Drug WarRant

Perry: Send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight drug wars

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Saturday that he would consider sending U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug-related violence and stop it from spilling into the southern United States.

“It may require our military in Mexico,” Perry said in answer to a question about the growing threat of drug violence along the southern border. Perry offered no details, and a spokesman, Robert Black, said afterward that sending troops to Mexico would be merely one way of putting an end to the exploding cartel-related violence in the region.

Black said Perry’s intention is to work with the Mexican government, but he declined to specify whether Perry is amenable to sending troops into Mexico with or without the country’s consent.

“If he were president he would do what it takes,” Black said. “The governor said, ‘I’m going to work with the Mexican government to do what’s necessary.’ ”

Based on reading the whole article, it appears to me less that Perry is really thinking about sending troops into Mexico, but rather that he hadn’t really thought anything through at all, and that’s the first thing that popped up in his head at the time of the question. And now his spokesperson is trying to justify what he said.

That doesn’t make me any more confident about Perry. It’s just a matter of figuring out what kind of stupid he is.

From Reason TV, we have “Prohibition Vogue: Why we can’t stop talking about “The Noble Experiment.”

The Ken Burns documentary on prohibition airing tomorrow comes at a time when we have clearly made the case that prohibition is a bad idea whether it’s alcohol back then or drugs now.

AT Toke of the Town: Philly Cops Rob Undercover Cop Posing As Marijuana Dealer

The arrests come just months after three other crooked officers were caught in a federal sting and charged with stealing heroin from a drug dealer.

Update: Got my years wrong. Sorry folks, this is from last year. Still…

Red Ribbon Week 2011 Launches New Contest: “It’s Up To Me To Be Drug Free”

Exactly. It’s up to me. Not up to the government, or the schools, or my employer, or some busybody who decided that a plant is immoral. It’s my decision.

It’s up to me to be drug free. And nobody else.

“Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society” discusses Eric Sterling’s blog and gives a shout-out to Drug WarRant.

Over at “At Painful Truth: The Entrapment of America’s Sick read Branded and see how our drug war attacks people in so many ways, including their dignity as individuals.

New Mexico couple says no to DEA drug raid — asked for warrant, the DEA leaves.

New Ken Burns PBS Documentary Brings “Prohibition” Lesson to Modern America at LEAP

Justice Stevens indicates he was wrong to uphold special Texas approach to death sentencing

“I really think that I’ve thought over a lot of cases I’ve written over the years. And I really wouldn’t want to do any one of them over…With one exception,” he told me. “My vote in the Texas death case. And I think I do mention that in that case, I think that I came out wrong on that,” Stevens said.

If I could chat with him for 20 minutes about Caballes v. Illinois, I think I could convince him that he was wrong on two cases.

I’m busy reading a book about evil and an eternal battle.

Statement of Governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island refusing to implement medical marijuana compassionate centers.
Continue reading →

WCTV

Despite a new survey that shows seven out of ten Floridians support drug testing welfare recipients,but former White House Drug Policy Coordinator Barry McCaffrey says the testing is counterproductive.[…]

Asked about Florida’s new policy of testing welfare recipients…some of whom are returning veterans, McCaffrey says the policy is misguided.

“What kind of sense does that make? You’ve got to make the barriers to entering rehabilitation low. You want people in treatment,” McCaffrey said.

From Ethan Baron in the Winnipeg Free Press, this is certainly a … graphic way of getting the point across.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is getting tougher on pot growers than he is on rapists of children. Under the Tories’ omnibus crime legislation tabled Tuesday, a person growing 201 pot plants in a rental unit would receive a longer mandatory sentence than someone who rapes a toddler or forces a five-year-old to have sex with an animal.

It really points out the legislators like to pass laws with no sense of proportionality of sentencing or proper reasoning. It’s just a constant stream of “let’s get tough” as they pull new sentencing structures out of thin air (or someplace worse).

The problem with this OpEd is that it’s likely to have little impact on those passing the laws. They’ll just decide they need to increase the sentencing for child rape.

As a follow-up to the story of the New York Police Commissioner asking cops to obey the law, the New York Times has a powerful editorial: Trouble With Marijuana Arrests

Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York Police Department came forth with too little, too late when he issued a memo directing officers not to arrest people caught with small amounts of marijuana unless the drug is in plain public view. A 1977 law decriminalized minor possession, yet tens of thousands are arrested every year. […]

While the memo, reported by WNYC last week, is an important step, it does not by itself end the problem. The United States Justice Department and New York lawmakers should investigate the legality of practices that led to the arrests of hundreds of thousands of people since the mid-1990s. […]

This policing practice has damaged young lives and deserves deeper scrutiny by federal and state monitors.

I saw a production of The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman last night. It’s an important piece of theatre, but it has always been a supremely unenjoyable experience for me seeing it performed. I just end up getting pissed off at the close-minded moralists who end up destroying the lives of good people, and the sheep who go along with them allowing it to happen. The same is true for me with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – an extraordinary play and I hate watching it.

Unfortunately, while those two plays are fictional, the characters in The Children’s Hour and The Crucible are real, and live today, manifesting themselves in people like Rick Santorum.

[in reference to states’ rights issues of gay marriage and marijuana legalization, his spokesman writes] “Senator Santorum is certainly an advocate for states’ rights, but he believes as Abraham Lincoln – that states do not have the right to legalize moral wrongs.”

And thus the destruction of peoples’ lives through denying marriage and jailing plant users becomes a moral imperative akin (in their small minds) to freeing the slaves.

Yes, it’s one more play that I find extremely unenjoyable to watch, but this one isn’t in the theatre.

Of course, to us, the war on drugs is far from an ignored war — we’re dealing with it every day.

And yet, José Fernandez López in the Huffington Post points out that it is ignored in some of the most important places.

In one of his widely read columns, journalist Andrés Oppenheimer complained last week that President Barack Obama, in his speech to the United Nations, didn’t mention Mexico at any time and the impact that the war on drugs is generating in the country. “President Obama talked at length about Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Cote D’Ivori — about almost every major conflict, except the one right next to the United States,” wrote Oppenheimer. […]

Oppenheimer stressed that the war on drugs “is a bloody conflict that, in addition to leaving a huge death toll, is becoming the biggest obstacle to economic growth in the region by draining government resources away from education and health, scaring away investments, and killing tourism.” Nothing is truer than this. But in my opinion, this is not the only reason why it is inexcusable that the American presidents — the current and the previous — take the ostrich position and decide to ignore the problem on stages as big and important as the United Nations meetings.

And it’s not just on the international stage that this war is ignored.

Check out President Obama’s remarks to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner on Saturday.

He talked about the “hard-hit black community” and addresssed unemployment, and poverty, and education, and housing, and health care, but not a word about the drug war. He talked about marching against injustice even when they’re turning the hoses on you and in the face o troopers and teargas, but never mentioned the troops that occupy those communities today.

Yes, in the halls of power, it’s often The Ignored War. Because they don’t like our answer, and they don’t have one of their own.