Drug WarRant

… so that they have to harass people not only following state law, but even federal law.

Oregon State Police harass Federal medical marijuana patient Elvy Musikka

Early Thursday morning, Oregon State Police detained Elvy Musikka, one of four remaining federal medical marijuana patients, along with other state medical marijuana registry cardholders following a town hall meeting on medical marijuana in the eastern Oregon / Idaho border town of Ontario.

According to Joey Nieves, clinic manager at 45th Parallel, a medical marijuana cardholders co-operative, a state trooper had staked out the co-op to harass cardholders as they left the building. […]

Nieves reports Musikka was detained for over an hour in a squad car as the trooper did not believe Musikka’s federal paperwork entitling her to possess and use her federally-produced medical marijuana anywhere in the United States. […]

Patients on the scene recorded the encounter on video, which has been seized by the state police. […]

An AP reporter was already working on a story about Elvy and in the process of getting the return of Elvy’s prescription and ID, they learned that the state troopers were being ordered by the federal Department of Justice to engage in these seizures from state-legal patients.

President Obama has issued the annual Presidential memorandum where countries are chastised for failing to win our failed war on drugs.

Pursuant to section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228)(FRAA), I hereby identify the following countries as major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries: Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. […]

Pursuant to section 706(2)(A) of the FRAA, I hereby designate Bolivia, Burma, and Venezuela as countries that have failed demonstrably during the previous 12 months to make substantial efforts to adhere to their obligations under international counternarcotics agreements and take the measures set forth in section 489(a)(1) of the FAA. […]

I have also determined, in accordance with provisions of section 706(3)(A) of the FRAA, that support for programs to aid Bolivia and Venezuela are vital to the national interests of the United States.

Seems to me that there’s one major drug producing and transit country that isn’t on the list. Big country, perched right on top of Latin America, consumes more illegal drugs than the rest of the world. Wonder how it got left off the list?

Drug WarRant has been a big fan of LEAP member David Bratzer. Well, he is taking a leave from his work as a police officer in Victoria, BC in order to run for School Board Trustee in Victoria.

His campaign theme is “Schools Not Prisons.” It recognizes education as a major factor in determining whether a young person ends up in jail.

The interesting thing is that he is not hiding his involvement with LEAP and his views about the failed war on drugs, but rather making that part of his positive candidacy. Very refreshing.

I’ll keep you updated on his campaign.

Update:

Taking swift action, a federal district court judge last night granted an ACLU request and temporarily halted an unconstitutional policy at a public college in Missouri requiring all incoming students to submit to mandatory drug tests. Judge Nanette K. Laughrey ordered officials at Linn State Technical College in Jefferson City, Mo., to stop analyzing urine specimens that have already been collected and to instruct the drug testing company not to release any results it may have already compiled.

The ACLU is on fire.

Got Urine? ACLU Sues College Over Mandatory Drug Testing

Today the ACLU filed suit in federal court to stop Linn State Technical College, a public college in Missouri, from drug testing all of their incoming students with no suspicion of wrongdoing. Six brave students have stood up to administrators to demand that their Fourth Amendment rights not be violated, and that this senseless intrusion must end. […]

Our complaint demands that Linn State rescind their unconstitutional drug testing policy, refrain from testing anymore students, halt any analysis of the urine samples already collected, and return the $50 they charged all students.

But this case goes beyond Linn State. We filed our complaint in federal court not to just stop Linn State, but to stop any other college that thinks they can drug test their student body. It is illegal and they cannot.

Coming right on the heels of taking on the Florida welfare drug testing law, the ACLU is really stepping up to the plate here. These lawsuits are essential.

…

In other drug testing news, Hawaii Teachers Defeat Random Drug Testing

In an agreement reached Monday, the state agreed to end its insistence on random drug and alcohol testing for teachers.

Negotiators for Gov. Abercrombie agreed to the settlement “to avoid further expense and risk of litigation,” according to KITV-4 in Honolulu.

“For the past four years, the HSTA the ACLU have been challenging the random drug testing,” said HSTA President Wil Okabe, who added the issue had become one of teachers’ rights and the constitutionality of random suspicionless drug tests.

Link

Police and FBI agents arrested a drug suspect in Alameda on Wednesday, but not before mistakenly trying to raid a home across the street belonging to a network TV reporter and her political consultant husband.

Harm Reduction International has released a new report: The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: Global Overview 2011

One of the key findings of the report is:

There are likely to be more than a thousand people executed every year for a drug offence and in many environments the majority or even totality are non-nationals of the executing state.

