Drug WarRant

The Economist has a devastatingly powerful attack on the U.S.: Too many laws, too many prisoners. Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little

This is a must read and it should be used to hold lawmakers accountable.

As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.

In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100.

We have been through an orgy of legislators passing criminal penalties and prosecutors pushing for maximums, regardless of the costs.

Jim Felman, a defence lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting “an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved only for those who had killed someone”.

And the results of this experiment include enormous incarceration costs and enormous medical costs as we end up locking up more old people than ever before, as well as the increased danger of incarcerating innocents (as fear of being locked up for decades sometimes pushes innocent people to plead guilty).

Plus, sometimes people don’t even know that they broke the law!

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. […] In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

“The founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offences, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalisation the first line of attack—a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam,” writes Gene Healy, a libertarian scholar.

If we’re supposed to obey the laws (which reasonably assumes that we should know what they are), then it seems to me that lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to pass any more criminal penalties unless they can recite all the ones that are already on the books.

Thanks to Logan for pointing out this nasty internet ad by the anti-proposition-19 folks:

The ad goes on to read…

As California goes, do does the
rest of the country.

“do does”? OK, we didn’t say they were literate.

This November, Californian’s [sic] will go to the polls and decide if they want to legalize the use and cultivation of Marijuana. Your state could be next. Bus drivers, forklift operators, hospital technicians, crossing guards who might be stoned could be coming to your community.

Seems to me that bus drivers, forklift operators, hospital technicians, crossing guards, doctors, teachers, judges, police, and (ironic mothers? — not sure what the image on the left is supposed to represent) should be pretty offended by the implications of this ad and want to support the other side.

On the radio, we have Democrat Michael Rubio, a Kern County supervisor who is running for state senate in Bakersfield. He apparently decided he could get more visibility for his campaign by running radio ads against legalization. (Maybe someone from Bakersfield can explain this.) Listen here.

Of course, he rails against “legalized potheads driving around.” I’m afraid we’re going to hear a lot more about those in the days to come. Facts, of course, won’t matter much from that side of this debate.

Oddly, he starts by calling it “legalizing the — quote — recreational use of marijuana —”

Um, no. It is in fact legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. I’m not sure what the purpose of the “quote” is. I know it was fashionable for prohibitionists to put quotes around the term “medical marijuana” to ridicule the idea that it was really medicine. But is he saying that “recreational marijuana” isn’t… recreational? What is it, work?

When pot is legal, will the following conversation be taking place?

Sarah: “Hey, you want to go to a movie?”

George: “Oh, I wish I could! No, I have to get stoned and drive a car and run over some kids. Hey, it’s a living.”

…

Update: They’re probably alerted to the mistakes in the ad, so Roger Salazar will be stepping in to clean it up and straighten out the drunks on his staff. When that happens, here’s a pdf of how it originally appeared.

Update 2: The ad has been removed. Currently, I’m getting a “Directory Listing Denied” at that page, and another ad they had aimed at California audiences is also gone.

Update 3: The ads have returned. And now they’re fixed (in terms of grammar and spelling — but still offensive). Jacob Sullum has more:

But Public Safety First, which is running the campaign against Prop. 19, is all about fear. Its website features photos of a doctor, a teacher, a judge, and a cop with joints dangling ridiculously from their mouths, suggesting prohibition is the only thing that prevents people from getting stoned at work. It says “bus drivers, forklift operators, hospital technicians, crossing guards who might be stoned could be coming to your community.”

Yes, these people might be stoned, but that is true whether or not Prop. 19 passes. And even if marijuana disappeared tomorrow, all of these people could come to work drunk. Yet Public Safety First is not campaigning for a return to alcohol prohibition, because it understands that workplace intoxication can be addressed through less sweeping measures that do not penalize responsible consumers for the sins of a reckless minority.

If we remove the terror-tinted lenses of Prop. 19’s opponents, we start to see the benefits of treating marijuana more like alcohol.

The British Medical Journal last week published a special edition: ‘Drug users and HIV: treat don’t punish’. It had a series of excellent articles, including one by our friend Steve Rolles at Transform Drug Policy Foundation: An alternative to the war on drugs.

