Drug WarRant

In my post America the Ugly I referred to situations where people were getting deported from this country because of minor drug transgressions.

Here’s how it worked:

Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, a lawful permanent resident of the United States, was convicted of two misdemeanor drug offenses in Texas. For the first, possession of a small amount of marijuana, he received 20 days in jail. For the second, possession without a prescription of one anti-anxiety tablet, he received 10 days.

Now, here’s where the trickery was taking place. To deport someone, they must have been convicted of an “aggravated felony.” Jose’s convictions were misdemeanors.

However, a provision of a federal law allows that recidivism (ie, multiple convictions, even of simple possession), may be prosecutable as a felony offense under the Controlled Substances Act.

The feds were taking the multiple misdemeanors and noting that, if they had been prosecuted in Federal Court using those standards, they could have been eligible for the recidivism enhancement (making it a felony), and therefore the person had essentially been “convicted” of a crime that was a felony by definition (even though they hadn’t been sentenced that way), and should be deported.

Right.

Fortunately, this week the Supreme Court, in Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, ruled unanimously that the federal government was full of crap.

Justice Stevens delivered the opinion, which included this gem (references removed):

While it is true that a defendant’s criminal history might be seen to make an offense “worse” by virtue thereof, it is nevertheless unorthodox to classify this type of petty simple possession recidivism as an “aggravated felony.”

Of course, as Justice Souter observed in his opinion for the Court in Lopez, Congress, like “Humpty Dumpty,” has the power to give words unorthodox meanings. But in this case the Government argues for a result that “the English language tells us not to expect,” so we must be “very wary of the Government’s position.” Because the English language tells us that most aggravated felonies are punishable by sentences far longer than 10 days, and that mere possession of one tablet of Xanax does not constitute “trafficking,” Lopez instructs us to be doubly wary of the Government’s position in this case.

Common sense from the Supreme Court. Hmmm….

Update: In other good news, this from the Kentucky Supreme Court today in Cochran v. Commonwealth, the court ruled that a woman may not be charged with wanton endangerment of her child based on having ingested illegal drugs while pregnant.

Again, the court showed common sense and noted that such prosecutions were not given to mothers who drank alcohol while pregnant.

The “case-by-case” approach suggested by the Commonwealth is so arbitrary that, if the criminal child abuse statutes are construed to support it, the statutes transgress reasonably identifiable limits; they lack fair notice and violate constitutional due process limits against statutory vagueness.

The court also slammed the prosecution by demonstrating that the sense of the Kentucky General Assembly had been made clear in its Maternal Health Act of 1992, which stated:

… punitive actions taken against pregnant alcohol or substance abusers would create additional problems, including discouraging these individuals from seeking the essential prenatal care and substance abuse treatment necessary to deliver a healthy newborn…

This ridiculous notion keeps circulating in states by politicians looking for some easy votes from the ignorant, but now Hatch is trying for a national law.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has proposed an amendment to the jobs bill today that would require Americans seeking unemployment benefits and welfare to pass a drug test.

Hatch claims this “would help save taxpayer money and reduce the national deficit.”

Wrong.

First, we have the cost of all the drug testing and the processing of those tests. This would be huge, and the government would have to pay for it — what else are you going to do, charge the recipients? They’re broke. That’s the whole point.

What about false positives? Ready for the court cases?

What about one member of a family testing positive? Does the entire family lose benefits?

And what if someone tests positive? So you take away their benefits and then what? Adding more people on the street with no means of support helps society how? And if they’re actually addicted (and not the victim of the persistence of marijuana metabolites), unless there’s also treatment or other help (additional cost), what prevents them from falling into a life of crime to support their habit?

Saving taxpayer money? Not so much. A huge windfall for the drug testing industry? You bet.

Plus, it makes Hatch look good to his constituents for proposing it (remember he’s from Utah).

I have watched Orrin Hatch on the floor of Congress for many years and he is one of the slimiest politicians I have ever known. Unlike some of the others there, he’s not stupid — he’s actually quite smart. But he’ll stand up and utter what he knows to be complete lies with the most sincere voice and facial expressions you’ll ever see.

