Drug WarRant

Perhaps the police officers in 20 cruisers from Gatineau and Surete du Quebec in Canada have heard the term “skunk” being used to refer to potent marijuana in the U.K. (or, formerly, crappy marijuana in the U.S.). But the truth is, while such cannabis does have a pungent smell, it doesn’t actually smell like… skunk.

Man angry after gun-point raid at his home

A rural Gatineau, Que., family is angry at police who raided their home armed with loaded guns looking for a marijuana grow-op, which turned out to only be a skunk that lived on their property. […]

The father of two was met by Gatineau officers who declared they had a warrant to search his home and arrest him.

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” said MacQuat, who was handcuffed and seated on a stool while officers searched his home.

“That scared the living daylights out of me. They were very respectful, but it’s very humiliating to be wearing handcuffs and to have people going through your house.”

He was told the skunk smell — which is noticeable when driving by — was also similar to that of a grow-op. […]

Minutes later, the scene’s senior officer walked inside to inform fellow officers the smell was, after all, just a skunk as MacQuat had pleaded.

“They were really embarrassed by it, but they were very sincere in their apologies,” said Macquat, who owns his own auto body shop.

“But had they done their investigation more thoroughly, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” […]

The force would not comment on the incident when reached Saturday.

But the family said officers were not rough and even cleaned their shoes before they entered.

At least the police were polite. Can you imagine a drug raid here in the U.S. where the police cleaned their shoes before entering?

I knew this was coming. Only a matter of when.

David Frum:

After horrific shootings, we hear calls for stricter regulation of guns. The Tucson shooting should remind us why we regulate marijuana.

Jared Lee Loughner, the man held as the Tucson shooter, has been described by those who know as a “pot smoking loner.”

He had two encounters with the law, one for possession of drug paraphanalia. […]

After the Tucson shooting, there may be renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime. But what about the drugs that may have aggravated the killer’s mental disease? The trend these days seems toward a more casual attitude and easier access to those drugs. Among the things we should be discussing in the aftermath of this horror is the accumulating evidence of those drugs’ potential contribution to making some dangerous people even more dangerous than they might otherwise have been.

Over 100,000 100 million Americans have smoked pot. Coincidentally, among that many people, there are some wackos.

Serial killer Ted Bundy started as a paper boy. Maybe we should look into outlawing that. John Wayne Gacy dressed as a clown. Now that’s enough to turn anyone into a serial killer. Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian. Hmmm…

I wonder if Jared Loughner eats Twinkies.

Nice People Take Drugs by Tony Newman in Huffington Post.

We have to learn how to live with drugs, because they aren’t going anywhere. Drugs have been around for thousands of years and will be here for thousands more. We need to educate people about the possible harms of drug use, offer compassion and treatment to people who have problems, and leave in peace the people who are not causing harm. And we need to take action against the incarceration of so many of our brothers and sisters who are suffering behind bars because of the substance that they choose to use.

Nice People Take Drugs. That’s why the war on drugs is a war on us.

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Newt Gingrich: Prison reform: A smart way for states to save money and lives

We urge conservative legislators to lead the way in addressing an issue often considered off-limits to reform: prisons. Several states have recently shown that they can save on costs without compromising public safety by intelligently reducing their prison populations.

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Legalizing Drugs Would Stop The Bleeding by Tom Condon

The illegal drug trade doesn’t just cripple American cities. It bankrolls international terrorism and has turned parts of Mexico into war zones. The whole thing is crazy. What other crime has an organization of police officers, judges and prosecutors, such as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, working for its repeal?

The failed war on drugs has cost Hartford and Connecticut a bloody fortune, and hasn’t worked. Well, the city and the state now have extreme budget difficulties. Now is the time to try something different. In mid-March, Leadership Greater Hartford and others will sponsor a forum on this topic, which I will moderate, with the goal of really making a change in drug policy. I’ll keep you posted on time and place.

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Judge, prosecutors: Pot is ‘no big deal’

The response to a recent column about the legalization of pot has me more convinced than ever the time has come to end a costly, dangerous and ineffective prohibition.

But don’t take my word for it.

Maybe you can imagine my surprise when Iowa 7th District Senior Associate Judge Douglas McDonald, of Bettendorf, wrote to say he also hopes to see cases of pot possession “de-emphasized or legalized.”