As Transform notes…

In a significant endorsement, the editor of the BMJ Fiona Godlee, in an editorial titled ‘Ideology in the ascendant’ , concludes by noting that:

“In a beautifully argued essay Stephen Rolles calls on us to envisage an alternative to the hopelessly failed war on drugs. He says, and I agree, that we must regulate drug use, not criminalise it.”

You can’t be more clear than that.

And she’s right — it’s a wonderful piece.

I’m going to quote a few passages, but you should go read the whole thing.

The criminalisation of drugs has, historically, been presented as an emergency response to an imminent threat rather than an evidence based health or social policy intervention. Prohibitionist rhetoric frames drugs as menacing not just to health but also to our children, national security, and the moral fabric of society itself. The prohibition model is positioned as a response to such threats, and is often misappropriated into populist political narratives such as “crackdowns” on crime, immigration, and, more recently, the war on terror.

This conceptualisation has resulted in the punitive enforcement of drug policy becoming largely immune from meaningful scrutiny. A curiously self justifying logic now prevails in which the harms of prohibition—such as drug related organised crime and deaths from contaminated heroin—are conflated with the harms of drug use. These policy related harms then bolster the apparent menace of drugs and justify the continuation, or intensification, of prohibition. This has helped create a high level policy environment that routinely ignores or actively suppresses critical scientific engagement and is uniquely divorced from most public health and social policy norms, such as evaluation of interventions using established indicators of health and wellbeing.

After talking about how movements for reform have grown in recent years, including actual efforts in decriminalization and harm reduction (the most that law will allow), he continues…

The logic of both, however, ultimately leads us to confront the inevitable choice: non-medical drug markets can remain in the hands of unregulated criminal profiteers or they can be controlled and regulated by appropriate government authorities. There is no third option under which drugs do not exist. The choice needs to be based on an evaluation of which option will deliver the best outcomes in terms of minimising the harms, both domestic and international, associated with drug production, supply, and use. This does not preclude reducing demand as a legitimate long term policy goal, rather it accepts that policy must also deal with the reality of current high levels of demand.

Rolles then goes on to talk about Transform’s After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation, which I’ve promoted here before (and which is free online). It’s an outstanding piece of work — the only legitimate report to actually lay out a post-prohibition set of workable models for drug regulation.

The British Medical Journal is one of the most influential peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. For it to warmly receive and endorse a full-throated call for legalized regulation of recreational drugs is a major step.

My host this weekend sadly lost a whole lot of valuable stuff in the basement after the incredibly heavy rains in Chicago Friday night, including his wifi, so I’m just getting caught up.

The big news: V.A. Easing Rules for Users of Medical Marijuana

The Department of Veterans Affairs will formally allow patients treated at its hospitals and clinics to use medical marijuana in states where it is legal, a policy clarification that veterans have sought for several years.

For a federal agency to actually recognize medical marijuana, even in this limited way, is pretty amazing.

Cannabis Commerce. After discussing the recent RAND study on the uncertainties of a narrow range of the effects of legalizing cannabis in California, it is interesting to check out Cannabis Commerce in the U.S.A.. Author Lory Kohn, who describes himself as someone who “bypassed Economics 101 for obscure liberal arts courses like Love And The Secular Spirit,” got interested enough in the economics of cannabis legalization to interview economists at length and attempt to put together a layman’s guide to the economics.

I haven’t read it all, yet, but from what I’ve checked out, it certainly seems useful.

An update regarding the shooting of Trevon Cole in Las Vegas. It appears that there were some errors in the affidavit prepared by the officer who shot and killed Cole.

Las Vegas police say they thought Trevon Cole was a hard-core drug dealer with a long record of arrests in Texas and California when they broke down his apartment door and pointed a gun at his head last month.

They were wrong. […]

Investigators might have confused him with another Trevon Cole — one with a different middle name who is seven years older, at least three inches shorter and 100 pounds lighter, records show. That Trevon Cole has several marijuana-related arrests in Houston, all misdemeanors.

Shoddy police work? Probably. But would even some additional marijuana-related misdemeanors actually justify breaking down someone’s apartment door and pointing a gun at his head?

No. There’s no excuse for the action to begin with.