This proposal will meet with lots of popular sentiment. To those who are uneducated on the subject, it sounds good: Let’s not have taxpayer dollars meant to help people in rough economic times be wasted on drugs. Makes sense. (I see friends on Facebook “liking” this idea all the time.) Until you study the issue.

This proposal won’t save money, it will cause problems.

Oh, and just in case this still matters… it’s un-Constitutional.

That’s right, a drug test is a search (yes, analyzing your pee is about as intrusive a search as you can get). And suspicion-less searches by the government are still a violation of the 4th Amendment (unless you’re a high school student participating in chess club or some other dangerous after-school activity)… at least until the Supreme Court adds another drug war exception to the Bill of Rights.

Update: Something I meant to mention…

If you’re going to have taxpayer money paid to people, whether it’s for unemployment, welfare, or Congressional salaries, you really lose control of how it is spent at that point. Certainly you may wish that it’s spent on food and housing rather than drugs, but remember that nothing’s preventing it from being spent on porn, or really bad movies, or alcohol/cigarettes, or condoms, or video games, or lottery tickets, or any of a host of other items or services with which you may disagree.

If you really want to control what people get, then you have to go to distributing government cheese or something like that (which I think would be really good in lieu of cash pay for the recipients of taxpayer handouts in Congress).

Philip Smith has the story of what appears to be not only a real tragedy, but an outrage.

Cops Kill Father-to-Be in Botched Marijuana Raid

A 21-year-old father-to-be was killed last Friday night by a Las Vegas Police Department narcotics officer serving a search warrant for marijuana. Trevon Cole was shot once in the bathroom of his apartment after he made what police described as “a furtive movement.”

Police have said Cole was not armed. Police said Monday they recovered an unspecified amount of marijuana and a set of digital scales. A person identifying herself as Cole’s fiancée, Sequoia Pearce, in the comments section in the article linked to above said no drugs were found. […]

Pearce herself told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Monday that police forced her to kneel at gunpoint in the bedroom and that she could see Cole in the bathroom from the reflection of a mirror. According to Cole, police ordered Cole to get on the ground, he raised his hands and said “Alright, alright,” and a shot rang out.

Pearce was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The two planned on getting married soon.

As Mike Meno at MPP says:

The message people need to take from this stomach-turning incident is the one MPP broadcasts over and over again: Marijuana does not kill people, but prohibition does. If marijuana were sold in a legal and regulated market, tragedies like this would cease to exist and police could better spend their time dealing with crimes more serious than the possession of a substance safer than alcohol.

Of course, stories like this really can bring the trolls out in the news reports. Here’s a sampling:

Of course the “other person” in the apartment was the shack-up honey ready to pop out another out-of-wedlock child for taxpayers to support.

…

Who cares? If he got served with a narco search warrant, he was probably a dirtbag anyway. Good job Metro. Wiped another worthless dirtbag off the planet.

…

If your cousin was anything like you the baby is better off without his father. Your cousin had a baby on the way??? Why wasn’t he married to the mother? A respectable young man would have done so.

…

Well done metro, thank you for saving us money.

…

News Flash — DRUGS is a choice, being a bad person is a CHOICE, getting pregnant and having baby and with allegations of drugs being involved, go figure. METRO did their job and did it well. Thank you Metro, another drain on society removed, taxpayers realized instant savings, and now maybe the baby will a chance in life and become a productive member of society.

…

If you’re NOT a thug, just stick your hands up or lie sprawled on the floor so you’re obviously no threat to the officers. If you’re a thug, I hope you get shot because most of you glorify the thug life and have no desire to try to change things when given the opportunity. You’re like the cockroaches of society and should be stamped out.

…

“Pearce also said she was nine months pregnant, and that now her baby would be fatherless.” And this is different how again? Good shoot officer, thank you for taking out the garbage.

