Drug WarRant

On Saturday, I will be hosting an online book salon over at FireDogLake. The topic is:

FDL Book Salon: “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know”

Authors Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins, and Angela Hawken are scheduled to be there and I’ll be leading the discussion.

Saturday, August 11 from 2-4 pm Pacific time, 4-6 pm Central, 5-7 pm Eastern. If you don’t have an account at FDL, it wouldn’t hurt to head over before then to set one up, so you can participate in the discussion.

For those expecting fireworks, you probably won’t see them from me. It’s different when I’m on my own couch at my own blog. Here, I’ve been graciously invited to visit someone else’s place and host (not debate), in order to facilitate a discussion.

Oh, I’ll probably have some pointed questions along with serving up some softballs, but mostly, I’m going to make sure that readers will have a chance to get their questions answered.

So come over to FDL on Saturday and

Can the Caravan of Peace End the War on Drugs? at The Nation

A new peace movement to end the US-sponsored drug war begins with buses rolling and feet marching from the Tijuana–San Diego border on August 12 through twenty-five US cities to Washington, DC, in September.

Named the Caravan for Peace, the trek is intended to put human faces and names on the estimated 60,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared and 160,000 displaced people in Mexico since 2006, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Pentagon and the CIA supported the escalation of the Mexican armed forces.

The caravan, which has staged mass marches across Mexico since 2011, is led by well-known Catholic poet Javier Sicilia, 56, whose son Juan Francisco, then 24, was killed in crossfire in Cuernavaca in March 2011. After his son’s death, Sicilia, vowing not to write poetry any longer, formed a Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) and penned an anguished grito, or cry, titled “Estamos Hasta La Madre!” The English equivalent might be “Fed Up!,” but the Spanish slang also means that the authorities “insulted our mother protector, they’ve committed a sacrilege,” Sicilia says.

This is something I want to see. It’s about time we had something like this here to wake a few more people up.

Here’s the Caravan route. It won’t be going through my town, but there’s a chance I can get to see it in Chicago on September 3.

If they’re passing near you, you might offer to help get the local media’s attention.

Good news in the effort to reduce highway robbery!

Under the consent decree filed today in the U.S. District Court in Marshall, police will now be required to observe rigorous rules that will govern traffic stops in Tenaha and Shelby County. All stops will now be videotaped, and the officer must state the reason for the stop and the basis for suspecting criminal activity. Motorists pulled over during a traffic stop must be advised orally and in writing that they can refuse a search.

In addition, officers are no longer using dogs in conducting traffic stops. No property may be seized during a search unless the officer first gives the driver a reason for why it should be taken. All property improperly taken must be returned within 30 business days.  And any asset forfeiture revenue seized during a traffic stop must be donated to non-profit organizations or used for the audio and video equipment or training required by the settlement.

Great job by the ACLU.

Remember Barry McCaffrey? What a tool!

He argued at length that “legalizing drugs would be an utter disaster,” claiming that “low-level users” don’t do time in the US, and concluding: “Portugal? Bullshit!”

That’s the kind of intelligent discourse coming from prohibitionists these days.

Just Imagine What Michael Phelps Might Have Done If He Hadn’t Smoked Pot?

As the sports world says a fond farewell to Michael Phelps, the most bemedaled Olympian that ever was, it’s worth remembering the idiotic moral outrage that exploded when this picture of the eventual 18-gold-medal-winning swimmer surfaced in early 2009

Olympic ouster brings marijuana issue to forefront

Lee said she and other Olympic athletes exhibit “camaraderie” in discussing with one another when best to stop marijuana use before expected testing. Lee estimated that at least “a good 50 Olympic athletes” use marijuana regularly before they stop in time for testing.

How A Single Oxycontin Pill Nearly Ruined One Man’s Life

Just one of many stories of the Kafkaesque nightmare that our drug war imposes on people.

When I hear prohibitionists excuse the drug war by saying “hardly anybody does time for possession in the U.S.,” I think of stories like this.

A new ad in Washington state.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aScUZgzFlTI

Or, perhaps the UNODC and U.S. has already gotten to him?

Mexico’s President-Elect Signals “Internationalization” of Drug War by Louis Nevaer

That change, however, may not be what most Mexicans were expecting.

“A transnational phenomenon requires a transnational strategy,” Óscar Naranjo, Colombia’s former director of the National Police and current advisor to Peña Nieto, told reporters last week.  “No country can succeed in an insular and isolated manner if it is to achieve timely or definitive victories.”

Transnational. That’s the word that the UNODC loves to use.

Far from “re-envisioning” the approach taken by outgoing President Felipe Calderon, credited with having launched the crackdown on the country’s drug cartels in 2006, Peña Nieto is preparing the Mexican people for a major escalation. It is a shift that could draw in military forces from Mexico’s neighbors, including the United States.