McDonald is 75. He served on the bench from 1988 until his retirement in 2007. He continues to serve on a part-time basis. He has never tried marijuana.

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Ann Coulter and John Stossel discuss drug prohibition. I could only watch half of the five minute discussion, but go for it, if you can handle it.

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This is an open thread.

This looks interesting.

A series of 8 concerts in Canada, the US and Europe will feature major artists who support ending the war on drugs. During the concerts there will be intermittent videos and images that show the real victims of the war on drugs, along with brief appearances by celebrities, politicians, policy reformers and representatives of victims groups talking about why they support the end of the Drug War. A communications plan for each event will focus on local media and provide Drug War content, interviews with celebrities, policy reformers, victims groups and other supporters. Venues will be for audiences of 20,000 and up. International artists as well as local and national artists will be featured in each location.

Looks like we may unfortunately have a new one to add to the Drug War Victims page.

Radley Balko has been covering the Framingham, Massachussetts botched raid here and here.

If this case plays out like most of those before it, Eurie Stamps’ death won’t change a damn thing. His will be just another body on the growing pile of drug war collateral damage.

Update: [Thanks, Malcolm]

Video news report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GtUvEA_9pg (embedding disabled)

One of the worst Supreme Court decisions of recent years was Caballes v. Illinois, where Justice Stevens wrote for the majority that merely having a dog accuse you was enough to justify a 4th Amendment search with no other suspicion needed. He wrote:

A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment.”

… and with that, he put the Supreme Court seal of approval on police fishing expeditions.

He wrote that as if the Fourth Amendment was merely an issue of criminals’ rights as opposed to citizens’ rights. And apparently, in the world of most of the Justices, dogs are completely infallible, because absolutely no thought was given to the rights of innocent drivers not to have their cars ripped apart on the side of the highway.

The Supremes completely failed in part because they didn’t demand proof of canine infallibility, and also because they failed to understand statistical math. We went ahead and crunched the numbers to show that even high-percentage-success dogs will infringe the rights of a horrific number of innocent citizens.

A few years later, I revisited Caballes while reviewing a piece of absolute rubbish by James B. Johnston of Seton Hall University, who fawned over Stevens’ horrible decision without an ounce of research or thought.

Just last month, someone (perhaps Johnston) left a message stating that:

Since you are such an expert on Mr. Johnston and his “drivel” note this. His article was cited as an authority in a brief filed by the Florida Attorney General’s Office to the Florida Supreme Court. The case was a drug sniffing dog case. Guess what. The Forida AG won. Some “drivel” . You and your fellow apologists for the drug trade really need to get over yourselves..

That doesn’t make it not drivel. It just means that the Florida Supreme Court was also dead wrong, and Johnston just helped them screw it up.

Well, just in case anybody still believed that this was a good decision, some hard data is now out.

[Chicago] Tribune analysis: Drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops often wrong — High number of fruitless searches of Hispanics’ vehicles cited as evidence of bias.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent. That means that when you see a couple of police cars on the highway with their lights flashing, with officers going through a car, searching through the trunk, while some poor Hispanic youth stands nervously by, 73 percent of the time, the driver was innocent. Of course, the search took a long time, so by now maybe he was late to his job (“Why were you late?” “The police were searching my car.”) or maybe even to a date.

It’s not victimless. And clearly, based on the numbers, not only are Hispanics being targeted, but it’s likely that the officers are passing on to their canines their desire that the Hispanic be a druggie (and dogs are often eager to please).

“Is there a potential for handlers to cue these dogs to alert?” he asked. “The answer is a big, resounding yes.”

That frustrates Martinez, the attorney from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Dogs do not have the human failings that have led to the targeting of minorities, but Martinez worries that an officer’s bias can translate through the dog leash. She fears drug-sniffing dogs are another tool to justify roadside searches of innocent drivers, the unfair consequences of what she called “driving while Mexican.”

“People of color are just targets,” she said.

I really love the way law enforcement responds to this study:

Dog-handling officers and trainers argue the canine teams’ accuracy shouldn’t be measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs. They said the scent of drugs or paraphernalia can linger in a car after drugs are used or sold, and the dogs’ noses are so sensitive they can pick up residue from drugs that can no longer be found in a car.