…

Don’t sell drugs and you won’t get shot by the cops pretty simple if you ask me. It’s too bad now she may have to get a real job to raise that kid.

…

Why is there always such a BS human interest story when one of these tribal marauders gets wacked. I’ll bet they will tell you that he was an honor student and would have gone to Harvard had it not been for his love for volunteer work with puppies. I dont believe a word of it.

…

[Regarding the fact that the officer had 3 controversial fatal shootings in his career…] Only 3 garbages taken out in 10 years? He should’ve taken out more.

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SO? Let me guess you smoke pot and think its ok.!Well i know people who also smoke pot!. They steal from there grandma, they cant keep a job because they cant wake up and they fail drug test.

…

hey whiners pay attention, if he didn’t shoot the man and later he go and kill someone, guess who youa re going to whine about?

New visitors, please note: The comments above were a selection of some of the worst and most outrageous from the commenters at those newspapers, not from our folks. Fortunately, even most of the other commenters at the newspapers weren’t as ignorant.

The ONDCP has faced criticism for years for its media campaigns, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on TV and print ads that have been shown to have zero effect (or in some cases, reverse effect) on young peoples’ attitudes about drug use.

Well, that’s all changing now.

“Above the Influence” differs from old anti-drug campaigns by including artwork from Milwaukee kids.

Ah.

The cops in Verona, Virginia have a problem.

It’s been nearly three months since the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office made its biggest marijuana seizure in the department’s history when it grabbed 1,840 pounds of packaged dope hidden inside a truck at American Safety Razor’s industrial division headquarters in Verona.

However, the marijuana, each 23-pound bale triple-wrapped in tinfoil, brown shipping paper and plastic, remains stacked inside a locked evidence room at the sheriff’s office, the space permeated by the pungent odor of the illegal drug.

They can’t figure out what to do with it. They used to bury it in a landfill, but this much might encourage “gophers.”

Sheriff Randy Fisher said he tried to offer the marijuana to a federal agency for training purposes, but noted “they have all they need.”

No kidding.

Fisher said he’s now leaning toward incinerating the entire stash, but he declined to name where and when that would take place.

I’m suggesting the middle of the public square at about 8 pm on Friday night. Invite the entire town to watch. Note the reduction in violence that weekend.

While it’s an amusing predicament, there were some ridiculous statements by police that also caught my attention:

While acknowledging that many users who smoke marijuana don’t go on to abuse harder drugs, [Police Chief Jim] Williams noted it’s still considered a gateway drug.

“It seems to me not too many people start snorting cocaine first. It’s usually marijuana or alcohol,” he said.

So… are you saying that alcohol is a gateway drug? Or that the term “gateway drug” doesn’t really mean much?

Chief Doug Davis of the Waynesboro Police Department agrees marijuana is a gateway drug, and said he would support neither legalizing nor decriminalizing it.

“I don’t see where the difference is,” Davis said. “I think, like alcohol, it needs to be controlled.”

What? (I think my head exploded trying to make sense of that.) Marijuana is just like alcohol and should be controlled, therefore marijuana should remain illegal and unregulated, while alcohol is legal and regulated.

Howard Wooldridge in the comments nails them:

Chiefs Davis and Williams prefer that criminals ‘control’ the sale of MJ instead of the Commonwealth controlling it by putting it in a ABC type store. Again, we -the cops -would lose 99% of the money, when such a thing happens.

It’s good to be back, although I had an incredible time in the Big Apple. Took 70 people around the city, and saw six shows (which combined ended up receiving 11 Tony awards). Just got back last night, exhausted. It’ll take a bit to get caught up.

If you haven’t seen this yet, you should. But be prepared to have not particularly nice feelings for Megyn Kelly, who lies through her teeth.

Oh, by the way, when she says that alcohol has an addiction rate of 10% and cocaine has an addiction rate of 75%, she’s just making that up completely. Those numbers exist nowhere. According to the government’s Institute of Medicine report “Assessing the Science Base,” the percentage of those who use alcohol and become dependent under DSM-III-R criteria is 15%. For cocaine, it’s 17%.

