Drug WarRant

On August 27th, I caught a remark by President Calderón buried in the Honduras Weekly and the Latin American Herald Tribune:

If Americans “are determined and resigned to consume drugs, then look for market alternatives that cancel out the criminals’ astronomical profits or establish clear entry points for the drugs distinct from the border with Mexico, but this situation can no longer continue unchanged,” he said.

A powerful and provocative statement. I also noted that mainstream media seemed to be ignoring that part of the speech entirely.

On August 30th (three days later) another blogger named Tim Padgett somehow found out about Calderón’s statement (maybe on his own, maybe somebody pointed out my post, I don’t know) and also wrote about it.

Well, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowski has responded to the story by writing to… me? No, he wrote to Tim.

So what’s the deal, Gil? Don’t you like me? Why does Tim get the love? He was a little late to the game – you should have been writing me.

Is it something I said? Did your secretary lose my address? Just ask Michele for it – she probably has it.

I’ll admit that it may have something to do with the fact that Tim’s blog happens to reside at Time.com, providing a significant automatic boost in readers compared to DrugWarRant.com.

Could it also have anything to do with the fact that I might not be a particularly easy audience for your letter? And that you thought you might be able to pull one past the mainstream media guy (it’s always worked in the past)? Well, it’s a different world now, so if that was the case, it only half worked.

This seems oddly familiar…

The White House is setting up a We the People website, where citizens can petition the government… and get a response.

Anyone 13 or older can create or sign a petition on WhiteHouse.gov asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. […]

Creating or signing a petition is just the first step. It’s up to you to build support for a petition and gather even more signatures. […]

If a petition meets the signature threshold, it will be reviewed by the Administration and an official response will be issued. And we’ll make sure that the petition is sent to the appropriate policy makers in the Administration.

The initial threshold to get a response from the Administration is 5,000 signatures.

Drug policy reform has dominated every other citizen-based feedback forum (change.gov, the various townhall and video townhall events, etc), and I’m sure we’ll do the same here (as we should). It’s the same idea dressed up in new clothes.

Like all similar efforts in this administrations, this rings a bit like providing bread and circuses to the populace – giving them the feel-good sense of government being “open and accountable,” when it’s anything but.

Despite my cynicism, these opportunities do provide us with something of value. Not in terms of reaching the government (they already know their answer to our petition), but in terms of reaching the people and making them aware of how many other people are demanding change.

Just down the road from me, there’s been a contentious situation as teachers have been on strike. One of the strike issues has been over mandatory random suspicionless drug-testing for teachers.

The main newspaper in the area has come forward with a powerful editorial: At Illini Bluffs, A Principle Worthy Of The Picket Line

The teachers strike at Illini Bluffs is into its second week and eyeballing a third, and it has been fascinating, if also a bit depressing, to read the back-and-forth in the on-line comments to Journal Star stories.

Once upon a time this nation stood for something, affording its citizens an unprecedented set of civil liberties. Americans got used to those, so much so that they wouldn’t give them up without a fight. Apparently that spirit has vanished from certain segments of the population, if not from the ranks of these teachers. […]

Ultimately, it’s about the kind of country you want to live in. The nation’s Founding Fathers got it. ( Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ) The teachers get it. The Illini Bluffs School Board doesn’t. ( No wonder its members have remained so silent. )

And unfortunately a fair number of citizens don’t get it either. They subscribe to the misperception that such random drug testing policies are common. ( If there is another Illinois public school district that does what Illini Bluffs is proposing, no one seems to be aware of it. ) Routine are the all-too-porous arguments that these teachers “are lucky to have a job” or “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” ( Imagine the constitutional abuses that could be excused by those attitudes. ) One appreciates that this economy has cowed a lot of people, but this level of passive and compliant seems downright un-American. Who’d have thought sticking up for the Constitution would prove in the least bit unpopular?

Freedom. What a concept.

Today is International Overdose Awareness Day. It’s not something that the government appears to be talking about much today. No, this is something that is being discussed around the world in health and drug policy reform circles (and in the music industry).