Oh, that’s convenient. Just claim that every innocent person that was targeted probably had the smell of pot on their jacket and that’s why Spot alerted.

Well, if that’s the case, then make it illegal to smell like drugs and then prove in court that there was a physical odor present. Otherwise, it’s just a convenient unprovable excuse for you to justify the unlawful violation of people’s Fourth Amendment rights.

And… “accuracy shouldn’t be measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs” Really? How should it be measured? You don’t get to just pretend that searches of innocent citizens didn’t happen.

The roots of the fiasco. John Sinclair takes a look at how we got to where we are today.

“An open and honest discussion” would lead first to an examination of what the War on Drugs is all about: Why do they have a War on Drugs? What are its goals? Who are the combatants? Why has there been no measurable success at all?

First off, it’s not a war on drugs per se, because all sorts of drugs are more prevalent than ever, and the pharmaceutical industry is indeed the most profitable of enterprises, but it’s a war on recreational drugs and their users.

The purpose of the War on Drugs is to persecute and punish users of recreational drugs in an effort basically to try to keep people from getting high on substances ruled illegal by a political process with little regard for medical or moral niceties — nor for due process of law, for that matter.

Recreational drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin were once legal. One day, through some mystical process that took place in the houses of Congress and in state legislative bodies in turn, each of them was determined to be illegal.

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Really, really stupid OpEd by Robert rose in the Indy Star: Don’t surrender in War on Drugs

Frankly, I do not want to live in the drug-addled world advocated by those who protest the War on Drugs. Alcohol is a drug and should be all this society needs for “recreational use.” It has been proven that marijuana use leads to heavier drug use to keep those highs coming.

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TSA keeping us safe. Montel Williams cited for drug paraphernalia

Williams was caught by TSA with a pipe commonly used for marijuana while going through a security checkpoint, a sheriff’s spokesperson said. He paid the citation of $484 and was released to resume his travel plans.

Williams suffers from multiple sclerosis and is a prominent advocate for legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes.

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Sinn Féin political party initiates reform in Ireland (via Transform)

Their call for fact-based policy:

“The administration of criminal justice as it interacts with drug-related crime should be reviewed, reformed and tailored to more effectively address and reduce systemic crime, economic compulsive crime and psychopharmacological crime. A broad societal debate considering every possible approach and all relevant evidence from other jurisdictions including those that have experimented with decriminalization and/or legalization is warranted to this end.

“New approaches must be informed by the most credible emerging evidence and international best practice.”

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This is an open thread.

…as presented by Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community (where “reality” is apparently protean) in The Mexican Crime Cartels

Keith is concerned by the violence in Mexico, but completely fails to understand it.

1. The violence has become to some extent self-sustaining because several of the cartels are fighting each other. Whether the government ramps up or rolls back its heroic efforts, there will be violence as the cartels battle for territory as well as perpetuate the we-commit-atrocities-as-vengeance-for-past-atrocities cycle.

“Heroic”? You’ve got to be kidding. Of course, much of the fighting will be as a result of cartels fighting each other, but that fighting intensifies exponentially when the government steps in and adds violence to the equation, as well as when the government (through “success”) causes instability in the cartels’ power structure. Note the intellectually dishonest argument structure: “Whether the government ramps up or rolls back its heroic efforts, there will be violence.” The implication is that there is no difference in violence regardless of military action, but that is blatantly false. Yes there will be violence in either situation, but with the government using military action, the violence is much greater.

2. Had Proposition 19 passed, the cartels would still be there and Mexico would still be enduring horrific violence. I personally expected a modest drop in violence if the initiative passed, although people who study the cartels tell me I am wrong about that. They forecast that the effect of a small loss of business would be akin to taking away a few street corners from a drug market, which tends to increase violence as the remaining players fight it out over the reduced territory.

Straw man. No serious reformer believed that Prop 19 would completely eliminate the cartels, nor did they claim it. And as to how much the marijuana business overall fuels cartels’ income and how much comes from California’s business in particular, that’s clearly an open question. The RAND “study” did not disprove the government’s original notion that a significant portion of their income is from marijuana. And post-Prop 19, the government at times has seemed to want to return (when it’s politically useful) to extremely large percentage claims (not to mention the embarrassment of those huge border seizures of marijuana after the vote).

