Drug WarRant

Grits for Breakfast brings us a fascinating piece in the Houston Chronicle which pits the police unions against Harris County DA Pat Lykos over a recent policy change reducing the charge for crack pipe residue.

Grits notes that the climate has shifted enough away from uncritical all-out drug war that the police unions are getting push-back from judges, DAs and the public in their choice to attack this policy.

Crack policy puts Harris DA at odds with police”

A man is stopped by a Houston police officer for riding his bicycle in the middle of the night without a headlight. He is patted down, and the officer finds a grungy glass pipe with the sooty residue of crack cocaine. The bicyclist does not have any other drugs and is not implicated in any other crimes.

Before Jan. 1, 2010, the tiny amount of crack in the pipe, comparable to a half grain of rice, meant the officer could charge the man with felony drug possession and lock him up.

After that day, the officer could only give him a misdemeanor ticket for drug paraphernalia and send him on his way – an administrative change at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office that infuriates Houston police.

The policy change, of course, makes a whole lot of sense – why waste a whole lot of court resources on such a low-level offense? The fact that the police are infuriated also, unfortunately is not a surprise. The absurdity of the police union position got even more blatant:

“These residue cases are instrumental in putting people behind bars – people who commit burglary of a motor vehicle, burglary of a habitation, aggravated robberies, strong arm robberies and they steal your cars,” said Eric Batton, vice president of the Harris County Deputies’ Organization. “These individuals do that to subsidize their drug addiction, so why wouldn’t you put them behind bars with trace cases?”

Wow.

Um, let’s see if I can explain this. You’re the police. If someone steals a car, you arrest them and charge them with stealing a car. That may require some investigative work. You don’t just stick everybody that uses crack in jail for a few days and hope that stops car theft.

“The police aren’t really interested in arresting these people because they are in possession of residue, they’re interested in arresting them to achieve a different purpose,” said Geoffrey Corn, a professor at South Texas College of Law. “But the DA has an obligation to prosecute crime, not people. You don’t target people, you target crime.” He said the argument by police is understandable, but it disregards the presumption of innocence.

“It’s problematic to endorse a concept that is, effectively, preventive arrest,” Corn said.

It’s the same idea behind police unions wanting to keep marijuana illegal. In addition to how lucrative it is for them, of course, it gives police an excuse to search people and arrest people they don’t like or that they think are probably criminals, using the law to target people, rather than solving crime.

I get an email:

Subject: I’m writing an essay on marijuana.

Text: I need you background to say your not a nut. Please reply. Thank you.

Probably not the best approach, Phillip, when asking a professional for information, but fortunately, I’m a laid-back kind of guy and don’t mind the potential “nut” reference.

However, I’m also a teacher, and I’m afraid I can’t let your spelling and grammar go uncorrected. I’m hoping you’ll do much better in your paper about marijuana. We’ve developed a bit of a reputation in recent years of being the smart ones out there, and if you go and spoil it for the rest of us by looking like you were too stoned to pay attention in English class, then us nuts are going to be quite unhappy and come after you.

“I need you background…”

OK. “I need you” is what you tell your girlfriend (I need you, Suzie), not what you tell a background. I’m going to assume you mean that you need my background. In that case you should say “I need your background.” “Your” is the possessive form of the pronoun “you” (“my blog,” “your paper”).

“… to say your not a nut.”

Remember our previous lesson? “Your” is the possessive form of “you.” This seems to imply that I possess a “not,” but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind. You probably mean “… to say you are not a nut” and then intended on shortening the “you are.” You can do that. But when you shorten “you are” it ends up as “you’re” (with the apostrophe taking the place of the missing space and “a”).

Thus the entire sentence should read:

“I need your background to say you’re not a nut.”

It’s a bit spare and could use some amplification (such as “I would like to get some details of your background to add as bibliography when I cite your writing, so I can show you are a qualified resource and not just a nut.”). However, that’s not really essential, and your revised statement (perhaps with the addition of “in order to”) would do a better job of passing minimal grammatical scrutiny.

“Please reply. Thank you.”

Again, a bit brusque, but at least it had the very nice “Thank you.” (which is why I’m providing what you ask).

At the top of every page of DrugWarRant.com, near the left, you’ll see links for “Home,” “About,” and “Articles”. If you click on the “About” link, you’ll find out things about the site and about me. If you’re ambitious enough to continue to follow links from there, you’ll also get to my regular work resume.

Good luck with the paper.

When I first read this story about the DEA laundering drug cartel money, I thought, “Of course. That’s what they do, so why is this a story?”

Then I remembered that the DEA is supposed to be on the other side from the cartels, so it is a scandalous story.

Then I tried to answer “The other side of what?” but couldn’t come up with a good answer to that one.

Let’s see… one runs drugs, guns and money and profits from the drug war, while the other one… nope, no real distinction there.

I’m at a loss.

I’ll just have to keep thinking of the DEA as another rival cartel and realize that the other side is we the people. And one day we the people will win the drug war with the stroke of a pen, undercutting the support for the DEA and other cartels.

Why is the west funding Iran’s deadly war on drugs? by Fazel Hawramy in the Guardian

Representatives of more that 50 countries will meet in Vienna shortly to determine the level of international support that Iran receives for its continuing war on drugs.

This comes amid concern about the increasing number of executions for drug-related offences in Iran. Six more people were recently hanged in the city of Kermanshah – executions that a senior figure in the judiciary described as “one of the triumphs of Iran”.

As part of the counter-narcotics programme, Iran receives a constant flow of technical support from the UK, the US and other western governments, either directly or through the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The UNODC’s Yuri Fedetov has consistently praised Iran’s drug war efforts, yet has said nothing about its human rights abuses, despite the fact that all other UN programs are supposed to be subservient to the Human Rights charter.

