Drug WarRant

Transform Drug Policy Foundation has a good follow-up report on the recently concluded UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna.

The CND is basically a tightly controlled international pro-drug-war event. Country representatives dutifully report that they are enthusiastically carrying out world drug laws and nobody suggests that they might not be the best thing for the world.

But, as Transform notes, there were some cracks in that facade this year.

Yet, for the jaded NGO veterans of this event there was also something new and highly significant: the first tentative challenges to the global prohibitionist regime appeared in the CND. Some merely called for a debate, Argentina being a notable example, its delegate stating in the plenary session that:

“Argentina adequately meets all its obligations arising from treaties that structure what we usually call the “institutional / legal system of drug control and the fight against drug trafficking”. Regarding this issue, we should perhaps analyse if, after decades and considering the results achieved so far, time has not arrived to start an open debate on the consistency and effectiveness of some of the provisions contained in those treaties.”

This statement was particularly heretical as it openly questioned the effectiveness and consistency of the treaties.

Even stronger was the statement from the Czech Republic delegation. Here are some excerpts:

…Nevertheless on behalf of the Czech Republic I would like to take the opportunity and draw attention to the recently released Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, signed by important figures in the world politics, which stated that some important aspects of our countries as well as international efforts of drug policies failed.

Therefore we would like to express that the findings of this Report seem to mark what many of us would like to state but from many reasons are hesitant to state.

Czech Prime minister Necas personally supported the Report of the Global Commission on Drug policy considering the report to be an important challenge by the heads of state and politicians who have signed it.

He said: “above all, anti-drug policy should be based on effective and economically efficient preventative and treatment measures, not on criminalisation of people who suffer from drug addiction but often are not causing harm to others. Czech anti-drug policy is basically going in the right direction, but we must not be afraid to promote additional effective solutions and to be inspired by other states as well” […]

The attitude of the Czech Republic is based on pragmatic drug policy, which leads the way towards the decriminalization of those addicted to drugs, support for preventative programmes and the minimisation of risks connected with drug use of course not undermining rehabilitation as the best and ultimate goal.

We are convinced that changes in current legal regulations are necessary in certain segments of the countries and the world drug policies. We are ready to cooperate in this field with everybody who feels dedicated to those important changes. We feel that the globalised world does not allow us anymore to continue with the expensive experiment of the War on Drugs without a serious international debates especially on why there is after all so many people dying of HIV?AIDS and other known reasons in connection with the drugs problem and look even more closely on the evidence and take the brave steps towards better decisions that improve significantly the world drugs situation

Transform concludes from all this:

It may come to be seen as something of a watershed year – and with the rapidly unfolding debate on alternatives to the war on drugs in Latin America it seems safe to say that CND may never be the same again. Next year it may actually be quite interesting.

I look forward to interesting.

Tough drug laws harm health and safety, doctors say

Criminalizing the use of marijuana and other tough on crime approaches haven’t worked, say public health doctors from across Canada who propose taxation and regulation instead.

The chief medical health officers in three provinces wrote a paper reviewing the evidence on Canada’s current illicit drug policies in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Open Medicine. […]

Strang, Dr. Perry Kendall, chief provincial medical health officer for B.C. and Dr. Moira McKinnon, who holds the same job in Saskatchewan, wrote that opponents to drug policy reform commonly argue drug use would increase if health-based models were stressed over drug law enforcement.

But they said a recent study by the World Health Organization concluded that countries with stringent illegal drug policies for users did not have lower levels of use than those with liberal policies.

The authors said governments need to consider other approaches that include public health objectives that minimize health and social harms, such as:

• Taxing marijuana as alcohol and tobacco are.
• Licensing cannabis dispensaries and issuing prescriptions for medical marijuana.
• Implementing age limits and other sales restrictions like those used to reduce alcohol use.
• Regulating and controlling the availability of potent substances to reduce the illegal market.

That’s right. Tough drug laws are not part of a good balanced approach. They are harmful.

That’s right. I’ve declared that the term domestic abuse is no longer operable, because now, on days that I don’t beat her, I buy her flowers, do something nice for her, or apply firm non-violent discipline.

It’s a new balanced approach to marriage. And I should be getting some credit from all of you for being so much better than her previous husband (who didn’t do those extra nice things).

….

Those who know me have figured out by now that this is merely a disturbing analogy (and they’ve probably even figured out to what similar outrage the analogy refers) – I’m not married. This is inspired by a recent twitter exchange with Kevin Sabet.

Drug War Rant: @rafaelONDCP @KevinSabet If ONDCP ended war on drugs, why is Panetta going to Canada to announce increase in drug war? bit.ly/GTqmO6

Kevin Sabet: @DrugWarRant You are using the term drug war (as is the media).Point is the term is outdated, but foreign assistance and cooperation isn’t.