Remembering 1972. Kate Woods writes Proposition 19: We’ve Been Here Before, a really nice piece remembering the devastating vote on the first Proposition 19, almost 40 years ago, and some increased optimism about the current one.

The always excellent Dan Gardner explains the drug war for the idiots who failed to learn the lesson of “Colombianization”: We have been ‘winning’ the war on drugs for 90 years

A very odd “Pro vs. Con” by Larry Lechuga at the 420 Times: Pro vs. Con: To Legalize Or Not?. He gathers quotes from advocates and opponents of legalization on the following questions:

1. Will legalizing marijuana lead to widespread and excessive use of the drug?
2. Will legalizing marijuana lead to huge social costs in terms of hospital visits, traffic safety, etc.?
3. Will the legalization of marijuana lead to increased crime rates?
4. One of the leading arguments in favor of legalizing marijuana is that it would generate a significant amount of tax revenue for cash-strapped California. Is this a good source of income?

Really? Those are the only questions? Not one on prohibition?

The BBC is on the cutting edge of investigative journalism and has discovered something earth-shattering: Some people enjoy taking drugs. (I couldn’t get the video to load so I don’t know the content of the story, but the headline is priceless).

Mark Kleiman condescends to consider voting for Proposition 19, but only if he’s sure it’ll lose. Apparently there’s no length he won’t go to let his disdain for legalizers triumph over the facts.

Like it or not, in November California voters are either going to vindicate the dishonest strategy of Prop. 19′s backers – falsely promising to help resolve California’s fiscal crisis as bait for legalization – or ratify the nonsense still being preached on the other side. Since we’re currently spending loads of public money to peddle Skip Miller’s nonsense to tens of millions of schoolchildren with tax dollars, and since prohibition is currently the law of the land, I think I will give rebuking the drug warriors priority over rebuking the legalizers: assuming the polls still show the proposition losing. Having the damned thing actually pass is not a risk worth running.

The Natchez (Mississippi) Democrat, in an editorial calling for a statewide ban on synthetics like “spice” that are intended to provide effects similar to marijuana…

Calling it legal shouldn’t make it so

What?

Apparently the Natchez editorial staff has bought into the premise that illegal is the default position in this country.

We think a citywide ban is a good start; however, ultimately to stamp out the stuff, it needs to be banned at the state level.

Call it whatever you’d like, but if the stuff provides a “high” like marijuana, it should be treated under the law as one and the same.

Ah, yes, if it’s banned at the state level, that’ll “stamp out the stuff.” And that’s worked… when?

Also apparently, anything that creates a “high” like marijuana should be treated as a criminal offense. Better get ready to arrest everybody. Starting with everybody in church that gets moved by the Spirit.

Note: Commenters there really slammed the editorial staff. Nice.

Press release from LEAP:

Federal Drug Agency Bans Pro-Legalization Police Group From Conference

SAMHSA Doesn’t Want Views Expressed at Treatment Event in Chicago

CHICAGO, IL — A group of police officers, judges and prosecutors who support legalizing and regulating drugs is crying foul after a federal agency reneged on a contract that gave the law enforcers a booth to share their anti-prohibition views at a government-sponsored treatment conference in Chicago next week.

After accepting registration payment from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration initially told the police group that it was canceling its booth at the National Conference on Women, Addiction and Recovery because of overbooking and space concerns. However, Sharon Amatetti of SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment later informed LEAP that, in a decision rising all the way to SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde’s office, the group was actually being disinvited for its viewpoint.

“It’s alarming that the federal government is trying to silence the voices of front-line police officers who just want to network and collaborate with treatment professionals to achieve our shared goal of preventing substance abuse through effective public policy,” said Neill Franklin, a former narcotics cop with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department who is now executive director of LEAP. “Perhaps the administration was most concerned that LEAP’s law enforcers planned to shine a spotlight on the fact that under President Obama, the White House’s drug control budget maintains the same two-to-one funding ratio in favor of harsh enforcement tactics over effective public health approaches.”

On a phone call with LEAP, Pamela Rodriguez of conference co-host TASC, Inc. of Illinois said that the police group wasn’t welcome at the event because “our policy perspective and our policy objectives are different from you guys.” She added, “It is the emphasis on prohibition vs. legalization that, for me at least, is the glaring dissonance with regard to our agenda.”