What the hell, let’s add the one with Megyn Kelly on O’Reilly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-oGLUy-470

I really don’t know how these folks manage to talk with their brains completely disconnected.

How can America’s ‘War on Drugs’ succeed if their Prohibition laws failed? by Johann Hari in The Independent.

When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn’t disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hand of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed an Armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote: “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.”

So if it didn’t stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as prohibition does today – a massive unleashing of criminality and violence.

An unlikely evangelist for legal marijuana, in the San Francisco Chronicle, is a nice feature on Richard Lee of the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act.

This is an open thread.

Downsize DC has a added a new campaign for writing Congress. Its goal is to Help End the Mexican Civil War, and its message is simple: “Please bring peace to both Mexico and the United States by ending the War on Drugs.” (You can add your own additions to it, of course.)

They’re also remembering a very special person, who died 10 years ago yesterday — Peter McWilliams.

Peter is one of the Drug War Victims listed on my page, and is particularly significant:

Peter was a world-famous author and an advocate of medical marijuana, not only because he believed in it in principle, but because it was keeping him alive (he had AIDS and non-Hodgkins lymphoma). After California passed a law legalizing medical marijuana, Peter helped finance the efforts of Todd McCormick to cultivate marijuana for distribution to those who needed it for medical reasons. Federal agents got wind of his involvement, and Peter was a target for his advocacy. He was arrested, and in federal court was prevented from mentioning his medical condition or California’s law. While he was on bail awaiting sentencing, the prosecutors threatened to take away his mother’s house (used for bail) if he failed a drug test, so he stopped using the marijuana which controlled his nausea from the medications and allowed him to keep them down. He was found dead on the bathroom floor, choked to death on his own vomit.

I first got to know Peter McWilliams through his extraordinary book: Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. It’s a great book to own. You’ll find inspiration all through it.

Thanks, Peter.

To follow up on Pete’s post regarding political conservatives favoring an end to prohibition I must add that now is a great chance to start working to place a drug policy reform candidate on the GOP 2012 presidential ticket.  We can wait for Congress to reschedule cannabis and other substances, and pass more reform oriented legislation, but the legislative process is long and cumbersome.  Unfortunately the Supreme Court doesn’t seem very promising either in bringing an end to the unjust drug prohibition and ultimately a significant change would likely have to come from the executive branch.  Nixon declared the war, Kerlikowske said it is over, but liberty hasn’t been restored and people are still in prison.

Now Obama seems bent on getting reelected so much so that he won’t do anything drastic on this issue in a first term that could jeopardize his chances.  However, let’s just hypothesize that if he were to get reelected then he might actually change some policies.  This might be tough for some readers to assume but he has made some strong statements about the ills of the drug war.  But let us assume this for now and as a movement do our part to make it easiest for the president, whoever it may be, to end this prohibition.

The best thing that drug policy reformers can and should be doing now is to mobilize behind Republican reform candidates.  If we can get a Republican candidate who supports drug policy reform on the ballot against Obama, then we have shifted the debate from “should we?” to “how do we end prohibition?”  That type of shift would help the general public’s perception of the issue too.  In fact, the O’Rielly Factor had two segments this past week on prohibition, one blasting the DPA video and the other discussing Freedom Watch’s questions distinguishing the positions of Ron Paul and Sarah Palin on legalizing cannabis.

The Our America Initiative pushing former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson into the national spotlight feels like our best shot in my opinion.  He easily could be considered a toned down Ron Paul and with the Republican field looking like the horse race that it is, I think this is our best bet for getting a good candidate on the ticket in order to bring about an end to this failed policy.

Thanks to Dan Linn for helping out while I’m in New York. Some others may stop in as well. I’ve got an incredibly busy schedule here with 70 people that I’m showing around New York, along with seeing shows every night. On Tuesday, we saw “Fences” by August Wilson, starring Denzel Washington. Amazing. Last night, Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth did a fine job in “Promises, Promises,” and tonight we’re seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury in “A Little Night Music.”

