Drug WarRant

The results of the inquest into the fatal shooting of Trevon Cole in Las Vegas were unsurprising.

A Clark County coroner’s inquest jury took 90 minutes Saturday to rule the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man justified, capping two days of pointed questioning and contradictory evidence in one of the more controversial officer-involved shootings in recent history.

Remember, this was the case where a warrant based on details of the wrong Trevon Cole, to search for a small amount of marijuana, ending up with Cole being shot to death while unarmed on his knees in the bathroom. The officer, Yant, has been involved in other controversial shootings. And all the evidence clearly pointed to a non-resisting suspect.

Yet, an inquest in these cases rarely finds wrong-doing by the officer. Most outside observers saw this process as a farce that needed to be completed so that the lawsuit could go forward.

Detective Yant on shooting Cole…

“Unfortunately he made an aggressive act toward me. He made me do my job,” Yant testified.

Ah, so that’s a police officer’s job.

You may notice a couple of minor changes today.

1. Drug WarRant is now published by the Prohibition Isn’t Free Foundation — a new umbrella organization that will help us do a better job with advocacy. I’m the Executive Director, and I’ve got a pretty impressive advisory council (more may be added). This won’t change anything at all with Drug WarRant itself, but will allow me to expand in some work with media contacts. The name of the Foundation is the name of a book that I intend to write (I’ve got the outline and am working on it very slowly…)

2. The “Just Say Now” campaign is working with Drug WarRant, and you’ll see their ads on our pages over the next month. They’re starting with a campaign responding to Facebook censorship of a drawing of a leaf, which has been reported at Huffington Post

Here’s the release from Just Say Now:

Organizers from the new national campaign, Just Say Now (JSN), which launched this month to mobilize millions of young voters nationwide to end marijuana prohibition, have just learned that Facebook is censoring the campaign’s official logo in advertisements after initially serving 38 million impressions. Political blogs from across the spectrum that will begin running the ads today instead.

The social networking site backtracked on its initial approval on August 7 of ads that use the campaign’s official logo, which features a marijuana leaf. Despite the ads’ clear intent as political speech, Facebook pulled them and informed the group no ads with marijuana leaves would be approved any more.

“It’s tantamount to banning a candidate’s face during a political campaign,” said Michael Whitney, one of the key Just Say Now organizers. “It’s a mystery to me why Facebook would do such a sudden about-face. After 38 million impressions were served, Facebook suddenly decided to that our campaign logo should be re-classified like tobacco. But their guidelines are for companies trying to sell tobacco as a product. This is political speech.”

The ads can be viewed at www.JustSayNow.com.

Earlier this month on August 3, Mexican President Felipe Calderon called on President Obama to enter into a discussion about legalizing marijuana as a way to defund the powerful drug cartels that have killed 28,000 people since 2006. The following week, former President Vincente Fox called for outright legalization. Two Mexican cardinals and Archbishop Jose Luis Chavez Botello have also endorsed Calderon’s request.

Obama Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske rebuffed their entreaties on August 11, however, repeating his contention that “drug legalization is a ‘non-starter’ in the Obama administration.”

Jordan Marks, member of the Just Say Now advisory committee, says the decision will not sit well with young people. “Our generation made Facebook successful because it was a community where we could be free and discuss issues like sensible drug policy” says Marks, who also serves as Executive Director of Young Americans for Freedom, the nation’s oldest conservative youth activist organization. “If Facebook censorship policies continue to reflect those of our our government by suppressing freedom of speech then they won’t have to wait until Election Day to be voted obsolete.”

Just Say Now brings together a transpartisan alliance devoted to ending marijuana prohibition that includes former Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan Bruce Fein, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, President of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation Eric Sterling, Former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, in addition to representatives from traditional anti-prohibition advocacy organizations like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Drug Policy Alliance and NORML.

Following Facebook’s decision to censor the Just Say Now ads, Jeff Cosgrove of Common Sense Media placed the ads on blogs from across the political spectrum. “Blogs from both the right and the left were delighted to accept the ads” says Cosgrove. The ads will begin running today on sites including: Reason, The Nation, The New Republic, Human Events, MyDD, Red State, Antiwar, Drug War Rant, The Young Turks, Pam’s House Blend, Stop The Drug War, The Daily Paul, Lew Rockwell, Think Progress and AmericaBlog.