SAMHSA has since refunded LEAP’s money. The conference takes place July 26-28 at Chicago’s Downtown Magnificent Mile Marriott Hotel.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and its 30,000 supporters represent police, prosecutors, judges, FBI/DEA agents and others who want to legalize and regulate drugs after fighting on the front lines of the “war on drugs” and learning firsthand that prohibition only serves to worsen addiction and violence. Info at www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com.

It’s not like LEAP wanted to have a panel or speaker at the conference — they just wanted to have a booth like many other organizations and pass out information to people who voluntarily stopped by. And they were willing to pay the fee to do it.

And that was too threatening to SAMHSA to allow.

Now, I understand that conferences are intended to get people motivated and excited about what they do, and so maybe it would be counter to the purpose of the conference to have a group at a treatment conference that was opposed to treatment. But that’s not the case with LEAP at all. They’re strongly supportive of treatment. In fact, they prefer that we deal with drugs as a public health issue, which obviously would include a strong treatment component.

So why is the treatment industry so solidly in the prohibitionist camp?

Is it the money?

Could be, and that was my first thought. After all, 37.8% of all treatment admissions (2008) were referred there by the criminal justice system. That’s 700,000 admissions.

And yet, over 300,000 of those criminal justice referrals were for alcohol, a legal drug, so it doesn’t mean that they would lose all criminal justice referrals – not by a long shot. They’d probably lose 180,000 marijuana referrals. And it’s possible that they’d lose admissions in general across the board in currently illegal drugs because legalization and regulation may reduce the harms of drug use (others will say that there will be an increase in admissions due to legalization).

What other reasons do they have for being against even the discussion of legalization?

One could be the skewed personal experience syndrome. Many treatment professionals are former addicts or have had experience with someone who overdosed, etc. And then they work all day with people who have severe problems. This can cause a skewed outlook where you’re unable to see the larger picture and unwilling to consider that the system you’re part of could be part of the problem.

Finally, the treatment system is heavily influenced in a top-down way by the federal government, which has a vested power interest in prohibition. SAMHSA is part of that and can’t avoid it. And it is this administration’s policy to stick their fingers in their ears and make loud nonsense noises whenever the “L” word is spoken.

FDL’s Jane Hamsher did a great job of re-directing a segment on Arizona’s immigration laws to ending the war on marijuana.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK0nFq2Al24

Via Scott Morgan

Georgia becomes first country to sign Vienna Declaration

The First Lady of Georgia announced at a breakfast event at the AIDS 2010 conference today that Georgia would sign the Vienna Declaration, the first country to do so.

Good for them! (Have you signed it yet?)

Several organizations, including Drug Free America Foundation, have released a ridiculous statement opposing the Vienna Declaration. They basically claim that prohibition is for the most part working just fine and only needs some tweaking, that it’s the drug use, not prohibition, that’s causing problems like:

Marijuana also contains bacteria and fungi that put users at risk for infection.

Oh, and yeah… balanced approach.

We are committed to efforts to improve current drug policy to further reduce illegal drug use by building on a balanced strategy that includes the criminal justice system.

More Politicians, Strategists See Opportunity in Supporting Marijuana Reform by Mike Meno in the Huffington Post. Good piece demonstrating that supporting reform is no longer a political liability.

Mike Meno also has this important, but unsurprising, bit of data: Marijuana Use Rarely Leads to Emergency Room, Study Shows

Researchers at the University of Michigan have sifted through nationwide data to determine the prevalence of different drug-related emergency room visits and (surprise, surprise!) their recently released results show that “marijuana dependence was associated with the lowest rates” of emergency room visits.

A lot of fuss has been made regarding how Mexican cartels are getting their guns. What about hand grenades? They’re not likely to be picking those up in sporting goods stores in the U.S. Turns out they don’t need to.

