Drug WarRant

In response to a member of LEAP calling for an end to prohibition to make the streets of Chicago safer, the Chicago Sun Times ran this follow up letter to the editor on Monday, “Legalizing drugs not that easy.”  What I found interesting about the letter is that it is not directly opposed to legalizing drugs, the writer simply has some questions about how the drugs would be regulated in a legal setting.   Here is the letter:

James E. Gierach’s proposal to end the war on drugs poses many questions. Decriminalization and legalization of drugs would be a lot more complicated than it seems. Questions such as who would manufacture the drugs, which drugs would be legalized and who would distribute them. Would Walgreens and CVS dispense said drugs? Would they be open to legal liability in cases of overdose? Would U.S. companies partner with Colombian and Mexican drug lords for supply and demand purposes?

And finally, what would the current drug dealers, particularly ones without any marketable skills, do for income? Would the government, in a time of tight budgetary restraints, be willing to treat and train them to be accepted back into society? There are a combination of causes for Chicago’s street violence connected with corruption, dysfunction, disinvestment and sheer rebellion at authority to name a few. But if the answer is for people to call for an end to the drug war, then that means there has to be a call for a start to reinvesting and retraining the participants in the drug trade so that they won’t look for other illegal means to survive.

Steven Majors,

Auburn Gresham

So, Steven is not necessarily against legalizing drugs, he just wants the government to “reinvest and retrain” drug dealers and drug consumers.   I think that we should do a better job of reinvesting and retraining those who have been unjustly imprisoned for drug offenses and that would prevent those released from jail and/or prison from returning to a life of crime.  However, while there are problems with education in Chicago, the fact that these Americans are incarcerated for putting a substance into their own body or selling or producing a substance for others to willfully consume is the problem.  Any felon can attest to the lack of jobs out there for those branded by the criminal justice system and the drug war is to blame for many felonies in Chicago and across the country. Nevertheless, Steven’s questions can be answered and in no way should be reason to oppose a logical solution like legalizing drugs.

The only people that find legalizing drugs difficult are politicians, which is sort of strange because they are in the regulatory business by making, and in very few circumstances, repealing laws.  One would imagine they could conjure up a set of rules for the production, distribution and consumption of these substances just like they do with everything else.  I suppose those with a vested financial interest in maintaining prohibition might find it difficult to legalize drugs but America needs a new replacement economy because the prison industrial complex is simply costing too much life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness among the supposedly free.  When the factory jobs went overseas, the prison building boom took off, now it is time to reinvest and retrain America to find some other economy that does not feed off caging illegal drug producers, traders, and consumers.

In case folks were wondering about the violence in Chicago there were “at least” 27 people shot over Memorial Day Weekend and that was not in celebration of Obama coming back to the city for the holiday weekend.  Chicago and Iraq have an ongoing race of where more people are shot and killed each summer and year, but legalizing drugs and pulling the financial rug out from the gangs is still too absurd for consideration.  In Illinois we cannot even allow people to consume cannabis with a recommendation from their doctor, as evident by our medical cannabis legislation once again stalling and being put on the back burner for consideration after the November election.  And for those interested in exploring different regulatory models for different drugs, I suggest turning to Transform’s Blueprint for Regulation

If the war’s over, why am I still here?

I’m leaving very early tomorrow morning for a week in New York City, along with 70 people. I’m host of this annual theatre trip and will be conducting walking tours of the city each day, along with seeing six shows with the group.

Naturally, it’ll keep me pretty busy. I’ll stop by when I can, but posting will be very light. However, I’ve got a few friends who may drop in and add a post now and then. Treat them well.

Not just a high by Nathan Seppa in Science News — a nice roundup of some of the discoveries going on now regarding the miracle plant cannabis.

But while the medical marijuana movement has been generating political news, some researchers have been quietly moving in new directions — testing cannabis and its derivatives against a host of diseases. The scientific literature now brims with potential uses for cannabis that extend beyond its well-known abilities to fend off nausea and block pain in people with cancer and AIDS. Cannabis derivatives may combat multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory conditions, the new research finds. Cannabis may even kill cancerous tumors.

