Drug WarRant

Right now on C-Span

Speaking to Sheriffs’ Association. According to his office: “Will call for reforming criminal justice system to address addiction as treatable disease”

Sheriff introducing him couldn’t pronounce his name.

Update: Kerlikowske lied again about the NHTSA study.

Jim Todd has an OpEd in the Tennessean: Fairness demands a new look at Drug Free School Zone Act

Call it political suicide, but the state Legislature needs to re-examine the Drug Free School Zone Act.

It’s ridiculous (but not a surprise) that such a thing might be considered political suicide, particularly when you read a description like this:

Consequently, a person who drives through a school zone with cocaine on their way to a sale outside of the school zone, during summer on a Sunday night, will still receive 15 years in prison, the same as a person convicted of raping a child or second-degree murder.

Shows how little the law actually cares about children, despite its apparent intent.

I think everybody here know the high esteem I have for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Groups like that are extremely important for turning the tide in the war against drugs. Most law enforcement LEAP members are former police officers, etc. There are very few active-duty members because of the very real risk of losing their job.

LEAP now has the first in a series of posts from an active-duty officer posting anonymously. He’s not proud of his public silence, but believes it necessary for now to keep from losing his job.

As we’ve heard from other LEAP members, there is the sense that the views of LEAP are much more widely held within active-duty law enforcement than one might expect:

Despite my current silence, I believe a paradigm shift regarding the drug war is quietly occurring in every law enforcement agency in this country, thanks in large part to the efforts of LEAP. This paradigm shift is palpable— I can see it, feel it, and on occasion I hear it slip out from fellow officers and even supervisors once in a blue moon. I firmly believe things are about to change in this country, and when they do, those within law enforcement will be jumping off this drug war rat ship like it was on fire. And the jumpers will proclaim that they knew the drug war was wrong the whole time. But alas, I am not here to judge or point fingers at those wearing badges—I wear one too. I too am riding on that drug war rat ship. Gladly, I will be jumping off that rat ship with everyone else. In the meantime, I can point no fingers, except at myself.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t true blue drug war believers — there are plenty — but that with the right amount of critical mass, those will be the minority.

Every now and then this ridiculous argument shows up in some serious-sounding piece about legalization and it’s important that a stake be put through its heart before it breeds more stupidity. This time, it showed up in Mamon McKinnon’s Drug Legalization Chic, which I mentioned a few days ago.

“…If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose…”

This is, certainly, nonsense of the most outrageous kind, and it takes a special kind of dementia to see any logic therein.

Of course, the glib sarcastic response is “If you don’t know the difference between marijuana and rape, you won’t get invited to any of the good parties.”

In comments, Old Soldier took a stab at setting people straight:

Rape has a victim. Smoking hemp doesn’t.

In the true sense of the meaning, absolutely right. But unfortunately, this argument gets us nowhere, because there’s always some git like David W who moronically replies:

Tell that to the children? In Dallas Police were called to an apartment. It was full of pot smoke, and there were little children in there. One woman who was smoking was holding her toddler in her arms. What kind of life does that child have to look forward to, even if they some how remain healthy?? How about the organization I belonged to that had it bank account wiped out because our treasurer was a “recovering” addict and stole the money to finance her habit? Or my uncle who abandoned his family (granted, he started on pot when young but had graduated to heroin when he abandoned his wife and two children). No victims my foot.

Completely sidetracked. Mention victimless “crimes” and you’ll always get someone who thinks that secondary victimization is the same thing. And we’ve completely moved away from the topic of legalization. Dave W’s pathetic stories have nothing to do with drug legalization. In fact, they all apparently happened under criminalization. No value to the discussion at hand in any way.

Fact is, the real difference between marijuana and rape (when it comes to the discussion of eliminating criminal penalties) is… economics. Supply and demand.

As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. Putting people in jail for selling drugs doesn’t do any good at all, because there’s still a demand, so someone else will step right up and fill the vacancy. That’s why criminal drug laws are always failures, as are interdiction and all other supply-side efforts.

There is no demand for rape.

Whey you arrest and incarcerate a rapist, you take a rapist off the street and make the place safer. Nobody steps up to take their place. There’s no lucrative job opening as rapist to handle the non-existent demand from all the people out there wanting to be raped.

Marijuana and rape are different.

The failure to understand such basic economic principles is just one of the things that makes our legislative output so utterly mindbogglingly stupid.

Yes, Drug WarRant is protesting the crass venality and stupidity of Congress, which was ready to break the internet in a futile attempt to protect the profits of certain entertainment companies.

Just like drug laws, they’re voting on bills that they don’t understand, and for which they have no clue regarding the actual consequences.

Feel free to discuss the protests or anything else here.