MAPinc is an incredibly useful resource, so please follow Allan’s advice in the comments to the last post, and get involved there, if you can.

Here’s one that’ll get your blood boiling. It’s an extremely ignorant rant by Kurt Schlichter at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood: Sting and Soros Hook Up For A Duet Of Pro-Drug Stupidity

I think it was just the fact that Soros was involved in the Drug Policy Alliance video that got him so bent out of shape that he couldn’t think straight. The whole column is full of bizarre nonsense.

Yes, the junkies, stoners, hopheads, dope fiends, pill-poppers, and Lindsay Lohan are unanimous: Drug laws are bad, and it’s probably BusHitler’s fault. […]

One woman, who is bald for no apparent reason, states that “The War on Drugs is a war on people of color,” as if Americans decided they would outlaw crack because they fear that black people might enjoy themselves. Montel Williams shows up to explain that drug laws prevent him from making choices about his own body, but the awful tie and ridiculous earring he chose to wear make a powerful argument against allowing him to make any kind of choices at all.

Where it really gets strange is when he acknowledges that libertarians — yes, some conservatives — support reform. Follow the contortions as he tries to separate them from Soros.

There may be a case for looking at our drug laws, but these nimrods don’t make it. The most compelling points are made by the conservatives at National Review and the libertarians at Reason. Sure, pot smokers steal your snacks, listen to Phish and sound-off with long, disjointed monologues about the miracle of hemp, but I have a hard time getting too bent out of shape by them. Many celebrities are among them, but Sting and Soros aren’t just talking about causal stoners. They think we ought to go open season on meth, crack and whatever else these degenerate half-wits today are ingesting. No thanks – I’d prefer not to live with the mess you’re rich enough to ignore.

Hate to tell you this, but the libertarians at Reason aren’t just talking about legalizing pot, either.

Tony Newman takes on Schlichter at Huffington Post

The Tea Party and the Drug War — Jeffrey A. Miron, writing at National Review Online, explains to the Tea Party why ending the drug war has to be a key part of their foundation if they have any principles at all.

It’s an important point, as many who have called themselves Tea Partiers, or who have co-opted the Tea Party movement, have been less than clear on their support for ending prohibition.

This is an open thread.

Each week, I read the all of the published letters to the editor on drug policy that are archived at the Media Awareness Project.  Then I select the five that clearly and concisely call for an end to drug prohibition, in my opinion.  I send these top five out to a relatively small email list, who then vote on it and the one with the most votes is awarded the “Letter Of The Week” in the Drugsense Drug Policy Reform Blog.  Normally I would do this on Tuesday morning and the voting ends Thursday night at midnight CST, however, this week I haven’t gotten around to selecting the Top 5 until about an hour ago.  I’ll open up the voting for the Letter Of The Week today to the Drug War Rant community and will tally up all the votes from here and the email list for the LOTW to be announced tomorrow on both blogs.  And for those who are not familiar with MAPinc I highly recommend it as a way to get involved in helping bring an end to drug prohibition, either by Newshawking or writing letters to editors. Below is the LOTW TOP 5 choices to vote on this week, feel free to vote in the comments section.  PUB LTEs represent letters that favor ending prohibition, LTEs are letters that support drug prohibition.

From June 1-7, 2010 there were 6 LTEs archived and 26 PUB LTEs archived at the
Media Awareness Project.  Here are the top five PUB LTEs in my opinion.

US CA: PUB LTE: Stop The Bleeding
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n428/a05.html?1151

US NC: PUB LTE: Lobby Legislators To Approve Hemp, Medical
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n427/a09.html?1151

US HI: PUB LTE: DARE Program
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n426/a02.html?1151

US MT: PUB LTE: Medical Marijuana: Let's Look On The Bright
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n421/a02.html?1151

Canada: PUB LTE: War Without End
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n418/a09.html?1159