There have been more than 72 grenade attacks in Mexico in the last year, including spectacular assaults on police convoys and public officials. Mexican forces have seized more than 5,800 live grenades since 2007, a small fraction of a vast armory maintained by the drug cartels, officials said. […]

One of the most common hand grenades found in Mexico is the M67, the workhorse explosive manufactured in the United States for American soldiers and for sale or transfer to foreign militaries. Some 266,000 M67 grenades went to El Salvador alone between 1980 and 1993, during the civil war there.

Methinks Russia is just a little bit defensive about Fedotov being named head of the UNODC. Moscow Times

But Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko waved the complaints aside.

“It’s no secret to anyone that there are powerful and active forces interested in presenting the situation with HIV and AIDS in Russia as nearing a catastrophe,” he said, without identifying the forces.

“We believe this approach is absolutely unfounded,” Nesterenko said in a statement published on the Foreign Ministry’s web site.

He acknowledged at a news conference that authorities have failed to slow soaring HIV rates but said there was “every reason to believe that we will achieve that sooner or later,” Interfax reported.

Pravda reacted even more strongly

As for the first accusation, in Russia, buprenorphine and methadone are considered drugs and therefore their circulation is limited and is under strict control. In the West, these substances are used to treat drug addiction. However, the Russian authorities are against methadone treatment, pointing to the conclusions of Russian medical professionals who believe that its effectiveness is not proven by science. […]

Besides, where is the guarantee that when we “crack open the doors” to semi-legal drugs, we can ensure that the number of drug addicts will not increase as a result? There is a suspicion that foreign NGOs are openly lobbying for the interests of the producers of drugs”legalized” in the West. […]

And secondly, what are the other ways to fight against illicit drug production and drug trafficking besides stringent measures?

Surprise! Woman Gets 2 lbs of Marijuana in the Mail

Now, something like this should be a pleasant surprise, yet in today’s regime of bust-down-the-door, shoot-first-investigate-after policework, it’s a frightening prospect to get an unexpected shipment of marijuana — especially since the fake address ploy is a common one for shipments, and since some militarized police seem to be unaware of that (see Cheye Calvo incident).

An additional concern I have is that I don’t have any dogs. So what are the police going to shoot?

This is an open thread.

Powerful new article in Time by the always excellent Maia Szalavitz: Does Teen Drug Rehab Cure Addiction or Create It?

Increasingly, substance-abuse experts are finding that teen drug treatment may indeed be doing more harm than good. Many programs throw casual dabblers together with hard-core addicts and foster continuous group interaction. It tends to strengthen dysfunctional behavior by concentrating it, researchers say.

But these researchers Maia talked to, they’re probably pro-drug folks, right?

“Just putting kids in group therapy actually promotes greater drug use,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Oops. This is one of your hard-core prohibitionists saying that group therapy for teens “actually promotes greater drug use.”

The article points out the problems involved with putting teens in therapy (particularly for those who are not experiencing severe problems from drug abuse).

1. Group therapy puts casual users in proximity with hard core users and gives them enticing descriptions of hard drug use
2. Teen therapy reduces positive time with families
3. Therapy focuses on surrendering to helplessness to addiction (12-step), and for teens that’s a negative path.

So here with a system that, instead of focusing on those with problems (harm reduction), uses incarceration and treatment to turn casual use young people (in particular) into networked drug criminals with reduced family support and damaged self-esteem.

Add to that a national anti-drug advertising program that has actually been found to increase interest in drugs, a school D.A.R.E. program that has been shown to increase the likelihood of using drugs unsafely, and a prohibition program that insures that young people will be able to purchase at any age through contact with criminals, and you have a government system that should absolutely scare the crap out of parents.

Oh, and the winners in all this?

The rehab industry.

The outspoken head of Denver’s DEA operation that clashed with medical marijuana laws in that state, is leaving Colorado for a new assignment. He has been considered by many to be an over-zealous anti-marijuana fanatic, who ignored the new Attorney General’s guidelines.

However, he points out that any replacement is likely to be as bad.

“The person who takes my place is going to have the same mission I have,” Sweetin said.

DEA agents are sworn to uphold the constitution, and marijuana remains illegal under federal law, he said.

Ummm, hate to break it to you, but federal law is not the Constitution. And in fact, putting “marijuana,” “federal law,” and “the Constitution” in the same sentence is likely to cause it to explode from the inherent contradictions.