Accidental overdoses have quadrupled since 1990, and more than 26,000 Americans die every year.

Prohibition has done absolutely nothing to address this problem, and, in fact, has been a significant contributor to these deaths. Almost all accidental overdoses for heroin, for example, are directly attributable to the lack of certainty of purity/dosage of the drug, which stems from the government letting criminals supervise heroin’s manufacture and distribution.

Other accidental overdoses are a result of lack of fact-based education. Just say no doesn’t help people know. Knowledge saves lives. Propaganda kills.

Even without stopping the destruction of prohibition outright, there are things that can be done now. As Jason Flom (president of Lava Records and former CEO of Atlantic Records, Virgin Records and the Capitol Music Group) writes in the New York Post:

The solutions are no mystery, and two stand out as no-brainers.

The first is expanding access to naloxone — a cheap, non-narcotic, generic drug proven to reverse the effects of opiate overdose and restore breathing. If we can make it easier to get, we’ll prevent thousands of deaths each year.

The other is passing “911 Good Samaritan” laws. New York last month became the fourth state to allow people to call 911 when witnessing an overdose without fear of prosecution.

We can’t forget the lives that have been lost, nor allow this catastrophe to continue. I’m calling on radio stations to help spread the word on International Overdose Awareness Day by playing music by bands that have lost a member to an overdose, like Sublime, Blind Melon, Hole, Alice in Chains, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Ramones. Music by legends like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. I hope radio stations will mention Overdose Awareness Day and give out the Web site drugpolicy.org/overdose so listeners can learn more about how to reduce overdose deaths.

The phrase that I caught here on Saturday in Calderon’s speech, is finally getting noticed in the mainstream media.

Tim Padgett at Time Magazine: Mexico’s Narco-Epiphany: Is Calderón Suggesting the U.S. Legalize Drugs?

Here’s another one to properly ridicule the Joseph Califano/CASA “study” on Facebook and teen drinking.

Flash! Facebook causes teen drinking! (Until you read the fine print)

For too long, people like Califano have gotten away with lying — inferring that correlation is the same as causation is a form of lying. It’s nice to see the media no longer uncritically accepting CASA’s nonsense, and even going a step further to educate the public about the difference between correlation and causation. Here’s one example I hadn’t known about before…

At one time, public health experts thought that eating ice cream might cause polio; they noticed that the number of polio cases was higher in places with greater ice cream consumption. It took awhile to figure out that polio increased in hot months, when children played together in often unsanitary conditions. And guess what people ate more of during hot weather?

Today in the Los Angeles Times, Paul Armentano has Student drug testing doesn’t work [Blowback]

Yet despite these programs’ consistently poor performance, an estimated one-quarter of public schools now engage in some form of student drug testing. They shouldn’t.

Random drug testing of students is an ineffective, humiliating, invasive practice that undermines the relationships between pupils and staff and runs contrary to the principles of due process. It compels teens to potentially submit evidence against themselves and forfeit their privacy rights as necessary requirements for attending school.

Rather than presuming our schoolchildren innocent of illicit activity, drug testing without suspicion presumes them guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Why are we continuing to send this message to our children?

I think it’s pretty exciting that we’re witnessing a renaissance of female heroes. Why are the police attacking them?

Law Enforcement Prepares to Fight Heroine Resurgence

To Channel 5’s headline writer: Spell-check doesn’t know the difference between a legendary female character and a drug made from poppies. That means you need to.

US-Trained Assassin Teams Now Deployed in Drug War

Now that’s something that you won’t hear either of our countries’ governments talking about publicly.

Michigan medical marijuana sellers close up shop after ruling

Thursday was a bad day to be among Michigan’s nearly 100,000 medical marijuana patients and down to a last joint.

Many marijuana dispensaries closed their shops to pot sales, on lawyers’ advice, following a court of appeals ruling.

“It would be dangerous to operate with the specter of a criminal case hanging over our head,” said John Lewis, lawyer for Compassionate Apothecary in Mt. Pleasant, the center of the marijuana maelstrom.