If the west is serious about supporting reform in Iran, it must rethink whether it’s right for taxpayers to continue funding a programme that leads to the execution of hundreds of people every year.

The message that we’ve consistently given to the entire world is that if you violate human rights in the war on drugs, we not only won’t call you on it, we’ll support you with money.

The quote is buried deep within Marijuana use among young adults at highest levels

It’s a standard ho-hum article about marijuana, teens, and addiction, with the formulaic start:

Growing up in Greeley, Colo., Justin Luke Riley heard lots of anti-drug messages at home, school and church. But he ignored them to escape his insecurities and fit in better with his high school tennis team; at age 15, he got hooked.

And the article has all the usual nonsense, complete with NIDA’s Nora Volkow making outrageous claims for which she should be ashamed.

There’s no good science yet to explain why pot use is rising, but Volkow blames medical marijuana. Hearing about medicinal benefits makes people think it must not be harmful, she said.

Then comes the simple quote of the day, from Brad Burge of MAPS:

Brad Burge offers another explanation: Perhaps teens enjoy how they feel when they smoke and don’t buy the government’s arguments against pot.

Yep.

This is hilarious.

Kevin A. Sabet: Former ONDCP propaganda writer, who was involved in helping the Drug Czar craft his campaign of misinformation about drugged driving (you know, the one we helped refute and forced a correction) complete with blatant misuse of NHTSA study statistics, who never complained when the Washington Post printed absolute lies based on his misdirection…

Kevin A. Sabet: Is now complaining that the report about medical marijuana states having a reduction of traffic fatalities doesn’t meet his standards, and he is appalled that media outlets are actually… believing it.

And his “refutation” fails to even address the main point of the study.

This guy has no shame or integrity at all. (Update: I don’t actually know that. I can only infer it in terms of this particular issue based on his actions.)

I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but the New York Times seems to really be stepping up recently. The latest is an excellent article: Police Officers Find That Dissent on Drug Laws May Come With a Price

The article discusses the cases of several cops who have been disciplined or fired for expressing their sympathy with legalization, and it mentions Law Enforcement Against Prohibition at length.

Nice.

The excellent Maia Szalavitz in Time: Why Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Traffic Deaths

A nicely-written and clear article on this study and it’s got a huge circulation.

States that legalize medical marijuana see fewer fatal car accidents, according to a new study, in part because people may be substituting marijuana smoking for drinking alcohol. […]

Studies have consistently found that while mixing either marijuana or alcohol with driving is unadvisable, driving high is much safer than driving drunk.

Bingo. That’s the key. We’ll never get far with the public by claiming that driving while high is better than driving while straight, but they’re much more likely to understand the clear truth that drunk driving is far more dangerous than stoned driving so that substitution is a positive effect.

It’s been suggested in comments here since the study clearly gets its life-saving benefits from young people switching to marijuana, that we, as drug policy reformers, should be less quick to claim that regulated legalization can control use by the young. And yet, as Maia shows, the study even covers that:

The authors also found that in states that legalized medical use, there was no increase in marijuana smoking by teenagers — a finding seen in other studies as well. But, in many cases, the laws were linked with an increase in marijuana smoking among adults in their 20s; this rise was accompanied by a reduction in alcohol use by college age youth, suggesting that they were smoking weed instead.

That’s positive all the way around.

Was our world made any safer because shortly after these pictures were taken, the women in them were shot in the back of the head?

The recent decision by Governor Gregoire and Governor Chafee (later joined by Vermont’s Governor Shumlin) to formally petition to take marijuana out of Schedule 1 is a pretty big deal, though not necessarily in the way some people think.

Now even conservative publications like the Bakersfield Californian are jumping on the cause:

The governors of Washington and Rhode Island last week sought to clear up the legal gray area created by the decriminalization of medical marijuana in their states by asking the federal government to reclassify the drug. Gov. Jerry Brown ought to join them. […]

Sixteen states have adopted medical marijuana laws. The other 14 should join the effort initiated by Washington and Rhode Island — and it should start with Brown.

In a sad irony, to have the next cannabis rescheduling petition come from government entities rather than citizens, gives it more weight — or at least makes it harder for the DEA to sit on it for years, bat it around for more years, and then finally spit out a denial that’s hardly more than “Get out of here, you’re bothering me.”

This scheduling petition could lead to a crack in the fed’s armor.

And make no mistake about it, keeping marijuana in Schedule 1 is of ultimate importance for the feds. They need that to be able to continue to exert the control they wish in terms of foreign policy, pharmaceutical policy, and a lot of other policy. Breaking it out of Schedule 1 will crack their death grip on it and make it easier to move toward an eventual goal of legalization.

Schedule 2 in and of itself is not the goal. Oh, sure, Schedule 2 would help ease the path for more research (which would be wonderful), but it’s not going to solve the fed-state conflict or the plant-pharmaceutical conflict.

The Bakersfield Californian imagines:

A reclassification of the drug could potentially lead to marijuana being dispensed by pharmacies, which would be safer than, and preferable to, the hodgepodge system of dispensaries, doctor “recommendations,” patient cards and uneven enforcement that has resulted in illicit, back-door distribution to recreational users and unnecessary difficulties for legitimate medical users.

Yes and no. It’ll definitely help states come up with better systems, but the conflicts and problems won’t go away until we’re able to come up with a complete policy of state-regulated legal marijuana for both medical and recreational use that can’t be touched by the feds.

The Governors’ rescheduling petition is just one more useful tool in our fight against the federal government’s unilateral and undemocratic attempt to control cannabis policy for the world.