Drug WarRant

Occurs in the pilot episode of “Harry’s Law” starring Kathy Bates. To watch it, go to the NBC video and go to the 23:45 mark of the episode (I haven’t watched the whole episode yet, but if the rest of the show is anything like this, it should be pretty interesting).

Transcript isn’t the same without Kathy Bates’ fiery acting, but for those who can’t get NBC video, here’s my attempt… Kathy Bates plays Harriet Korn, a defense attorney, and in the pilot episode she defends a young black man named Malcolm on his third drug offense.

Continue reading →

The latest ignorant and fact-free screed comes from Connecticut State Senator Toni Boucher: “Fake Pot” — A New Threat to Children and Parents.

I began work on halting efforts to expand marijuana use after emotional appeals for help from mothers and fathers who had found their young children dead from drug overdoses after years of marijuana use.

Clearly, those mothers and fathers have been betrayed by giving their trust to their senator. Marijuana did not cause those deaths. Those deaths have come about because Toni Boucher and other elected officials have continually put the distribution and safety of illicit drugs in the hands of criminals through banning them, rather than saving lives by regulating these drugs.

She knows her responsibility:

As elected officials and advocates for a health and safety of our constituents, we are entrusted to help improve the lives of the people we represent, not place them in harms way.

And yet, it is through banning drugs that she puts their lives in harms way.

Additionally, by continuing the push to ban marijuana, it is the politicians who have created a market for fake pot, it is the politicians who have created a reason to shift to other drugs, and it is the politicians who have put marijuana sales in the same category and distribution network as heroin and cocaine.

Toni Boucher has blood on her hands. And she attempts to clean up that blood either with willful ignorance, or outright lies.

According to medical experts, however, one marijuana cigarette is even more lethal than a cigarette, 4-5 times more.

You don’t serve your constituents by lying to them and making them less safe.

The Economist regarding the U.S. decision to object to Bolivia’s amendment regarding coca-leaf-chewing…

Bolivia is considering pulling out of the convention if its modest proposal is struck down.

Now and then the ignorance of the masses depresses me when I read bizarre comments related to a drug war news item (usually at Yahoo news, for some reason). Yet, on the whole, I am incredibly impressed with the knowledge of commenters at news sites.

What a difference from even 5 years ago!

This inspires me to optimism.

Case in point. Really bad letter in the Springfield, Illinois, State Journal-Register by Dora Dixie, M.D.: Smoking marijuana is not medicine

It was full of the kind of nonsense that gets my blood boiling, from someone who is Immediate past president of the Illinois Society of Addiction Medicine in Chicago.

I stand with thousands of physicians across our country and around the world who know that smoking marijuana is not medicine. […]

It is apparent that the legislators for legalization of medical marijuana are minimizing the potential harm to public health and safety […] Is it possible that they are far more interested in the millions of dollars that stand to line pockets and political coffers?

People who need alternative therapies for pain relief and other symptoms associated with end-stage illness have plenty of options that don’t require them to smoke. Those options should be determined by patients and their reputable health-care providers, not Illinois legislators. […]

I urge more physicians to stand up to the medical-marijuana industry and the drug-legalization movement and to refuse to allow responsible medicine to be compromised by them. I also urge Illinoisans to contact their legislators and insist that they just say no to Rep. Lang and his latest medical marijuana proposal, SB 1381.

As I was reading the letter, the obvious retorts were screaming in my brain, and yet.. check out what I found in comments before I even had a chance. Clear. To the point.

artie: From the penultimate paragraph, ‘Those options should be determined by patients and their reputable health-care providers, not Illinois legislators.’

I agree entirely. Legalize it and let the decision be with patients and their reputable health-care providers, not Illinois legislators.

lunarschooner:well, you have a stake in ‘drug’ rehabilitation don’t you?

dg48: Here we have another professional drug warrior who spent over twenty years being part of the problem instead of part of the solution and cannot now ever admit this to herself. It is unfortunate that she would sell so many suffering people down the river just to justify her career choice.

MrM: I wonder if Dr. Dixie has actually read the bill. The bill does not allow for a medical marijuana industry. It allows a patient and 1 caregiver to grow their own plants. The number and size of plants is quite limited. The amount of marijuana that the patient and caregiver are allowed to possess is 2 ounces.

Where is all of this ‘millions of dollars that stand to line pockets and political coffers’ going to come from?

Boom.

With only about a dozen comments, the visitors had covered vaporizing marijuana as medicine, the hypocrisy of supporting more dangerous prescribed drugs, and more.

Nice to see. Good job, “army” (although it didn’t appear to be any of ours directly commenting, the work everyone does feeds into the knowledge base of the citizenry).

Ignoring 5,000 years of the history and culture of the indigenous Andean people, the U.S. Government has formally opposed Bolivia’s amendment to the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs that would have eliminated the unenforced (and unenforceable) provision requiring countries to eliminate coca chewing within 25 years.