On Tuesday, a unanimous panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the dispensary’s business model of charging clients a fee to store marijuana that could be sold to any registered patient was illegal. The ruling was a blow to the burgeoning medical marijuana business and its patients.

We’ve really got to make this plant legal. Period.

… on how not to handle drug policy.

A good article: Ottawa’s drug problem: The penalty doesn’t fit the crime by Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob.

…the answer to offending “does not lie in simply building more prisons and getting more police. If that were true, then the United States would be the safest place on Earth.” […]

Imprisonment is very costly and, if it’s being justified as a means to address drug problems or achieve public safety, the government needs to demonstrate that imprisonment is the most cost-effective way of achieving reduction in drug use, production and trafficking. It won’t be able to do this. Interestingly, it never tried. […]

By addressing sentencing for drug offences in an unprincipled and incoherent manner and by suggesting that its new set of drug sentences will help address Canada’s drug problem, the government is doomed to failure on two counts: It will not address Canada’s drug problems, and it will make sentences less coherent than they are at the moment.

It’s fascinating to see our disaster through outside eyes. Fortunately, there are some that can see what should be obvious to all.

That’s the Supreme Court of Colombia. Who knew that we’d have to look to other Supreme Courts for an understanding of fundamental rights.

Colombia Supreme Court decriminalizes drugs for personal use

Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that carrying small doses of drugs is not a punishable offense, torpedoing years of effort by the administration of former President Alvaro Uribe to criminalize the personal possession and consumption of drugs.

According to the court, penalizing the personal use of drugs violates the “free development of personality.”

The court found that Legislative Act No.2, 2009, which banned the personal use of drugs, “implies the nullification of fundamental rights, and it represses and sanctions with the severest punishments (imprisonment) the personal decision to abandon one’s personal health, a choice that corresponds to their own decision and does not infringe on the rights of other members of society.”

According to newspaper El Tiempo, the Supreme Court set the “personal amount” of drugs at 20 grams of marijuana and one gram of cocaine.

I was reading another article about Mexican President Calderón, and it looked like it was going to be more of the same…

Calderón Blames US Consumer for Drug Wars in Latin America (Honduras Weekly)

My first thought was that this was getting a little old. Blaming US consumers for the violence in Mexico is like blaming gravity for plane crashes. Technically true, but you’re better off looking at what your pilots are doing and whether your airplanes are designed right.

But then I read what he actually said and realized that the headline writer completely missed the bombshell.

President Calderón said, “If [the US] is determined and resigned to consume drugs, then it should look for market alternatives that would either deny the stratospheric profits to criminals or create alternative shipment routes to the border with Mexico… but this situation can no longer continue as it is.”

Read that carefully. Calderón says if the US is going to continue to consume drugs (ie, not repeal the law of gravity), then it should look for market alternatives…

Did Calderón just call for legalization? I think so. Market alternatives that deny exorbitant profits to the black market is pretty much the definition of legalization.

How is that not the headline of this story?

That quote is also buried in this story in the Latin American Herald Tribune.

Early in the story, they talk about Calderón’s criticism of the U.S. a different way…

The crime prompted President Felipe Calderon to escalate his rhetoric against violent drug cartels and also criticize the United States’ appetite for illegal narcotics and demand greater commitment from Washington in the battle against organized crime.

Then much further down comes the key quote, with a slightly different translation that makes the latter part about distribution routes clearer, while keeping that very specific “market alternatives” language.

If Americans “are determined and resigned to consume drugs, then look for market alternatives that cancel out the criminals’ astronomical profits or establish clear entry points for the drugs distinct from the border with Mexico, but this situation can no longer continue unchanged,” he said.

Yes, President Calderón, it’s time for the U.S. to look at market alternatives.

…

In related news…

Ex-Mexico President Suggests Truce With Drug Cartels

Just an Ordinary Day of Death in Mexico’s War on Drug Traffickers

…

Update: McClatchy reports on Calderón’s reactions to the casino fire as well, and includes the criticism of U.S. not doing enough, but leaves out the references to market alternatives. So far, I’ve not found a single U.S. media outlet (other than blogs) that has reported this fairly major item.