Drug WarRant

A really powerful set of articles in The Guardian today.

Starting off with War on drugs: why the US and Latin America could be ready to end a fruitless 40-year struggle by Rory Carroll and Paul Harris

Mexico’s president Felipe Caldéron is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the ‘war on drugs’ there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight

It’s a pretty good discussion about recent political and drug war developments in the Americas.

Even better is the extremely strong and stinging piece against prohibition by the editorial board:

A unique chance to rethink drugs policy

If the purpose of drug policy is to make toxic substances available to anyone who wants them in a flourishing market economy controlled by murderous criminal gangs, the current arrangements are working well.

If, however, the goal is to reduce the amount of drugs being consumed and limit the harm associated with addiction, it is surely time to tear up the current policy. It has failed.

This is not a partial failure. For as long as courts and jails have been the tools for controlling drugs, their use has increased. Police are powerless to control the flow. One recent estimate calculated that around 1% of the total supply to the UK is intercepted.

Attempts to crack down have little impact, except perhaps in siphoning vulnerable young people into jails where they can mature into hardened villains.

When a more heavyweight player is taken out, a gap opens up in the supply chain which is promptly filled by violent competition between or within gangs. Business as usual resumes. […]

It is far from certain that decriminalisation, regulation or legalisation would work. But they should be examined as options, for it is absolutely certain that prohibition has failed.

Wow. The trifecta finishes off with Drugs: the problem is more than just the substances, it’s the prohibition itself by Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge in Brazil and board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Violence is not necessarily related to drugs. As the alcohol or tobacco businesses demonstrate, the production and supply of drugs are not inherently violent activities. Weapons and violence only accompany those activities when undertaken in an illegal market. The prohibition yields the violence, as disputes must be settled out of court and on the streets. Paradoxically, when we prohibit these widely used substances, we are actually relinquishing meaningful control over them.

Prohibition consigns the drug market to criminalised actors not subject to oversight of any kind. Legalisation would mean regulation and regulation is the best way to control the dangers of drug use, while cutting the cartels off at the knees. […]

Latin America is advancing the debate, but even in the US there are efforts to undo the damage of prohibition, the most prominent being California’s effort to legalise marijuana.

Hopefully, the thousands of Mexicans, Brazilians and people from other parts of the world who have been killed in the insane “war on drugs” will not have died in vain. Their deaths are already showing that it is time to put an end to all the pain and harms caused by drug prohibition; it is time to legalise and regulate the production, the supply and the consumption of all drugs.

… argument is one of the more ridiculous ones that I’ve heard.

Keith Humphreys, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, discussed the potential consequences of legalizing marijuana.

Here’s the kicker:

Q: What about the argument that taxing marijuana will provide fiscally strapped cities and states with much-needed revenue?

Humphreys: I am not sympathetic with that argument, either on the values front or on just straight economics. If as a society we’ve decided that if it makes revenue we’re for it, why are we wasting time with cannabis? We should be legalizing child pornography and human trafficking. There’s lots of awful things that raise money, and that doesn’t make them right. The idea that we can make a buck here, and therefore it’s the right thing to do for kids in California … I think that’s morally bankrupt.

I really get tired of these jerks/liars who act like the whole tax revenue argument has been made in a vacuum. Nobody who supports legalization has ever said that tax revenue is the only reason to legalize, and it’s disingenuous to say the least to make that implication. And to compare it to child pornography and human trafficking? Now that’s morally bankrupt. It’s also intellectually dishonest, and seeing a professor make such a statement offends the educator in me.

But then again, he’s being paid to be… disingenuous. According to his bio at Stanford:

He is currently on leave from Stanford while he serves as Senior Policy Advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Update: It appears now that his bio is out of date. He apparently has returned to Stanford. So that eliminates that excuse.

With the Just Say Now campaign underway at FDL, Jane Hamsher has emerged as a progressive leader on drug policy reform. She talks about it at The Atlantic.

CG: Do you see a lot of support for legalizing marijuana in the Netroots community, or in the more staid progressive community including unions, civil rights groups, and people like that?

JH: Well, interestingly enough, the issue has never gained traction in the quote-unquote liberal political blogosphere. People were always a little bit nervous about it. So it hasn’t had support, but it’s tremendously popular on the Internet and among the Obama surge voters.

CG: I remember when Obama did one of his first tele-town-halls as president, one of the questions that got the most votes was, “Are you going to make marijuana legal?”

