Drug WarRant

The ACLU blog is marking the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s declaration of a “War on Drugs.”

June 2011 marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs” — a war which has cost roughly trillion dollars, has produced little to no effect on the supply of or demand for drugs in the United States, and has contributed to making America the world’s largest incarcerator. To mark the occasion, we will be running a series of blog posts throughout the month about the drug war, its victims and what needs to be done to restore fairness and create effective policy.

Keith Humphreys thinks Nixon is getting a bad rap.

As President, he dramatically reduced federal criminal penalties for marijuana possession and launched the largest expansion of drug addiction treatment in U.S. history. I refer of course to Richard M. Nixon, who is today widely remembered as the President who launched the “war on drugs”. Why are his well-documented progressive drug policies almost completely forgotten today, leaving us with a collective memory of Nixon as the original snarling drug warrior?

But Mark Kleiman sets him straight.

Yes, but Nixon’s rhetoric outlived his policies, and is doing damage to this very day.

He invented drug-policy-as-culture-war, and the idea that drug policy was a struggle between the pure-minded Republicans and the druggie Democrats, the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” […] Nixon’s other great contribution was the idea of blaming Mexico for U.S. drug problems, leading to policies such as “Operation Intercept.” […]

Nixon is remembered as a nasty SOB because he was a nasty SOB […]

NPR this morning (and a host of major media sources around the world):

Report: ‘The Drug War Has Failed’

The global war on drugs has failed and governments should explore legalizing marijuana and other controlled substances, according to a commission that includes former heads of state, a former U.N. secretary-general and a business mogul.

A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argues that the decades-old “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” The 24-page paper will be released Thursday.

“Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,” the report said.

The 19-member commission includes former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former U.S. official George P. Schultz, who held cabinet posts under U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Others include former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, U.K. business mogul Richard Branson and the current prime minister of Greece.

Instead of punishing users who the report says “do no harm to others,” the commission argues that governments should end criminalization of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organized crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users in need.

The commission called for drug policies based on methods empirically proven to reduce crime, lead to better health and promote economic and social development.

The commission is especially critical of the United States, which its members say must lead changing its anti-drug policies from being guided by anti-crime approaches to ones rooted in healthcare and human rights.

“We hope this country [the U.S.] at least starts to think there are alternatives,” former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria told The Associated Press by phone. “We don’t see the U.S. evolving in a way that is compatible with our [countries’] long-term interests.”

The office of White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said the report was misguided.

The report is available to read here.

Via Radley Balko…

Bird-watcher wrongly arrested for possession of pot had sage in backpack

She prayed for peace that day.

But the sage that Robin Brown carried on a bird-watching outing in Weston landed her in jail on felony charges of marijuana possession.

Now she is suing over the wrongful arrest. […]

Sheriff’s Deputy Dominic Raimondi, 51, mistook Brown’s sage for marijuana, then searched her car and found more. His field kit said the sage — purchased at an airport gift shop in Albuquerque, N.M. — tested positive for marijuana.

He did not arrest her that day in March 2009, but sent the 50 grams of “contraband” to the crime lab for a more definitive test.

Assistant State Attorney Mark Horn ordered Brown’s arrest without having the sage tested, court records show.

Three months later, Raimondi showed up at the Massage Envy in Weston where Brown works and took her away in handcuffs.

Unreal.

“Our policy is to make sure the evidence is tested at the very least before trial,” said Ron Ishoy, spokesman for the Broward State Attorney’s Office. “Looking back now at this specific police report, it would have been the better practice to test the evidence before filing a formal charge.”

Ya think???

I’m off to New York City. Taking 55 people for a week of shows and walking tours on an annual theatre trip. We’ll be seeing “War Horse,” “Book of Mormon,” “Jerusalem,” “Born Yesterday,” “House of Blue Leaves,” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

Over the next 7-8 days, posting may be light, but I’ll try to stop in as often as I can.

Former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, George Shultz and Paul Volcker Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a live press conference and teleconference on Thursday, June 2 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to launch a new report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a paradigm shift in global drug policy.