Rolling Stone Magazine dedicated a full-length feature article in its latest edition to the legalizing effort in California. Ending marijuana prohibition has the support of potential 2012 presidential hopefuls Ron Paul and former New Mexico Republican Governor Gary Johnson.

“Facebook’s business will suffer if they don’t reverse this decision” says Aaron Houston, Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, whose organization has over 150 chapters on campuses across the country. “We’re way beyond reefer madness and censorship. Facebook should get with the times.“

An important piece by John Geddes in MacLeans: RCMP and the truth about safe injection sites

It would have been quite a news conference, and it very nearly happened. Last fall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, after months of intense, private talks, agreed to face the media together to declare their agreement that research shows the “benefits” and “positive impacts” of supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users. […]

“I can confirm we are good to go from our end,” said Chief Superintendent Bob Harriman, a top RCMP drug enforcement officer in Vancouver, in an email he sent on Oct. 28, 2009, to Dr. Julio Montaner, director of the B.C. centre. Harriman’s email included “proposed messaging for [a] joint media release” of the RCMP and the research centre. The RCMP would acknowledge “an extensive body of Canadian and international peer-reviewed research reporting the benefits of supervised injection sites and no objective peer-reviewed studies demonstrating harms.” As well, Harriman said the RCMP would admit that “reviews” commissioned by the force, which contested the centre’s research, “did not meet conventional academic standards.”

The proposed joint media release was never issued. Nor did the RCMP officers and the centre’s doctors appear together for their planned news conference. According to Montaner, two days before the scheduled event last December—after a venue had been booked at the University of British Columbia and “the banners were ready”—he received a telephone call from Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, the most senior RCMP officer in British Columbia. “He said, ‘Julio, can’t do it,’ ” Montaner recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean, Gary?’ He said, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve been ordered not to go ahead with the news conference.’ ”

Despite over 30 peer-reviewed studies showing that Insite works, the sadomoralists in the conservative government in Canada have been desperately trying to shut it down.

The WSJ is known for having some really outstanding reporting and OpEds on drug policy. And there’s plenty more good stories they could report.

Which is why this article: Sobering Report on Street Drugs by Kyle Stock is so pathetic. Were the editors asleep?

The credit crisis has sobered up Wall Street in more ways than one.

This Kyle Stock proclaims in the evidence of drug testing statistics from a company that drug tests mostly new hires (who know that they’ll be tested) in finance shops, showing lower rates of “drug use” in the financial industry.

But then he goes on to say:

Abuse hasn’t slackened among existing employees, psychologists and counselors say. It may even be peaking, exacerbated by the credit crisis…

Which is it, Kyle?

Then he quotes a treatment professional who says:

“We’re in crisis mode,” he says. “Many of these drugs are so accessible to the average person, let alone the person who is well-spoken and professional.”

What does that mean? Do drug dealers really demand that clients wear a necktie and not use slang?

“Excuse me, sir. As you can plainly see, I am a gentleman wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. May I purchase 5 grams of Cannabis Sativa, please?

I’m having fun with him here, but really, the entire article is a pile of mush — just a bunch of random stuff strung together in a way that makes it even more nonsensical.

The Wall Street Journal can do a lot better.

Over at BigThink, they’re having a month of thinking dangerously. Idea #10 is Legalize All Drugs, and they have the fabulous economics professor Jeffrey Miron as guest.

“In a free society we should allow people to consume whatever they want, no matter how dangerous, no matter how much it might be bad for them because that’s what freedom means,” he says.

It’s a refreshing piece and Miron does a very nice job in the accompanying video.

Speak Ebonics? The DEA Wants You

Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.

Drug Enforcement Agency Special Agent Michael Sanders said the agency recently sent memos asking companies that provide it translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics.

Update: More perspective here.

A very good post by David Bratzer at the LEAP blog: Black police officers? You can’t talk about them here

Definitely worth reading.

I’d like to focus on one part of that post, a response David once got from “Inspector Leviathan Hobbes,” the pseudonym for the founder of the Thinking Police Blog.

It’s impressive.