Would like to see more candidates for Congress talk this way:

The closest thing I could see to a quick fix with all the economic issues we’re having is the legalization of marijuana and hemp. We just can’t continue to fund this war on drugs and lock up people, breaking up families and all the other issues that come up with it.

Jamaica Says it Can Win Its Drug War for $1 Billion

What a great idea. If only we would spend a billion dollars on the drug war, maybe we could win ours… oh, wait.

Opponents are getting desperate and turning to dirty tactics… Montana kids warned of ‘Medical Marijuana Crises’ in flyers — and these flyers were passed out by the schools.

‘War on drugs’ behind endless misery by Evan Wood at CNN.

Given that the scenes of violence between rival drug gangs are so common, people often fail to consider the factors that fuel this violence. The reality is that Jamaicans are just the latest victims in a misguided and expensive war that has taken countless thousands of lives, from the streets of New York to the slums and shantytowns of Colombia, Mexico and other third-world nations.

It was through this article that I discovered the new International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. This looks like an excellent, and much needed, organization, urging scientists to speak out to counter the self-interested lobbying of the drug warriors.

There remain critical areas in public health where the gap between evidence and public policy persists. Few areas suffer from this concern more than society’s response to the illicit drug problem. Despite the wealth of scientific evidence that drug law enforcement may be associated with increases in violence and homicide, policymakers continue to focus energy on police and prisons at the expense of effective public health and regulatory approaches.

Continue to read their overview of the challenge of Science and Drug Policy.

This is an open thread.

(Remember, when possible if posting links, please try to use shortened links, or else use html.)

I just about dropped my coffee when I read this letter to the editor by Shirley Bradley of Bloomington this morning: Marijuana law would send mixed message

Of course, it’s in opposition to the medical marijuana bill in Illinois. But the key line:

Legislators are not doctors, and they do not have the expertise to determine what constitutes medicine.

Ummm…. right. And that’s supposed to be an argument for asking legislators to keep it from being a decision made by doctors?

Thanks for playing, Shirley!

Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post, thinks we’ve been too hard on Mark Souder, the drug warrior and abstinence warrior who recently resigned from Congress because he had an affair with a staff member.

Mark Souder and the case for grace

Gerson is disturbed by the “national mirth” over Souder’s departure, and notes that Souder was decent to him.

Not long after I started working there, my father died suddenly. Mark drove from Washington to Atlanta to attend the funeral. I won’t forget.

That’s nice. And completely irrelevant to the national discussion about the hypocrisy of Mark Souder. I’m sure that even mass murderers have done nice and decent things for their friends and associates.

Gerson also notes:

The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals.

Of course not. People are imperfect. It is not the moment of Souder’s fall that disproved his ideals. They had already been clearly disproved. His fall was merely the “I told you so” moment. And that’s what made it worthy of national mirth.

Mark Souder promoted failed and bad policy because it fit his own personal sadomoralistic views. This was not a matter of someone doing good things, but having a moment of weakness — I’m not bothered by that at all. Mark Souder was constantly shown that the policies he promoted (in both the drug war and abstinence education) didn’t work and caused harm. And yet he used his power to force his personal morality onto others, despite the damage.

Lee at HorsesAss had already said it clearly last week:

The reason that Mark Souder’s downfall has everything to do with abstinence-only education is because if even the biggest nanny in Congress doesn’t have the ability to abstain from sex that he knows could have serious consequences, very few teenagers out there do either. That’s the basis for why comprehensive sex-education is more realistic and more effective than trying to scare teens into keeping their pants on.

And of course the same is true for drug policy.

Legislation isn’t about deciding what you personally believe to be morally correct and then turning it into law. It is about crafting public policy that serves the greater good (you know, that actually works). Souder had long been a horrible failure as a legislator and deserved a kick out the door many years ago for his legislative work. Again, the affair was just the “I told you so” moment.

Gerson says:

But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

That, of course, is a distortion of what really is going on. Souder didn’t “recognize” standards. He imposed them (and failed to meet them). And we don’t mock all standards as lies — only those that are lies.