Dan Riffle: @KevinSabet @DrugWarRant @rafaelONDCP is the term outdated, or just unpopular? If policy is the same, why else call it something different?

Drug WarRant: @KevinSabet If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can’t make it not a duck by simply calling it a “balanced approach.”

Drug WarRant: @KevinSabet The truth is that the U.S. is waging a violent war on drugs and drug users that results in thousands of deaths, here and abroad.

Kevin Sabet: @Doctor_Iffle @drugwarrant @rafaelondcp Policy is different. Fair Sentencing Act. HOPE. DMI. Vet Tx Courts. Safe Disposal. PDMPs. ‘Nuff said

The twitter conversation is still continuing, but this gives you an idea.

So, in Kevin’s mind, the policy is different. Sure, he’s still beating his wife supporting an overall policy that results in death and destruction worldwide, but now, there’s all this other good stuff as well. And shouldn’t that be what counts?

Update: At Kevin Sabet’s request, post has been corrected to show that Kevin is not still beating his wife.

Kevin Sabet (via Twitter): Ur latest post using the wife beating analogy is disgusting and I demand you take it down.In your post you say”he’s still beating his wife”.

Apparently all the people who have died in the drug wars worldwide, those who have had their civil liberties taken from them, the families who have been robbed of a parent to incarceration, the people who have lost their livelihood, their possessions, their children because of overzealous drug war prosecution, the people in real trouble who have been ignored because their behavior was considered a criminal justice issue — all these are not disgusting.

Well, they’re disgusting to me. As disgusting as domestic abuse (which I do find extremely disgusting) and that’s why I use the analogy. Because it maybe shocks you into realizing that supporting the drug war is as bad as supporting domestic abuse.

Red Cross Weighs in on Drug Criminalization

The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is one of the oldest and most eminent global health organizations in the world. IFRC influences the community-level services of millions of health professionals in its local and national chapters and is a respected leader in emergency health services. It was therefore of note that at the recent annual session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), the IFRC representative spoke not only about the harm reduction work that the organization has long supported but about drug policy more generally.

In particular, the IFRC called on the member states of CND to turn away from criminalization of drug use in their national policies. […]

To conclude, the IFRC, on behalf of the most vulnerable people affected by drug use, strongly calls upon key stakeholders and donors to exert all possible efforts to gather knowledge on the scale of the drug use epidemic at country level and decide on the proper response accordingly. Criminalization, discrimination and stigmatization are not such responses. Laws and prosecutions do not stop people from taking drugs. Neither does the cold turkey methods of detoxification that can be potentially life-threatening. On the contrary, governments should recognize once and for all that a humanitarian drug policy works!

Good to see. And the Red Cross has huge respect globally.

The Brutal Logic of a Drug Warrior: Put ‘Em All in Cages

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf does a wonderful job of dismantling David P. Goldman’s column in the Asia Times.

Goldman’s notions are truly pathetic, involving solving Mexico’s problems by waging war against the poor and locking them all up, and Conor handily smacks him down.

But there’s one area in particular I wanted to highlight, because we hear this argument from prohibitionists so often.

Here’s a rebuttal [to legalization] that the author apparently finds persuasive. “Libertarians used to argue that arresting criminals was futile as long as crime paid, because there always would be someone willing to take the job; the only remedy, they added, was to legalize drugs, bring down the price and eliminate the economic incentive,” he writes. “The trouble is that the Mexican gangs do not restrict their predations to drugs, as the frightful incidence of kidnapping makes clear.” He is apparently blind to the fact that those gangs would be far less powerful, far less formidable to stop from kidnapping people, if they weren’t enriched with obscene amounts of wealth the likes of which they could only plausibly obtain from one source that can in fact be eliminated: drug profits. Prohibition era gangs committed crimes besides producing and selling alcohol. Do you know what made them less powerful? Or why they’ve long since ceased to terrorize law-abiding Americans?

But this is the illogic of a drug warrior. His solution requires locking up vast swaths of a country’s population in cages while the folks that remain free are caught in a hopeless attempt to eliminate a black market. He nevertheless points at the libertarian solution and says, as if its a commensurate complaint, “Even if you legalize drugs there will still be other crime in Mexico.”

Yet his side is still driving policy in the United States.

Unfortunately, true.

It drives me crazy when I hear that argument.

Now I bring in about $100 a month from advertising and donations to this blog, enough to cover hosting costs. And I have a full-time job that pays my rent, food, and everything else. Imagine someone saying “It wouldn’t matter if Pete lost his job. He’s got a blog.”

If you eliminate the black market drug profits for the traffickers, then they don’t have the money to hire as many soldiers, which are used to intimidate people when they commit other crimes. They also don’t have the money to bribe police, judges, and government officials to look the other way when these crimes are committed.

Sure, when drugs are legalized these really bad people will try to operate in other areas, but they’ll have lost the bulk of their funding and be easier to stop. And this time when we catch or kill one, there will no longer be the same incentive for someone else to take their place.

