Drug WarRant

Editorial: After Marijuana, The Cold from The Bulletin (Bend, OR)

Those really don’t look like such tough questions, do they? They may not be tough, but the truth of the matter is that there are no definitive answers to them. That’s because we really have no marijuana experts. That’s why the penalty for possession of marijuana is more severe than the penalty for possession of LSD, which all the non-experts agree is a far more dangerous narcotic.

Huh?

There aren’t all that many things we know more about than marijuana.

What are they looking for? We’ve got experts. We’ve got experts in marijuana science, marijuana economics, marijuana history, marijuana cultivation, marijuana distribution, marijuana politics, and, of course, marijuana consumption.

Sure, we always want to know more, but… no experts?

In yet another wrong-address drug raid. Radley Balko passed it on Thursday

Spring Valley, New York

David McKay said he, his wife, 13-year-old daughter and his brother-in-law were sleeping at 5:30 a.m. when they heard banging on the door of their townhouse at 36 Sharon Drive. When they went to open the door, at least 10 police officers forced their way into the home, he said.

“Their guns were drawn, they were screaming ‘Where’s Michael, Where’s Michael,’ ” McKay recounted hours later in a telephone interview from Nyack Hospital, where he took his terrified daughter for treatment after she had an asthma attack and fainted following the ordeal.

McKay said he was still groggy from sleep but tried to explain that there was no one named Michael in the house.

“They pulled me outside in the freezing cold in my underwear, manhandle my wife, point a gun at my daughter and they won’t even tell me what they are doing in my house,” said McKay. “It was terrifying and humiliating beyond belief.” […]

When the police were preparing to leave, McKay and his bewildered family asked them again what they were doing and why they entered the house.

“They wouldn’t say,” he recalled. “All they would say was ‘You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow.’ “

Well, the local police still aren’t talking — they’re referring all questions to the DEA. And the DEA has responded with an “apology.” Not directly to McKay and his family, who only learned about it from the media. But the DEA issued a statement.

John P. Gilbride, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, issued a statement Friday clearing Spring Valley resident David McKay and his family of anything to do with the series of drug raids that took place early Thursday in Westchester and Rockland counties.

“We sincerely regret that while attempting to execute an arrest warrant for a member of this drug trafficking organization, the innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation,” Gilbride said.

“Though we take many precautions to prevent this type of incident from happening, drug investigations are very complex and involve many fluid factors,” Gilbride said. “DEA will continue to pursue these criminal organizations to protect the public from the scourge of drug trafficking.”

Wow. That’s a pretty pathetic apology for storming into a man’s home with guns drawn, dragging him out in the snow in his underwear while screaming at him, shoving his wife around and sending his daughter to the hospital.

“Inadvertently affected”? Inadvertently affected is when it takes you an extra five minutes to get to work because there was an accident on the bypass and one lane was blocked by the police. Storm troopers terrorizing you in your home is something else entirely.

…

The article reporting this quoted Radley Balko and talked about the rise of problems with this kind of raid. That’s good.

We’re making a difference. And more and more people are getting fed up with this.

I used to think that each country had its own laws and those laws affected the people in that country. How naive I was.

I also used to think that to break a law you actually had to, you know, break the law, not just think about breaking the law, or know something about some law that might be broken in the future. And that if you thought you broke the law but really hadn’t, then you hadn’t. (In other words, if I thought I ran a stop sign, but it turns out there wasn’t really a stop sign there, then I didn’t run a stop sign.)

Obviously I was young then, and not experienced in the intricacies of modern U.S. criminal justice.

Still, I found the following bit of braggadocio in an email that the DEA sent me today someone unsettling…

On January 10 the indictment of Franklin William McField-Bent, a/k/a “Buda,” a Nicaraguan national, and five members of his drug and weapons smuggling organizations was announced. McField-Bent was charged with three narcotics counts and four counts of conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Colombian Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), which is a foreign terrorist organization. According to the indictment, McField-Bent and the other five members of his group conspired and attempted to distribute cocaine knowing that it would eventually be imported into the United States. The indictment also alleges they conspired and attempted to provide grenade launchers, grenades, automatic rifles, and other weapons to what they thought were AUC members. To their surprise, they soon found out that these “terrorists” were undercover agents.

I like that little bit of humor at the end.

So, to recap (with some additional detail from the press release):

A foreigner, who was in a foreign country, was arrested in that foreign country and indicted in U.S. court for violating a U.S. law while in a foreign country. He was indicted for two things:

1. “Conspiring and attempting to distribute cocaine knowing that it would eventually be imported into the United States.” Hmmm… my head just about exploded with that one.
2. “Conspired and attempted to provide grenade launchers, grenades, automatic rifles and other weapons to what they thought were members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (“AUC”).” Except of course that there were no AUC members, just undercover agents.