Scott Morgan has a fun read in the Huffington Post: How to Write a Clichéd, Unpersuasive Argument Against Drug Legalization.

So much familiar in his critique of Manon McKinnon’s particularly ignorant OpEd in The American Spectator: Drug Legalization Chic.

Guatemala president orders army to join drugs fight

One day after his inauguration, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina has ordered the army to join the fight against drug cartels.

Get ready to start reading death counts.

Sponsor Of Bill To Require Drug Testing For Welfare Recipients is Arrested For DUI

Yep. All we’re saying is that our hard-earned tax money shouldn’t be going to pay for some drugged-up legislator passing bad laws.

Meth Hype Could Undermine Good Medicine

Meth’s persistent bad boy reputation means that medical marijuana dispensaries will not be expanding their offerings to include speed any time soon. Still, the idea is not as totally outlandish as it might seem.

Cop or Soldier? – a fun quiz over at The Agitator that shows the challenge of telling those two apart.

Rocking in the drug-free world

Here’s a story about a “drug-free world” that actually doesn’t bother me at all, but in fact is inspirational. Rocker Sabrina Barajas has decided to go for a “straight edge” lifestyle in her own drug-free world along with those who choose to go the same way.

What makes this story different from the other drug-free world stories is that this is a choice for Barajas, not an attempt to force it onto others.

Barajas is a lyricist and drummer for the Oxnard punk band Facing the Fallen, and is the only member claiming to be straight edge, “Everyone has different opinions on how they choose to live their life, and I choose to live mine sober,” said Barajas, who meets a wide variety of musicians and fans as an intern at Camarillo’s Rock City Studios. […]

“Being straight edge is not a criteria that I have for friends. I have learned that a lot more people are straight edge than I thought, but I haven’t seen it growing into a larger movement. Just that it’s there is good enough for me.” 

Good for you. Live your own life and don’t let others tell you how you should live it. There will always be others who think as you do that will support your decision, as well as good friends who prefer another lifestyle who can broaden your perspective without threatening your being.

Gary Johnson at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government: It’s Time to End the War on Drugs

We own the internet – it doesn’t matter if it’s a conservative site or a liberal site, the commenters are almost always going to be predominantly in favor of legalizing marijuana (still a few opposed, though).

Iran executes people on drug charges; world gives Iran cash

For drug-related offences alone, it put 488 people to death in 2011, the Amnesty International reported last month. Iran denies violating human rights in this case, saying its chosen form of justice leads to less crime. […]

In recent years, Iran has received international assistance, including from several European countries and the United Nations, to help stem the drug flow across its borders.

That is the ultimate subtext of the prohibitionist. It’s sadomoralism. They talk about being concerned about all the people harmed by drugs, but they have absolutely no qualms at all about harming more people in the name of prohibition.

B.C. police reluctant to release deadly ecstasy pill markings

Police in B.C. are reluctant to tell the public what unique markings are on ecstasy pills suspected to contain a lethal additive linked to five deaths in the province .

That’s because they don’t want users thinking they’re sanctioning the rest of the pills.

A number of people have died taking pills that they thought were ecstasy, but were, in fact, a rare drug called PMMA. The police know how those pills were marked and could save lives, but won’t share the information.

Unconscionable.

In the latest Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Dateline DEA” email, they had the following item:

DID YOU KNOW?

In a milestone in U.S. – Colombian relations Carlos Lehder, who became known as a leader of “The Extraditables” arrived in the United States 25 years ago. A major cocaine trafficker, Lehder was indicted in 1981 on U.S. federal charges in Florida and a formal request for extradition was submitted to Colombia in 1983, and this was granted in 1987. Fanatical in his effort to prevent his extradition, he went as far as forming his own political party, with a key objective of preventing extraditions such as his own from Colombia to the United States. His extradition finally happened only after the murder of Colombia’s Justice Minister who was at the time prosecuting his case. Lehder was sentenced to 135 years in federal prison, and in the years since then about 1,350 other Colombians have been extradited to the United States.

This isn’t news, really, but that last number really hit me. 1,350 Colombians extradited. That’s 1,350 foreigners, most of whom never set foot on U.S. soil, and we’ve gone and had them brought here so we could try them at great expense, and then imprison them in our prisons for many years, also at great taxpayer expense (even with conservative numbers, that’s about $34 million per year just for prison for that many). And that’s just Colombia – it’s happened with other countries as well (think Marc Emery in Canada).

Why are we so worried about illegal immigrants? You know, the ones who come over here and work really hard jobs and pay taxes? The DEA is importing immigrants who provide no productive value at all to this country and cost us a ton!

What do we get for those dollars? Nothing.

Of course, the DEA gets work out of it, as do the federal prosecutors, and the prison industry. But we’re paying for it.