Mexico has not had foreign troops on its soil since the U.S. invaded in 1847. The country’s constitution bans foreign troops from its territory. But Mexican officials have been quietly developing strategies for circumventing these prohibitions. 

High-ranking advisors suggest one strategy would be to develop a “multinational” military force comprised of American, Colombian and Chilean military advisors to work with Mexican marines and special forces under an international mandate.

“Not only the United States, but the world, must ally with Mexico to help Mexico overcome the challenge of transnational crime,” Naranjo continued.

The article goes on to speculate that the “accidental” incursion into Mexican airspace by U.S. drones may actually have been part of a larger plan.

Much of this is speculation, and I don’t know enough about political structures in Mexico to weigh the information, but it certainly is disturbing… and unfortunately doesn’t seem far-fetched.

And, of course, one of the problems is that perversely so little was actually discussed about the drug war during the campaign.

For Peña Nieto, it is clear that had he openly debated this course of action, the presidential election might have turned out differently.

Here’s the trailer for “How To Make Money Selling Drugs.” The full film doesn’t have an official release date yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vr2dRh0inA

Looks like an interesting approach.

Lawrence O’Donnell has a very powerful Last Word on the War on Drugs.

Good stuff on network mainstream cable TV.

Chatham House Magazine has a slate of drug war articles in the current issue; some good, some atrocious. The current issue is free to read online, so you can check them out now.

In the atrocious category are:

• Legalization Could Make Things Worse by Bill Hughes, former Director General, Serious Organized Crime Agency, UK; Member, Independent Advisory Panel, Drugs and Organized Crime Project, Chatham House
• Organized criminals won’t fade away by Dr Vanda Felbab-Brown, Fellow in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution

These are like badly written high school papers – confused and rambling all over the place. Really pathetic – like they know that legalization isn’t supposed to be the answer, but they don’t really have a rebuttal for it, so they just wander around.

Vanda doesn’t even seem to know the difference between outlawing and legalizing!

Why outlawing drugs is not an answer

Although frequently portrayed as an effective solution to the problem of organized crime, mere legalization of illicit economies, particularly of drugs, is no panacea.

In the category of moderately OK, is an interview with Mark Kleiman, which unfortunately, concludes with:

Surely reform has to be better than prohibition?

This drug policy reform narrative is based on two false claims. One, it’s possible to substitute regulation and taxation for prohibition and still prevent a mass upsurge in use. I’d like to see how you can do that. The other fallacy is that prohibition is an original sin: once you have committed prohibition you cannot have a sensible drug policy. But I’m convinced we could have policies where most illicit drugs remain illicit but cause much less damage. Against that claim both the prohibitionists and the drug policy reformers will protest.

Here’s the guy who says everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts, and yet he has no problem labeling “false claims” two areas merely because they disagree with his opinion.

He believes that regulated legalization will cause a massive upsurge in use, but cannot prove it, yet those who don’t believe are considered factually wrong. He believes that there is such a thing as sensible drug policy with prohibition, but except for certain populations, he can’t prove it, and yet those who believe we must dismantle prohibition are somehow making false claims.

There are a number of other articles in the issue with some good stuff. Check it out.

One of the things about prohibition that people sometimes forget is that it so often truly does make drug-taking more dangerous.

• Alcohol prohibition led to people going blind from government poisoned alcohol, and to dangerous alcohol stills that were both toxic and explosive.
• Crackdowns on diversion of safer pharmaceutical amphetimines led to dangerous meth labs.
• The many deaths from heroin cut with fentanyl are the result of prohibition. All prohibited drugs lack any safety regulation regarding dosage and purity.
• Banning marijuana leads people to more harmful substances…

How the National Institute for Drug Abuse Helped Create the Dangerous Marijuana Alternative Known As “Spice” by Mike Riggs. 

But it appears NIDA’s quest to cure Americans of their enjoyment of marijuana has backfired. According to a report in The New Orleans Times-Picayune, funds from NIDA helped create the dangerous marijuana alternative known as “Spice” and “K2.”

The funds were disbursed in the mid-1990s to a Clemson University researcher named Dr. John W. Huffman. It was while searching for a cure to marijuana “addiction” that Huffman developed the formula for Spice:

Former Clemson University chemistry professor Dr. John W. Huffman is the namesake of JWH-018, JWH-073 and JWH-200, three of the synthetic cannabinoids banned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2011.

“The National Institute of Drug Abuse wanted to research marijuana,” said Dr. Victor Tuckler, the emergency room toxicologist at Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans. “They were looking at different receptors of the brain to see if they could come up with a way that people wouldn’t get addicted to this stuff.”

Huffman and his colleagues created more than 400 synthetic cannabinoid compounds during the 1990s.

“Who knows how this got out,” Tuckler said. “Pretty soon, it’s on the Internet and people are making it over in China.”

Yep.

Check out The Strip by Brian McFadden for an excellent cartoon about our incarceration nation.