Remember that the ban was based on a 1949 brief visit to Bolivia and Peru by a completely unqualified commission from the U.N., which gave erroneous and racist reports including that chewing the coca leaf “induces in the individual undesirable changes of an intellectual and moral character,” “reduces the economic yield of productive work, and therefore maintains a low economic standard of life.”

Remember also that the coca leaf chewing ban is separate from the ban against cocaine. Removing this bad section would not affect the cocaine ban. And remember that coca leaf chewing is, in fact, non-addictive, with proven therapeutic benefits and no negative health effects. Additionally, remember that lifting this ban would not suddenly make coca leaf chewing legal in the U.S. or anywhere else, unless that country decided to legalize it.

So why is the U.S. pushing to keep this racist policy that doesn’t affect them and further marginalizes indigenous people?

Well, they have their reasons, but it doesn’t seem that they’re too proud of them.

AFP

“Alongside concerned member states, we cannot go along with the proposed amendment, and we filed our note with the UN secretary-general on January 19,” a State Department official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

On condition of anonymity? The U.N. has already confirmed receiving the note from the U.S. What’s the secret? U.S. officials are so embarrassed by this that they don’t want their name attached to it?

AP

A U.S. official speaking on background also confirmed that the letter was filed with the United Nations on Wednesday.

The official said the United States was concerned that the proposal would weaken the integrity of the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs by removing language obligating signers to prohibit coca leaf-chewing.

Weaken the integrity? What integrity?

On the basis of the video we saw alone, that drug bust and killing was unsupportable. Turns out it was even worse. Unbelievable stuff in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Investigators gathered evidence that it was Blair’s roommate, Melanie Chournos, buying and selling meth — a factor in the no-knock search that would precede Blair’s death. […]

Keyes asked 2nd District Judge Scott M. Hadley for a no-knock, nighttime search warrant because house “lookouts” were known to give warning when police were nearby. Meth dissolves quickly, Keyes added, and “if given the opportunity, Chournos will destroy the evidence.”

However, the warrant doesn’t mention that Chournos had already moved out of Blair’s home — a development officers noted in interviews after his death. […]

The SWAT team prepared for a “dynamic entry” — breaking through the door and subduing anyone inside.

Normally, that involves extensive planning, officers said in investigation interviews.

“A PowerPoint presentation is typically put together (and) a briefing of everybody sitting around the round table in our office … and all the details are laid out as far as the suspect, the location, the route in, the … evacuation points and … where the closest medical [facility] is,” officer Brandon Beck said in a transcribed interview with county investigators.

Instead, the team gathered at a nearby retirement home to go over the plan.

To do a dynamic entry without the in-office briefing is “absolutely not our standard,” said Burnett, the officer who shot Blair, during an interview with investigators.

On the video, minutes before the raid begins, an officer can be heard asking the group, “Did somebody grab a copy of the warrant off my desk?”

“Oh, don’t tell me that,” Burnett replies. He then tells the other officers, “He doesn’t have a copy of the warrant.”

Now the Washington Post has picked up on it.

The article gives a pretty good background on the subject and covers the issues without the U.S. parochialism that often biases media drug war coverage.

And here we see the problem for the US government. In their minds, the drug war belongs to them, and they don’t like anyone messing with their pet.

Washington argues that the amendment would open the nearly 50-year-old convention to attack by any U.N. member nation that would seek to exclude for parochial reasons one of the 119 substances the convention classifies as narcotics, submitting them to strict controls.

Trying to carve out such exceptions “over the long term is not good for the planet’s efforts to control and eventually solve the problem of drug abuse,” the senior U.S. official said, adding that Washington also fears it could open a Pandora’s box of legal challenges to drug crimes in the United States.

It looks like the U.S. will definitely object, possibly even today, as soon as they figure out who is in the boat with them.

Gootenberg said the United States is encountering greater resistance these days to its position on coca leaf.

“As global cultural rights have come to the forefront of the U.N.’s agenda (its) anti-coca policy is a glaring contradiction,” he said.

1. Russia has been complaining that the U.S. hasn’t been fighting the drug war hard enough.
2. Harm reduction organizations complain that Russia focuses solely on punitive enforcement measures and forcing sudden abstinence, to the detriment of the health and lives of drug users and addicts. Russia responds that it doesn’t consider harm reduction methods to be valid.
3. Russia’s Yury Fedotov was named Executive Director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
4. The Russian Federation pledges US$7 million in voluntary funding to the UNODC now with annual contributions of $2 million starting this year.

You do the math.

Gee, I wonder how open the UNODC will be toward harm reduction?

Via Scott Morgan

The drug czar has gone to great rhetorical lengths to convince the American people that our drug policy isn’t a war any longer, but you don’t have to look very hard to see the violence that still erupts daily, not only in Mexico, but right here in our own communities. If you can handle it, I’d like you to take a look at just one example of the incredible violence police use when enforcing our drug laws.

