’s nothing. We shouldn’t praise them. We shouldn’t honor them. We should really hit them….

To me, she’s not an actress, she’s a slut, in the pure word, in the pure meaning of the word.”

At the time of comments, Molinaro was pointing to photos of the not-actress lighting what appears to be a marijuana cigarette at an Amsterdam concert last week. The photos were displayed alongside a poster that said: “Stop glorifying drug use in the media.”

Americans for Forfeiture Reform reports: OIG releases and audit of DEA adoptive seizure process and equitable sharing requests

• Of instances involving federal adoption of assets seized, 65% of reported samples required DEA headquarter approval to adopt the seizure because the instance lacked all of the following criteria:
  1. the seizure was based on a federal or state judicial seizure warrant;
  2. an arrest was made for a felony violation of the Controlled Substances Act or an equivalent state felony charge that would be a felony if pursued under federal law; and/or
  3. drugs or other contraband associated with a federal felony drug offense were also confiscated at the time of seizure.
• The OIG report notes “for the period of October 1, 2000, through September 30, 2011, the DEA and other federal agencies processed over 150,644 seized assets valued at about $9.2 billion of which $5.5 billion (60 percent) originated from seizures processed by the DEA and $3.7 billion (40 percent) originated from seizures processed by other federal agencies.” [Another $522 million in DEA seizured assets was noted but omitted from analysis for a lack of equitable sharing requests.]

That’s right. In 65% of DEA asset seizure cases, there was no warrant, there was no felony arrest, and there were no drugs seized. Just stuff the DEA wanted to take.

Latin American Leaders: UN should promote debate on alternatives to fighting drug trafficking

Calderon, Santos, and Molina all hit on this theme, without explicitly mentioning legalization (“market alternatives” was used again), but making it clear that the current policy wasn’t acceptable.

If you’re interested in watching Calderon’s fairly strong speech, see it here (skip to around the 32 minute mark. [Thanks, Sanho]

We have a ton of problems here in the United States with out-of-control prosecutors who seem to be completely unaccountable (and immune to lawsuits when they abuse their position).

We’re not the only ones with that problem. Check out this story from Russia.

Zelenina heads a laboratory at the Penza Agricultural Institute, some 600 kilometres southeast of Moscow, one of the best-equipped chemical-analysis labs in Russia. She is a specialist in the biology of hemp and poppy, and is a sought-after expert in legal cases involving narcotics produced from these plants.

In September 2011, the defence attorneys of Sergey Shilov, a Russian businessman under investigation by the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FDCS), asked her to provide an expert opinion on the amount of opiates that could possibly be extracted from 42 metric tonnes of food poppy seeds that Shilov had imported from Spain in 2010. . .

. . .On the basis of gas-chromatography and mass-spectrometry measurements of samples analysed in her lab, Zelenina calculated the overall morphine and codeine content in the poppy-seed consignment in question to be 0.00069% and 0.00049%, respectively. In such low concentrations, opiates can only be identified or extracted in well-equipped analytical chemistry labs, she wrote.

“This opinion apparently failed to satisfy the prosecutors,” says Irina Levontina, a linguist at the Russian Language Institute in Moscow, who is frequently heard as an expert in libel and drug lawsuits. “It has become quite common for Russian prosecutors to accuse independent experts if they don’t like their opinions. It can be downright dangerous for experts to appear in court.”

Talk about a chilling effect on both science and criminal defense.

She’s been released pending trial, but faces serious charges. More here

Just as a reminder, Russia has an extremely backward zero-tolerance drug policy that outlaws heroin replacement programs and needle exchange — a policy that has resulted in a 10-fold increase in HIV cases in the past decade.

Oh, and the head of the UNODC is Russian representative Yuri Fedotov.