JH: Yeah, I believe there were three polls on the transition team’s website, and questions about marijuana topped all three of them, with millions of voters. So for the people who supported Obama, it’s clearly an important issue.

I think this is good recognition that, among progressive voters, there is strong potential interest (just as there is among traditional conservative voters), but that, until now, it’s been the progressive leadership that’s been unwilling to consider it.

Scott Morgan does a nice job of disabusing the idiot-enablers of the notion that somehow legalization will be good for the cartels.

Here’s the thing: criminal drug organizations don’t want this “legal platform” you speak of. That’s not how they do business. Their product is grown by day laborers and slaves, not master cultivators. Their business strategy is characterized by assassination and bribery, not Facebook fan pages and free massage Fridays. They have no intention of paying taxes or appearing before local zoning boards, and they can’t compete with American entrepreneurs who are happy to do the paperwork and can explain where their investment capital came from.

Ah, the hunt.

Instead of rifles and stealthily stalking the prey, it’s body armor, pistols and battering rams. Instead of the forest or tundra, this prey is in a fenced yard, closed in a bathroom, or running away in the living room.

It’s a tough sport and the big game hunter must always be vigilant and always shoot first, because who knows what this ferocious beast, who spends his entire day playing with little children, might do to a grown man in body armor.

As always, Radley Balko documents the hunt…

Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force agents, aided by a uniformed Willits police officer, serving a search warrant at 64 Franklin Avenue on July 27, shot and killed a family pet, an 8-year-old half-pit bull mix named Tonka.

When agents searched the home, they found nothing directly linking the residents to the arrest of Craig Anthony Gelber, the target of the search, according to MMCTF Commander Bob Nishiyama. […]

According to resident Anna White, Tonka’s owner, the police shot her pet while it was in a fenced area on her front porch. “We found the shell casing outside by the fence area. Tonka then ran into our house, got onto my bed and died.”

White described her bedroom following the search, claiming Tonka’s body had been dumped from the bed onto the floor and items from her room dropped onto the body and into the dog’s blood. “They destroyed our house and found nothing,” says White. “Tonka lived long enough to die on my bed, which we shared each night.”

Meanwhile, we go to Prince George’s County, location of the slaying of Payton and Chase. In case you’ve forgotten…

Prince George County SWAT, intercepting a package of marijuana addressed to Mayor Cheye Calvo’s wife Trinity, and knowing that criminals were addressing packages to innocents and intercepting them, nonetheless burst into the Mayor’s home without even enough investigation to know he was the Mayor or even notifying local police, shot the two dogs (Chase was running away from them when they killed him), and kept the Mayor and his mother-in-law handcuffed on the floor for hours in their dogs’ blood.

Well, last night, Sheriff Michael Jackson said:

“Quite frankly, we’d do it again. Tonight.”

For more outrage, see Radley’s Federal Cop Shoots Dog at a Dog Park. No Charges.

Had a great time with my friend in Chicago this past weekend, and now have my Dad visiting to see the Shakespeare Festival shows, and my Sister and niece are coming tomorrow for a couple of days, so I still have only a few moments a day to check on news.

I had several hundred spams built up in the comment spam filter and ended up accidentally dumping them all, so I apologize if any of your comments got caught in there and I didn’t rescue them.

And I feel remiss about not having reported about the wonderful Just Say Now campaign put together by FireDogLake and SSDP. Go over there and show them some support.

Not U.S.

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said he would consider a debate on legalizing drugs Tuesday as his government announced that more than 28,000 people have been killed in drug violence since he launched a crackdown against cartels in 2006. […]

Calderon said he has taken note of the idea of legally regulating drugs in the past.
“It’s a fundamental debate in which I think, first of all, you must allow a democratic plurality (of opinions),” he said. “You have to analyze carefully the pros and cons and the key arguments on both sides.”

Three former presidents — Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Cardoso of Brazil — urged Latin American countries last year to consider legalizing marijuana to undermine a major source of income for cartels. And Mexico’s congress also has debated the issue.

But Calderon has long said he is opposed to the idea, and his office issued a statement hours after the meeting saying that while the president was open to debate on the issue, he remains “against the legalization of drugs.”

In proposing the debate Tuesday, analyst and writer Hector Aguilar Camin said, “I’m not talking just about marijuana … rather all drugs in general.”

It’s not a call for legalization by Calderon, but it’s a recognition of basic facts — you have to discuss all the options. You can’t bury your head in the sand, cover your ears and repeatedly scream “Legalization is not in my vocabulary.”