Not only have I been reading, but I’ve been thinking. It’s difficult as a police officer to agree with the legalisation and regulation of drugs. Why? It’s because we see the evil ruination that it has upon addicts. Not only that, but those who are the real dealers, the Mister Bigs, are extremely difficult to bring to justice. Add to this the consequential victims, the ones who have their property stolen to fund habits, and it seems difficult to say to all of them that what LEAP proposes is the way forward. However, after nigh on 20 years of reading philosophy, I’ve fallen foul of the Platonic adage I swore I never would – ‘an expert is someone who knows nothing at all.’

What I mean by this is, just because as police officers or MOPs we see the full impact that drugs misuse has on the wider community, not only on the user themself – and because we know the law inside and out regarding drugs – we can sometimes become blind to the alternatives. Just because the law and societal opinions have been the same throughout the lives of almost all of us, it doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean the law was devised because it works. Sometimes it’s wrong. I can point to many examples, as I am sure many of you can. Think about it this way – if drugs WERE legalised and regulated, the Mister Bigs would suffer – the ones who deserve to suffer. Prostitution, a drug-reliant trade, I’m guessing would halve at the very least, as would most ascquisitive crime. You can’t get away from the fact that the majority of acquisitive crime is committed by habitual drug users. Yes, there are issues around the practicalities of this proposal, but they’re not unachievable in the overall aim.

To have someone see the light like that is a beautiful thing.

And it’s also a point that we who are in drug policy reform need to remember…

Not everybody knows, or has been able to absorb, what we know — that which gives us the certainty of our convictions regarding legalization.

We understand that to a certain extent. We understand, for example, that there’s a vast part of the general public that has been propagandized for so long and have not been well exposed to the truth that it’s going to take a fair amount of education and time to get them on board.

And then we know that there’s another group of opponents who will never be interested in reform, either because they are venal and profit from the war on drugs, or because they are sadomoralists. We can write them off.

We have to be more aware of a third category — those immersed in the drug transaction world whose experience has been so skewed that they are already certain that they know the full truth, and are just unable to open up that tiny bit to absorb the legalization message. They’re a hard nut to crack, and tend to be in areas like law enforcement and treatment (and sometimes religion), where they can easily be mistaken for profiteers or sadomoralists.

These people fervently believe in the rightness of the drug war because they have been overwhelmed by the wrongness of the drug world. Ironically, they are so close to it that they are unable to step back and see that their drug war has caused the problems that they want to solve.

But just like with Inspector Hobbes, it is possible to crack that nut, and when you do, you’ll probably have a strong ally. This is another reason why groups like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are so critical to our effort.

My dad is a retired minister and was very supportive of the war on drugs (he had seen the devastation of addicts in his ministry). I helped him learn why the war on drugs wasn’t the answer, and now every time I visit him, he asks me how long it’s going to be before I succeed in getting rid of this war on drugs!

This is just unbelievable…

NV judge orders drug offender write report on pot

A Nevada judge has issued a homework assignment in the form of an unusual sentence for a 25-year-old Sacramento man who sold marijuana to a police informant in a casino parking lot at Lake Tahoe.

District Judge Dave Gamble ordered Matthew Palazzolo to write a report on what the judge called the “nonsensical character” of California’s medical marijuana law.

Gamble gave Palazzolo 90 days to complete the paper discussing his self-admitted realization that marijuana was a gateway drug that led him to use more powerful narcotics.

The judge clearly has some strong views about marijuana.

Palazzolo, who works for a law firm in Sacramento, admitted he grew it after obtaining a medical marijuana card. […]

“So you decided to grow your own?” Gamble asked. “If this isn’t testimony to the absolute asininity of medical marijuana laws in California and the path Nevada is choosing.”

OK. I really, really, really want that report. 90 days will make it somewhere around Thanksgiving, unless he gets it done earlier.

I’m hoping it’ll be made public, or one of my readers will have access and get it to me. Seriously.

I plan on grading it.

Nope, not talking about the Showtime series. Just like the word.

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Californians must look at science of marijuana by Timmen Cermak, president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine.

Cermak supports Prop 19, but is also full of crap, looking to promote marijuana addiction as a cash cow for his industry.