The countries that do the most executing particularly like to execute people who come from other countries (don’t assume that being an American will protect you).

Harm Reduction International points out the state of international law regarding execution, particularly for drug offenses:

The lawful application of capital punishment is significantly restricted under international law. Article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that the penalty of death may only be applied to the ‘most serious crimes’. Over the past twenty-five years UN human rights bodies have interpreted Article 6(2) in a manner that limits the number and type of offences for which execution is allowable under international human rights law. While many retentionist governments argue that drug offences fall under the umbrella of ‘most serious crimes’, this is not the perspective of the UN Human Rights Committee or the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, both of which have stated that drug offences do not constitute ‘most serious crimes’ and that executions for such offences are therefore in violation of international human rights law. This is supported by international State practice given the small minority of countries retaining capital punishment for drugs. In recent years there has also been increasing support for the belief that capital punishment in any form violates the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, as enshrined in numerous UN and regional human rights treaties, and customary international law.

I’d like to see the UNODC focus more on this area. When UNODC head Yury Fedetov recently visited Iran and praised them effusively for their drug seizures, saying:

“Iran is our important partner in the war on drugs,” he said, adding, it is a “good and reliable” partner for the international community as well.

“We will make efforts to increase international support for Iran,” he added.

Where was the admonishment for their execution of drug offenders in violation of UN law? According to reports (including from Iran government sources) as detailed in the HRI document, Iran executed at least 590 last year for drug offenses and has executed over 10,000 for drug offenses since 1979.

I’ve heard that Kevin Sabet is planning on leaving the Drug Czar’s office next week to take a job in the private sector. He’s been a prime behind-the-scenes player in the ONDCP and is likely to have had a strong hand in the extremely late National Drug Control Strategy.

Kevin’s a bright young opportunist, and has done quite a job of building a career for himself using the drug war as a resume builder. He’s also good at creating catchy sound bites without needing any evidence…

And legalization remains (rightfully) the stuff of dreams (nightmares, really, when you take into account the heavy social costs that would result from a free, commercial market for illegal drugs).

I haven’t heard yet where he’ll be working. What are your guesses?

… but what it can do is get out of the way and let the states experiment if they choose.

But the entire federal government with its President and all his federal agencies and armed forces, along with the entire House of Representatives and Senate, even if they all worked together for the first time in history to use all the power at their command… they could not legalize marijuana.

And yet, I continue to hear people call HR 2306 (Barney Frank’s bill: the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011) a bill that would legalize marijuana. Even people in Congress. (After the jump I’ve included the rather convoluted letter I got from my Representative Adam Kinzinger.)

So people like my Representative say they’re opposed to HR 2306 because they oppose legalization. But that’s not true, since HR 2306 cannot, by itself, legalize marijuana.

What these people actually oppose is the ability of free citizens in other places to use their Constitutional power to have their state government reflect their interests.
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It is not hard to see how critics of the war on drugs got the impression that Barack Obama was sympathetic to their cause.

Jacob Sullum does a fine job of analyzing Barack Obama’s record so far regarding drug policy, both candidate Obama and President Obama.

Barack Obama turns out to be just another drug warrior.

Kerlikowske’s earnest insistence that you can end the war on drugs if you stop calling it that gives you a sense of the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Obama’s drug policies, which by and large have been remarkably similar to his predecessor’s.

The jury is no longer out. The verdict is clear.

“I initially had high hopes,” says Marsha Rosenbaum, “but now believe Obama has abdicated drug policy to the DEA.”

It would be going too far to say that Obama has been faking it all these years, that he does not really care about the injustices perpetrated in the name of protecting Americans from the drugs they want. But he clearly does not care enough to change the course of the life-wrecking, havoc-wreaking war on drugs.

Sullum ends with a powerful punch:

A misdemeanor marijuana conviction could have been a life-changing event for Obama, interrupting his education, impairing his job prospects, and derailing his political career before it began. It would not have been fair, but it would have spared us the sorry spectacle of a president who champions a policy he once called “an utter failure” and who literally laughs at supporters whose objections to that doomed, disastrous crusade he once claimed to share.

This one’s from last week, but I couldn’t resist passing it on…

A Las Cruces woman has been charged $1,122 by a local hospital for a forcible body cavity search ordered by the Metro Narcotics Agency that did not turn up any illegal substances.

That has to be one of the most surreal sentences ever written.