In response to President Calderon’s call for a debate on drug legalization, Norm Stamper, a 34-year veteran police officer who was Seattle’s chief of police and is now a speaker with the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and an adviser to the Just Say Now campaign, called on President Obama to join the debate on legalizing marijuana:

“President Calderon’s call for a debate on legalization is a big step forward in putting an end to the war raging in Mexico and along our borders. More than 28,000 people have been killed by Mexico’s drug cartels since 2006 – including 1,200 in July, the deadliest month yet in this drug war.

“Legalizing marijuana is the most sensible approach to stopping this border war. Cartels thrive on marijuana prohibition. Around 70% of the cartels’ profits come from the illegal sale of marijuana, which they turn around to buy guns that have killed thousands of Mexicans and that terrorize police on America’s streets.

“Just Say Now welcomes President Calderon to this debate. We hope that President Obama will join this debate to end the war on marijuana.”

I’ve got a good friend flying in from Seattle to spend a long weekend and we’re going to spend the time in Chicago exploring the city (as we do every year) until Tuesday. And then my Dad is coming to town and we’re going to see all the shows at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival on Tuesday through Thursday. So while I’ll be checking it, posting will probably be a little light.

Keep sending me tips. I apologize that I seldom have time to respond to them and am behind following up on some that really interest me.

Obama administration clueless as to what to do about drug policy. If California legalizes marijuana, not clear what Obama administration would do

I realize that the current administration isn’t going to do anything to actively help reform. The best we can hope for is a kind of negligence. Something that looks like incompetent and inefficient efforts to be tough on drugs. It appears that they’d rather be seen as doing a bad job at being prohibitionists than as leading for change.

A fascinating This Week in History from StopTheDrugWar.org

Excellent overview of what’s going on with Prop 19 in California by Daniela Perdomo at Alternet.

Because it’s been working so well so far… US Congress Approves More Funding for Plan Mexico

A measure passed by Congress to provide emergency funding for the war in Afghanistan is also being used by US lawmakers to pump an additional $175 million into Mexico to support the drug war this year. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a budgetary bill referred to as the 2010 supplemental appropriations act, which along with providing $60 billion to war efforts in Afghanistan also allocates more funds to “international narcotics control and law enforcement” in Mexico.

Odd. What is this feeling? Not sure how to handle it. Today, I read the Drug Czar’s “blog” and… actually mostly agreed with it.

“I applaud the passage in the House today of the Fair Sentencing Act, which will dramatically reduce a 100-to-1 disparity between trafficking offenses for crack and powder cocaine,” said White House Drug Control Policy Director, Gil Kerlikowske. “The Obama Administration is committed to the fair and equal application of our Nation’s laws. The Fair Sentencing Act marks the first time in 40 years that Congress has reduced a mandatory minimum sentence.

Hmmm.

This is an open thread.

My, that certainly is a provocative question. Is Roger Salazar channeling funds to terrorists? Is he, in fact, providing money laundering services for terrorists? These are real questions, based on absolutely nothing, that I feel that I need to put in front of the public, so they can think about it.

Who is Roger Salazar? Well, he’s a Democratic spokesman and media consultant. He is also the spokesperson for California Working Families for Jerry Brown (for the Governor race), which is heavily funded (millions of dollars) by certain unions (which includes public employee unions in California). And he is the spokesperson for Public Safety First, which opposes Proposition 19 (the legalization of marijuana in California) and which is responsible for this new ad on the left.

So, given that, and the fact that those facts do not in any way add up to evidence that Roger Salazar is channeling funds to terrorists, it still is a provocative question that we may feel needs to be asked: Is Roger Salazar funding terrorists? He is dealing with a lot of funds, and there are terrorists out there. Just sayin’.

That’s the relevance of this offensive ad. It’s Salazar going fact-free and negative, and trying to deceive voters by scaring them. I mean, you could just as well put a number of captions there:

— Is My Teacher Drunk?
— Is My Teacher Stupid?
— Is My Teacher Holed Up In The Classroom With A Semi-Automatic?
— Is My Teacher Sleeping With Roger Salazar?

All disturbing questions. All equally unrelated to the passage of Proposition 19.

But we’ll see more of these ads. Why?

These are the questions that morally bankrupt political hacks who don’t have the facts on their side are forced to ask.

…

Oh, and to California voters? You may want to vote Green, not Brown.

Some oppose medical marijuana because patients who aren’t that sick can still get a doctor’s note.

I’ve noticed that people who can walk pretty well still get permits to park in the close spots. Maybe we should outlaw all handicapped parking.