I have no doubt that this McField-Bent guy is probably not a nice guy and maybe deserves some criminal justice attention. But when did our laws get so squirrelly? And have we really gone from a nation that supposedly wasn’t allowed to have a national police force, to a nation with a national police force, to a nation with an international police force that enforces U.S. laws on people anywhere in the universe?

If the Russians send another cosmonaut to the moon and his lunar rover has the capability of going 140 kilometers per hour, can we arrest him for conspiring to violate U.S. speed laws?

If I wanted to win the hearts and minds of farmers in Latin America and Afghanistan, I probably wouldn’t start by destroying their fields and removing their only hope of feeding their families. – Guitherisms

Afghan campaign caused $100 million damage: inquiry

(Reuters) – Afghan and foreign forces have caused more than $100 million damage to fruit crops and homes during security operations in southern Kandahar province, a government delegation said on Tuesday.

Just as the harvest was about to begin.

Bhutan

Bhutan police can raid homes of smokers in a search for contraband tobacco and are training a special tobacco sniffer dog in a crackdown to honor a promise to become the world’s first smoke-free nation.

Buddhist Bhutan, where smoking is considered bad for one’s karma, banned the sale of tobacco in 2005, but with a thriving tobacco smuggling operation from neighboring India, the ban failed to make much of an impact.

But legislation passed in the new year, granting police powers to enter homes, is set to stub out the habit, threatening five years in jail for shopkeepers selling tobacco and smokers who fail to provide customs receipts for imported cigarettes.

And yes, I checked. This is in Reuters, not the Onion.

… that’s the title of an excellent column by Larry Gabriel in the Detroit Metro Times

Welcome to the world of science. I didn’t do well in high school science and have pretty much avoided addressing scientific subjects formally until now. That’s because I’ve been delving into the science of marijuana to try to figure out some of the hows and whys of medical marijuana’s workings. There are some 20,000 published scientific papers analyzing marijuana and its parts. So don’t let anybody tell you there is too little known about marijuana to make a call regarding its usefulness.

Most of those papers are beyond my understanding, and making sense of those I could understand came with the help of a medical dictionary. But at least I’m trying. Most public policy and attitudes about the plant have been formed without the help of science. In fact, when President Richard Nixon ramped up the drug war in the early 1970s, it was in direct contradiction of the information and recommendations of his own marijuana task force.

A breath of fresh air in the media — a journalist who actually tries to understand the science, rather than merely repeating what the government tells him.

Update: I’ve received two reminder notices on Facebook about the event for tonight, so it looks like it’s happening.

This could be interesting…

Reflections on the Drug War: A Conversation with John P. Walters

John P. Walters, Drug Czar for nearly the entire Bush Presidency, reflects on the successes and failures of national drug control policy, the case for fighting substance abuse, and ongoing challenges in the Drug War. Extensive time will be allotted for questions.

The event is sponsored by University Republicans and SGFC.

Please invite your friends.

Thursday, January 13
7 pm – 8:30 pm
University of Chicago Social Science Research Building, Room 122

Note: I haven’t found any other references to this event on the U. of Chicago website so far, so I can’t verify the Facebook event, but a chance for extensive questions (and I don’t mean disruption) with John Walters could be very exciting.

If you do go, and questions actually happen, remember that a Q&A is much different than a debate. In a Q&A, the A controls the room and can answer or dodge at will and usually the Q has extremely limited opportunity to follow-up or to force A to actually answer. Brief statements of damning provable fact with a request to comment are usually best.

Example:

Why did you consistently imply that treatment admissions were proof of marijuana’s harm, when you knew that the majority of those in treatment for marijuana were there as criminal justice referrals?

or

NIDA funded the largest study in the world which conclusively showed no link between even heavy marijuana smoking and lung cancer. Why then, does the government continue to imply that there is one? Are there so few actual health problems with marijuana that you feel the need to scare us with non-existent ones?

Keep your questions from rambling. Don’t raise your voice or use foul language. Come prepared with facts, but don’t use them all at once.

Ron Hill does a pretty good job of responding to David Frum’s piece over at FrumForum with this more thoughtful Even If Reefers Cause Madness, They Shouldn’t be Illegal

Hill makes it clear that he’s no fan of marijuana

David Frum’s post on marijuana and schizophrenia has inspired much debate and criticism, yet his statement that marijuana use is associated with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia is correct. It’s also true that continued marijuana use may help trigger future psychotic episodes among those suffering from this serious brain disease.

Frum makes some valid points about marijuana and government policy; and I don’t endorse its use.

If that’s all you read, you’d think that it’s a full-throated endorsement of Frum’s bizarre and untimely piece, but it’s not. Read the whole thing.

Here’s an important part of the difference between the two. Both Frum and Hill say that marijuana is “associated” with schizophrenia. Both Frum and Hill seem to understand that “associated with” is not the same as “causation.” (That’s already a quantum leap above most casual commentators.)