The Commission is the most distinguished group of high-level leaders who have ever called for such far-reaching changes in the way society deals with illicit drugs – such as decriminalization and urging countries to experiment with legal regulation. The Executive Director of the global advocacy organization AVAAZ, with its nine million members worldwide, will present a public petition in support of the Global Commission’s recommendations that will be given to the United Nations Secretary General.

This is very big stuff, if for no other reason than the fact that a group this distinguished can generate significant press coverage and get huge mainstream cred.

If you haven’t signed the petition yet, you can still do so before the press event on Thursday.

There’s a legitimate tendency to be a little pissed about the fact that it seems to take leaving office to see the light (or to have the guts to say so), but our ire does no good aimed at those who are now doing their part. It’s more appropriately targeted at those in office now.

That’s exactly what Mary Ann Seighart does in this excellent OpEd in The Independent: A ‘war’ we should fight no longer.

Before he was President, Obama called the war on drugs an “utter failure” and said we should think about decriminalising cannabis. Before he was Prime Minister, Cameron said Britain’s drug policy was an “abject failure” and called for a debate on legalisation of all drugs. Now that they’re in power, though, both men have had an utter and abject failure of nerve. They agree with the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, who once said, in this context: “We know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”

They are not just craven but wrong. For, inexorably, the momentum is building for a more rational way of dealing with drugs. And it’s not only because baby-boomers and their successor generations now make up three-quarters of voters. The big hitters are onside too. This week, the Global Commission on Drug Policy will publish a report in New York calling for a “paradigm shift” in the way we deal with drugs. It will advocate not just decriminalisation, but also experiments with legalisation and regulation. Its cast list of backers is stellar. […]

There must be a better way, and Obama and Cameron know it. If they’re serious about representing a new generation, they should stop bragging about their youth and start doing something about it. Those of us who also came of age in the 1980s don’t want to wait till they’re ex-leaders serving on a drugs policy commission.

On the other hand, you have this extremely ignorant screed attempting to preempt the Global Drug Policy announcement:

Should former presidents, prime ministers, economists and the business community decide drugs policy? NO! from the World Federation Against Drugs:

This is what happens when the legalisation movement teams up with strong financial interests pushing the agenda via normalisation, harm reduction, in order to finally reach their goal – legalisation of drugs. Pushing for a health approach is just part of the plan, the idea being that nobody is expected to be against a health approach or harm reduction.

There is every reason to be critical of this so-called “health approach”. To facilitate access to drugs has nothing to do with a “health approach” or harm reduction. It is rather harm production.

Furthermore one might ask – What do former presidents, prime ministers, economists and members of the business community really know about drug addiction?

Well, morons, it’s not about drug addiction, it’s about drug war and drug prohibition policy, and former presidents, prime ministers, economists and members of the business community actually might know something about policy.

And “financial interests for legalisation”? Really? You might want to talk to your board members Robert DuPont and Calvina Fay about their financial interests in prohibition. Those are a couple of folks who know about “harm production.” They’ve been responsible for a whole lot of that in this world.

A rather moving segment featuring Neil Franklin, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, at a panel discussion at Riverside Church in New York. He is visibly disturbed by what the drug war has done to the people, and by his part in it before understanding its destruction. A very heartfelt mea culpa.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center has released a major new report (that appears to have been prepared at significant expense) titled: The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society 2011

The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) prepares an annual National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) that provides federal policymakers and senior officials with a comprehensive appraisal of the danger that trafficking and use of illicit drugs pose to the security of our nation. To expand the scope of its NDTA, and to provide the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and other federal officials with a broad and deep understanding of the full burden that illicit drug use places on our
country, NDIC has prepared this assessment— The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society. The assessment is conducted within a Cost of Illness (COI) framework that has guided work of this kind for several decades. As such, it monetizes the consequences of illicit drug use, thereby allowing its impact to be gauged relative to other social problems.

In 2007, the cost of illicit drug use totaled more than $193 billion.

$193 billion. In one year? Wow.