Regardless, Prop 19 was the first step in a larger effort which clearly would dramatically reduce cartel income.

No matter who is correct about that issue, California’s marijuana business is just one of many lines of activity for the cartels. To wound them seriously the U.S. as a whole would have to legalize marijuana, heroin and cocaine (which isn’t going to happen and shouldn’t), and even then the cartels would have income from human trafficking, black market movies and cigarettes, kidnapping for hire, drug trafficking within Central and South America etc.

First, I believe that we could wound them seriously by merely legalizing marijuana. But he’s right that we could do it even better by legalizing all of them (except that it should happen).

But then he goes into one of the stupidest arguments that keeps showing up in this bizarro land of prohibition accommodation. Apparently we might as well let them keep their huge black market drug income because otherwise they’ll do other crime(!) Or maybe the point is that we should make sure that they have illicit drug profits to prevent them from going into other crime. I don’t know — it’s a bafflingly stupid argument.

If we cut off their drug profits, yes, the cartels will go into other crime. The real bad apples aren’t going to go to work at McDonald’s (although many of their employees way down the line will).

But really? Black market movies and cigarettes? Ah, yes, Los Zetas are going to keep the empire going by selling bootleg copies of Yogi Bear on the street corners.

Sure, they’ll do more kidnappings in a vain attempt to replace their accustomed riches, and an enraged populace will get behind law enforcement to take them out of business, and without the obscenely massive income from drug trafficking, they won’t be able to buy the police and the army any more.

The illicit drug trafficking operations take in as much as the national income of the country of Mexico. Nothing else will give them that much power, because there isn’t that much money anywhere else to get.

3. But even presuming national legalization in the U.S. of all drugs, the idea that the removal of the drug business would wipe out the cartels is an example of the “reversability fallacy” (which probably has a proper name in logic but I don’t know what it is). Reversability was also invoked during alcohol Prohibition in the U.S. Repeal advocates promised that re-legalizing alcohol production would eliminate the Mafia. But once a process has been put in place, removing an original cause does not logically imply that the process will stop. The Mafia was enriched by Prohibition, but by the time of repeal it had a life of its own and survived for decades afterwards as a force in American society. (Note, same fallacy applies to human activity and climate change…whether we caused it is irrelevant, all that matters is whether changes in our behavior now will make a difference…it’s entirely possible that we caused it to start but no longer have the power to stop it).

The fallacy here is not “reversibility.” It’s straw man. Whether it was with alcohol in the earlier prohibition or other drugs in this prohibition, the real reform argument has been that legalization would seriously weaken the criminal traffickers and take away a major source of their income. But Humphreys uses the straw man, claiming that our argument is that legalization will eliminate the criminals, and since he can show that they won’t be entirely eliminated, therefore our argument is wrong.

That’s complete nonsense.

What sane public policy would say that something is not worth doing unless the problem it is targeting would be completely eliminated? If that was the case, then every public policy that we have should be abolished.

The truth is that legalization will be a major blow to the large traffickers that will weaken them significantly, and dramatically reduce their ability to control governments, communities, and armies. And that’s just one of the reasons for legalization.

4. The basic problem in Mexico is not drugs but endemic corruption and weak governance in the states.

And until we take away the bulk of that black market payroll, it’ll be impossible to realistically address corruption and weak governance.

Some photos from my trip, including the Rockies in Colorado, Colorado National Monument, Arches National Park, and Southern Utah. I’m in Phoenix now for a couple of days and then will be heading back home through New Mexico.

More coverage of the revolt of jurors in Missoula.

“Martin Luther King” jurors, Butler calls those who nullify cases. “They would engage in strategic jury nullification designed to safely reduce the number of people in prison for nonviolent drug crimes, and to send the message that ‘we the people’ ain’t gonna take it anymore,” Butler wrote in Prison Legal News last year.

Jury nullification — when a jury opts for acquittal regardless of evidence — isn’t quite what happened here because the jury hadn’t actually been seated.

Still, Butler said what happened in Missoula fits into what he calls “Nullification 2.0,” when such protests move beyond race into larger philosophical disagreements with the law.