The guy was a small-time drug addict who lived in a house belonging to his parents. He had $4 on him, and the police found a small amount of marijuana in the house and a vial that had contained meth in his pocket. And he was holding a golf club.

This is how fast it happens.

In the video:

:23 Police start to yell “Police. Search Warrant.” and enter home
:27 Police moving through home yell something. Perhaps “freeze.”
:28 Todd is shot three times
:29 Todd is on the ground
:31 Officer yells “Get on the ground.”

Do you all feel safer now?

The coca leaf has been an important part of the culture of Andean indigenous people for thousands of years (at least 5,000 years, in fact). It improves metabolism at high altitude, relieves feelings of hunger and provides energy, and also serves as an integral part of religious and cultural ceremony.

In all that time, there has been no clinical evidence of toxicity and nobody has ever been admitted to drug treatment centers for being addicted to the coca leaf.

In 1950, the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf was prepared by a United Nations commission that visited Bolivia and Peru briefly and, despite noting that it wasn’t addictive, made some rather strong, racist, and completely unsupported claims, including that chewing the coca leaf “induces in the individual undesirable changes of an intellectual and moral character,” “reduces the economic yield of productive work, and therefore maintains a low economic standard of life.”

Naturally, this was the information that was used for the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which included not just cocaine, but the coca leaf. Article 49, paragraph 2 (e) states that:

coca leaf chewing must be abolished within twenty-five years from the coming into force of this Convention

It also allows a state joining the Convention to take 25 years to abolish coca leaf chewing. The convention was ratified in 1961 (50 years ago) and it was entered into force in Bolivia in 1976 (almost 35 years ago).

About a year and a half ago, I reported:

The Bolivian government has successfully commenced the formal process for amending the UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961) to eliminate the provision that would require all countries to prohibit coca leaf chewing within 25 years (for Bolivia, that was 2001).
Interesting amendment process. If no country objects within 18 months, then the amendment passes (a nice, if time consuming, way to do it – countries need not get on the record to approve it). Countries most likely to object: United States and Sweden. If that happens, then there’s a conference to consider it.

The proposal has a very nice argument as to why this provision should be removed from the Single Convention.

Seems quite reasonable. It’s unenforceable. It’s not been enforced. New understanding shows that the reason to include coca leaf chewing at the time was racist. Plus, a study in 1995 found chewing coca leaves to be therapeutic with no negative health effects. The provision should just quietly go away, and if nobody objects within 18 months, it does. Let’s see… 18 months from 30th July 2009 would be… 30th January 2011. Hey, that’s just a couple of weeks away and nobody so far…

Oh, wait.

The TNI/WOLA Drug Law Reform Project reports:

In two weeks time, on January 31, the deadline ends for countries to present objections to this change; without any objections the amendment would automatically enter into force. And at this very last moment, the United States formed a “friends of the convention” group and announced it would object. Several other countries – notably the Russian Federation, Japan, Colombia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark and Estonia – have announced to present a formal objection as well. […]

It seems that those who do not regularly chew coca have run mad. All recent efforts to establish support in international fora resulted in proof for the point made: a cultural heritage that harms no person, merits protection and a legal base. Outcomes of a WHO study on coca/cocaine in 1995, determined that the “use of coca leaves appears to have no negative health effects and has positive therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations.” Moreover, the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights approved in September 2007 – recently endorsed by the United States on December 16, 2010 –, promises to uphold and protect indigenous cultural practices.

The proposed amendment by Bolivia implies a mere symbolic change: no new country will be facing masses of coca chewing citizens. Not objecting to this amendment simply recognizes coca chewing is there to stay. Time has come to repair a historical error responsible for including the leaf amongst the most hazardous classified substances, causing severe consequences for the Andean region. It is a sad fact that our governments are representing us citizens in disregard of facts, led by mere ignorance and fear. Still there is a chance now to come to our senses.

Update: It appears that the news is potentially better than I thought after all… (Thanks, Gart – I missed that one).

According to the government of Bolivia, the only three countries that did file a formal objection to the amendment of Bolivia to abolish the ban on coca leaf chewing in the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, withdrew their objections. […]

The United States has been lobbying with other countries to object to the Bolivian amendment but they have not filed a formal objection yet. According to Summaries of discussions of the EU Horizontal Working Party on Drugs, usually referred to as the “Horizontal Drug Group” (HDG) – the committee for drug policy falling under the European Council – the US prepared a “friends of the convention” group to oppose the abolition of the ban on coca leaf chewing because in their opinion the request would significantly weaken the Convention.

The main reason that the US has not filed a formal objection yet seems to be that they are not sufficiently sure about the support for their objection from other countries, and want to avoid the impression that the US is leading on this. It seems they are playing a diplomatic game, trying to spread the message that many countries are going to submit an objection, and waiting for some others to do so first, so they can be seen as rather ‘joining’ the opposition from others than taking the lead.

Let’s hope the US finds no support.