How is illicit drug use costing us so much? Let’s look at what they’re including…

• Crime includes three components: criminal justice system costs ($56,373,254,000), crime victim costs ($1,455,555,000), and other crime costs ($3,547,885,000). These subtotal $61,376,694,000.
• Health includes five components: specialty treatment costs ($3,723,338,000), hospital and emergency department costs for nonhomicide cases ($5,684,248,000), hospital and emergency department costs for homicide cases ($12,938,000), insurance administration costs ($544,000), and other health costs ($1,995,164,000). These subtotal $11,416,232,000.
• Productivity includes seven components: labor participation costs ($49,237,777,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the state level ($2,828,207,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the federal level ($44,830,000), hospitalization costs ($287,260,000), incarceration costs ($48,121,949,000), premature mortality costs (nonhomicide: $16,005,008,000), and premature mortality costs (homicide: $3,778,973,000). These subtotal $120,304,004,000.

Now, you have to read the actual report to understand what they mean by some of those terms above, but are you already starting to get the picture?

The vast majority of those costs are directly attributable to prohibition, not illicit drug use.

Criminal justice costs of $56 billion, for example, include the police, courts, and prisons that enforce drug laws.

And the absolute largest portion of the total costs by far is “lost productivity.” Here’s my favorite: $48 billion attributable to lost productivity due to prison. That’s right, they’re considering it a cost to society that people are not being productive because they’ve been arrested for drug offenses and are in jail. And they attribute this cost to illicit drug use. They even invented a really bizarre-sounding term: drug-induced incarceration.

Now I’ve heard of drug-induced hallucinations before, but drug-induced incarceration? I don’t think so. It takes a law and a judge to induce an incarceration.

Most of the other so-called costs of illicit drug use are equally suspect. Take a look at the lost labor productivity from drug users who aren’t incarcerated. They’ve essentially looked at the income of those who use illicit drugs and compared it to those who don’t and called the difference “lost productivity.” That ignores all sorts of social and class implications related to the status of illicit drugs and also whether drug use drives unemployment or the reverse is true.

Take a look at treatment costs and you’ll find they not only count the cost of treatment, but the cost of lost productivity for those in treatment, and yet treatment may be not a result of illicit drug addiction, but of court mandate.

Or health costs. How much of the health costs mentioned are because illicit drugs are unregulated, leading to overdoses and other health problems? And death. They also counted the lost productivity of every person in history who died because of illicit drugs and would have been alive to work in 2007 otherwise. This means they counted all the people who died from heroin laced with all sorts of adulterants – a direct result of unregulated drugs.

The more you look at the report and analyze it, the more you see it as a damning report on the cost of the drug war to society. And yet it’s actually presented as a justification for the drug war.

The base line they use for the report is a drug-free America.

It is important to note that this analysis occurs within the context of a “what if” scenario in which illicit drug use no longer exists.

So essentially, they are comparing a mythical non-illicit-drug-use state with today’s illicit-drug-use state. Except that that’s not really true. They are completely ignoring prohibition. In a non-illicit-drug-use state, there would be no prohibition. Prohibition is not something that just exists because drug use exists. It is an active and significant factor that’s been added to the equation. To ignore a factor of such magnitude renders the entire report meaningless.

Imagine that the government had bizarrely decreed that corn was only allowed to be planted in rocky desert areas. Now imagine that a government report studied the attempts to grow corn and concluded, without any reference to the decree, that corn was not a viable crop for the United States. How stupid would those analysts look? And yet, this is the same kind of stupidity used in this National Drug Intelligence Center report.

It gets worse.

After listing a bunch of costs that are truly attributable to the drug war and not to illicit drug use, the analysts actually conclude that this report justifies the drug war and the drug policies that the federal government are pursuing.

…it is relatively easy to draw inferences from the findings presented above.

It is important that illicit drugs be made as difficult and costly to obtain as possible. This points to the value of law enforcement efforts. […]

The findings thus validate the basic premises of the National Drug Control Strategy. Strong law enforcement efforts that reduce cultivation, production, and distribution of illicit drugs both limit consumer access and enhance
public safety…

Incredible. I’ve seen a lot of junk science in my time, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more blatant example of just making up a conclusion that had nothing to do with (and in fact was contradicted by) the data presented.

Ethan Nadelmann