But where Frum disregards even the plain reading of the article to which he links, Hill goes a step further and really tries to understand the uncertainty of the science:

Keeping marijuana banned or toughening penalties for its use is not the solution for isolated acts of violence by alleged schizophrenics (due to the genetic factor in schizophrenia, these individuals appear to have been at high risk of experiencing a psychotic episode regardless of whether they smoked marijuana).

It’s also possible that a person who is developing schizophrenia may begin using marijuana to self medicate during the prodromal stage of schizophrenia – meaning, the earliest phase of a developing condition. In this instance, the developing schizophrenic mind may precede the marijuana use; with marijuana used to cope with the effects of internal changes in brain functioning prior to what many call a psychotic episode. This would make it appear that marijuana hastened or “caused” the psychotic episode as the disease is often not diagnosed until after the first such episode. In this scenario, marijuana use may be a warning sign that someone may be developing schizophrenia, rather than a contributing factor in the schizophrenia.

It’s also possible that marijuana use is one of many factors that mix with genetics to trigger schizophrenia in those already genetically predisposed to it. Yet even if this is the case, it doesn’t justify the need for a continued expensive war on drugs financed by the taxpayers and the resulting government intrusion into the private lives of citizens.

Even more important than the uncertainty of the role of marijuana in the tiny fraction of the population that has schizophrenia is the ridiculous notion of using that to validate marijuana laws.

But to suggest that marijuana should remain illegal because its use is contraindicated in some part of the population makes as much sense as arguing that alcohol should be illegal because its use is sometimes contraindicated as well. This is particularly true since deaths from marijuana are almost unheard of, yet alcohol misuse is directly blamed in the deaths of 79,646 Americans between 2001 and 2005, according to the CDC. I have also known bipolar patients to misuse caffeine and tobacco in an effort to bring on a manic state, at which point they may become a danger to themselves or others. Should tobacco and caffeine fall under tighter regulation also? Where does it end?

Keeping marijuana banned or toughening penalties for its use is not the solution for isolated acts of violence by alleged schizophrenics…

Final thought. We know next to nothing about the Tucson shooter. We don’t know the specifics of any mental illness he may or may not have (everything I’ve read is amateur conjecture). We know very little about his specific drug use or patterns. We know absolutely nothing about his drug use and its supposed connection to the act in question. And even if we knew all of those things with certainty, it would be absolute lunacy to craft public policy for everyone based on him.

Soros-funded Dope Lobby in Damage Control Over Shootings by… Cliff Kinkaid

Kinkaid is so far over the edge that even the crazies are afraid to touch him, so don’t go to the bother of actually fisking this story unless it’s for fun.

Because of the evidence that Loughner was a pothead, and the evidence that marijuana abuse is linked to mental illness, the Soros-funded marijuana lobby is working overtime to try to draw media attention away from his addiction to the drug. […]

A photograph of a smirking Jared Loughner, after he was taken into custody, seems to prove beyond doubt that he is seriously disturbed, as a result of prolonged drug use. He exhibited symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. […]

Now she is fighting for her life because of bullets fired from the gun of a certified marijuana addict. […]

Ironically, Arizona voters in November narrowly passed Proposition 203, making Arizona the 15th state to allow for the scam known as “medical marijuana.” This will have the effect of increasing distribution of the drug.

Remember that the Pentagon shooter from California was a “medical marijuana” patient but was obviously not helped by the drug being prescribed by a physician. […]

One of those people was Arizona shooter Jared Loughner. The passage of Proposition 203 guarantees there will be more like him.

F. James Sensenbrenner.

Sensenbrenner Named House Crime Subcommittee Chair

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, will be the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. Sensenbrenner, 67, is a former chairman of the full Judiciary Committee. On the subcommittee, he succeeds Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) Sensenbrenner will bring a much more conservative perspective to criminal justice issues.

Here’s one of Sensenbrenner’s past highlights

The “Defending America’s Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005″ (H.R. 1528) was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) on April 6, and it has already passed out of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

The list of atrocities in this bill are unbelievable. Here are a couple of examples:

• 10-year sentence for a second offense of distributing marijuana to a person under 21. (this would include one 20-year-old college student giving a joint to another 20-year old college student)
• Three-year mandatory minimum for parents who witness or learn about drug trafficking activities, targeting or even near their children, if they do not report it to law enforcement authorities within 24 hours and do not provide full assistance investigating, apprehending, and prosecuting the offender.
• Increase to five years the federal mandatory minimum sentence for the sale of a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of a school, college, public library, drug treatment facility (or any place where drug treatment, including classes, are held), or private or public daycare facilities – in short, almost anywhere in cities across the U.S.
• Punishes defendants for the “relevant conduct” of co-conspirators that occurred BEFORE the defendant joined the conspiracy.

Fortunately, that one never made it. Can’t wait to see what he’s got up his sleeve.