Update: It still amazes me how this argument refuses to die. I think part of it is that some people look at the problem and correctly recognize that if we legalized all drugs today, the bad people in Mexico who are decapitating rivals wouldn’t suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke like some suddenly irrelevant cartoon creature. Of course not – we never said that they would.

They’ll try to do other things that they already do (kidnapping, etc.), but they’ll no longer be drug trafficking organizations. They’ll merely be murderous criminals. And when they are caught or killed, there will be nobody to take their place, because there will no longer be billions of dollars — close to the entire national budget — coming in to their organizations from drug trafficking.

There isn’t enough money in Mexico to replace the money they get from drugs.

Is getting rid of the cartels the ONLY reason to legalize? Of course not. It’s just one of many very good reasons.

More of this, please.

Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple on Friday said he has shut down the department’s drug unit and reassigned the controversial squad’s investigators within his department.

“The Drug Interdiction Unit is no longer. … We’re going in a different direction,” Apple said. “We’re not going to turn our head to drug activity or gambling or prostitution or any other crimes they were investigating, but there’s a lot of other crimes that need attention.”

Apple’s decision to close the unit follows a series of Times Union stories about the unit’s use of criminal forfeiture funds, including purchasing take-home vehicles for its six investigators.

Drug task forces are a bad idea for a whole lot of reasons. They are especially prone to corruption. They have a tendency to consider themselves above local supervision. They lose touch with their core purpose (serve and protect) and are more likely to consider the citizenry as the enemy (like soldiers in a war zone). The fact that they work exclusively with a crime that is consensual means that they spend their time trying to entrap and turn people, rather than truly investigating crime.

Unfortunately, the feds encourage drug task forces through funding and through assisting them in getting around local/state regulations. And the money for drug task forces means that drug enforcement becomes more of a priority than other crime.

Sheriff Craig Apple appears to have the right idea. Focus on policing.

Apparently Defense Secretary Leon Panetta didn’t get the message that Gil Kerlikowske had ended the war on drugs.

Panetta set to announce more support for drug war

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrives in the Canadian capital Monday, where he is expected to announce new measures to support the fight against narcotics in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

I’m waiting to hear back from the ONDCP how they managed to miss sending the memo to the largest agency in the government.

All options on the table in Central America. No decisions, but good discussions….

Perez:

“We are talking about creating a legal framework to regulate the production, transit and consumption of drugs.” […]

“It’s important this is on the discussion table as an alternative to what we’ve been doing for 40 years without getting the desired results,”

A legal framework to regulate the production, transit and consumption of drugs. Can’t get clearer than that.

Oh, and I like this:

The president added that Central American leaders are considering requiring the United States, the biggest consumer of South American cocaine, to pay the region for drug raids.

“We’re talking about economic compensation for every seizure undertaken and also the destruction of marijuana and cocaine plantations,” said Perez, a 61-year-old conservative.

That’s marvelous!

Update:

Headline of the month. Guatemala Times:

US no longer dominates drug war agenda in Central America

Mother of College Student Who Smoked Synthetic Marijuana,Then Crashed His Car and Died, Says Rand Paul “has blood on his hands”.

Once again, grieving parents send blame in the wrong direction. Making drugs illegal has never increased their safety or reduced their availability. In fact, just like alcohol prohibition, banning drugs tends to encourage the production of more dangerous drugs.

More of this please. Mandatory Minimums Distort Justice System Discussion of the dangerously unchecked power of prosecutors.

There are police and there are police from Cop in the Hood.

Why are some departments so committed to prevention over apprehension or meaningless patrol? Why are some departments so committed to protecting the civil rights of everyone with whom they are in contact, and others so flagrant in their violation of them? Why are some individual police officers so thoughtless, and others so thoughtful? Why do some agencies handle protests in ways that protect the right of protesters, and others almost guaranteed to provoke conflict?

Guatemalan president leads drug legalization debate

Discussions occurring. With or without the U.S.

The Pope landed in Mexico today and doubled down on the failed drug war.

“We must do whatever is possible to combat this destructive evil against humanity and our youth,” he told reporters, referring to the some 50,000 people killed since 2007 as rival drug trafficking cartels fight each other and the state.

“It is the responsibility of the Church to educate consciences, to teach moral responsibility and to unmask the evil, to unmask this idolatry of money which enslaves man, to unmask the false promises, the lies, the fraud that is behind drugs,” he said. […]

The pope’s strong words on the drug menace should offer comfort to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has staked his reputation on beating down the cartels.

The fraud that is behind drugs? Drugs aren’t beheading people. As far as unmasking the idolatry of money, well, it wasn’t really masked.

Identifying the traffickers as evil doesn’t do anything. It isn’t even news. Calling for “whatever is possible to combat it” is exactly what got us in this mess.