The question of legalizing marijuana creates a conflict between protecting civil liberties and promoting public health, between desire and prudence, between current de facto legalization in cannabis clubs and revenue-generating retail marijuana sales. […]

Physicians see many people who seek help in quitting marijuana. If Californians decide to legalize marijuana, who will pay for the additional treatments that will be needed? This question becomes profoundly more relevant if your own child has become devoted to smoking pot. If marijuana is legalized, a truly fair, socially just public policy would use tax revenue from marijuana sales to pay for increased treatments.

There are a small number of people who have addiction problems who also abuse marijuana. That has very little to do with the issue of legalization.

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Legalizing marijuana is bad for California by Susan E. Manheimer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, the group most likely to be hurt financially by the legalization of marijuana next to the drug cartels, despite what Susan would like you to believe.

The truth is the production and distribution of marijuana is already big business and controlled by violent drug cartels. Should this initiative pass, the cartels are well positioned and eagerly awaiting a greatly expanded marketplace. We need only look at the violence occurring among warring drug cartels along our border with Mexico to imagine what California might experience.

How corrupt do you have to be to try to sell this to the public?

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Finally, in today’s Doonesbury, Zonker wants to go to Oakland…

I don’t blame him.

A little Sunday reading for you:

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case for Marijuana Law Reform
by Eric D. Blumenson (Suffolk University Law School) and
(Eva S. Nilsen) Boston University School of Law.
Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 09-20.
Indiana Law Journal, Vol. 85, 2009

(Note: If you have trouble downloading the paper there, it’s available here.)

In this essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession crimes. We put forward two arguments, corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws that both ban marijuana use and punish its users. The first argument opposes criminalization, demonstrating that marijuana use does not constitute the kind of wrongful conduct that is a prerequisite for just punishment. The second argument demonstrates that even in the absence of criminal penalties, prohibition of marijuana use violates a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters – a corollary to Mill’s harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, or, in the non-consequentialist tradition, to the respect for personhood that was well described by the Supreme Court in its recent Lawrence v. Texas opinion. Both arguments are based on principles of justice that are uncontroversial in other contexts.

The arguments used in this paper are not ones that you could likely use in a courtroom today (even the Supreme courtroom) because drug war precedent has too far warped the concept of liberty, yet it is important to have discussions like this to remind us of the roots of liberty in this country, and how the drug laws have damaged them (and to give us something to strive for).

The authors point out that most discussions about marijuana laws revolve around pragmatic terms.

Such debates are crucial elements in any examination of marijuana law and policy, but they ignore the deeper level of justification that may be required by restraints on individual liberty, of which marijuana criminalization is arguably an instance. Restraints on religious practice, for example, cannot properly be evaluated by merely calculating the utilitarian costs and benefits; something of greater moral weight is required to override the fundamental right to free exercise of religion. A key threshold issue regarding the prohibition and criminalization of marijuana use is whether such laws implicate fundamental individual rights, and if so what kind of grounds are required to justify doing so.

In this essay, we argue that these laws do unjustifiably infringe fundamental moral rights. We present a non-consequentialist, civil libertarian case against marijuana prohibition and criminalization, based on the requirements of liberty and just punishment.

The essay takes some inspiration from the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence, which struck down a law criminalizing homosexual sex. The Court’s words in that case ring true in other areas as well…

Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. . . And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. . . Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. ….At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. . . .The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives.

The authors even address the basics from the Declaration of Independence.

There is also a more quotidian moral right, perhaps less exalted but no less important, which is recognized in the Declaration of Independence as “the pursuit of happiness.” This right should protect those who seek affective rather than cognitive benefits from marijuana – users for whom it serves as a relaxant, a social lubricant, an anti-depressant, or a palliative.50 The right to pursue happiness in one’s own way is worthy of respect, and we disdain countries like Iran partly because they do not respect it. There, certain music and dress is deemed decadent and banned. Here, the default position is that people should be free to pursue their individual and idiosyncratic tastes in recreation, even risky ones like boxing and mountain climbing. Only in a few cases does the majority presume to control the personal pleasures of a minority; marijuana is one of them. (That marijuana use often takes place in the privacy of one’s home greatly compounds the violation.)

A very interesting read (and a nice diversion from the daily slogging through the drug war). The authors specifically chose not to apply their argument to other drugs, but certainly much of their points could easily extend beyond marijuana.