Michael Gerson wants us to show Mark Souder a little grace. Not divine grace, but merely some mercy. That’s hard. I keep wondering where the grace was for all the young people whose lives were destroyed by Mr. Souder’s drug and sex policies.

The sad thing to me in this affair (even though I did take considerable pleasure in the “I told you so” moment), is that it took an affair for him to leave office. The right reason for him to leave office was not the affair, but because his public policy efforts were so damaging.

Yet by calling his agenda “morality,” Souder was able to convince the voters in Indiana (who apparently never read the first four books of the New Testament) to put him in office time and again. That’s the real tragedy.

Attorney General Eric Holder re-confirms the Administration’s new policy of throwing a whole bunch of prohibition words together and calling it “balanced.”

In his opening to the Strategy, the President calls for “a balanced approach of prevention, treatment and law enforcement” in addressing the drug problem. Our current fight against the threats posed by drug use and trafficking has many areas of focus – international and domestic; sources of supply and centers of demand; and law enforcement, prevention, and treatment efforts. The Justice Department is committed to the implementation of every part of the Strategy. Let me assure you all that, while we will continue to enforce our drug laws to their fullest extent, and continue to attack with all of our resources drug producers, distributors, and traffickers, we will also continue our support for innovative prevention and treatment programs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a7qoFwSqDs

This video from Democracy Now! demonstrates that more and more people are coming to realize and accept that violence and corruption, such as what we’re seeing now in Jamaica, is a direct result of the U.S. war on drugs.

More on this: Jamaica bleeds for our ‘war on drugs’ by Ben Bowling

This is an open thread.

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about a very poor article by Jennifer Johnson in the Pioneer Press: Legalization talk cited in teen pot use spike. In it, Margaret Polovchak, executive director of the Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation (Chicago suburbs, not the state of Maine), claims that an increase of pot use among high school students has occurred, that it’s the result of talking about medical marijuana in Illinois and that medical marijuana should be opposed for that reason.

We shouldn’t really be surprised by this kind of ignorant talk — the MCYAF is a tool of the drug war machine (even their website is paid for by grants from ONDCP and SAMHSA), and we know that those entities have shown little actual interest in the welfare of children.

But Margaret’s statement demonstrates the sickness of the drug war’s interaction with youth. The very notion that we need to reduce or eliminate public discussion about current events (assuming such an absurdity would work) in order to protect children (!) demonstrates that she considers young people to be somewhat akin to hamsters.

And guess what? Young people are smarter than that. You can pretend all you want that if you shield them from discussions about sex they’ll remain blissfully and naturally celibate, but then you’d better be ready to be a grandparent. And you can pretend that if we talked less about medical marijuana then they wouldn’t use marijuana, but if you really want that to work, you’d better raise them in a big cage with a wheel.

So what happens when you treat young people this way? They immediately realize that you’re lying to them. They don’t like it, and they see you as the enemy rather than someone who is there to help. They become suspicious of all attempts to help them and tend to disbelieve even important truths.

Once they realize that they’ve been lied to about marijuana, then they assume that everything else has been a lie (often leading to fatal results). When they aren’t given reality-based education that teaches them the truth, then they are forced to try to discover it on their own, through trial and error, again often with disastrous results.

What people like Margaret Polovchak are doing is destroying the safety net of experiential wisdom for young people that should be provided by the family, the village, society.

Instead, children are treated as though they cannot be trusted with what we know. We turn them into suspects by making them pee into cups, and we send dogs through their schools sniffing their belongings. We lie to them and withhold information that is critical to them and have the gall to wonder why they rebel.

Does that mean we have to roll over and just accept any level of drug use by young people? Of course not. We’ll never be able to stop all of it, but we can control it and reduce the harm of it by regulating drugs, teaching young people the truth about them, and explaining why we want them to wait until a later time to experiment with them.

Now there are other ways that Margaret Polovchak harms children, too. Some of the children at these schools certainly have family members who now, or in the future, could benefit from medical marijuana. Those children are harmed by Polovchak’s efforts, either because their family member is denied valuable medicine or because their family member ends up incarcerated in order to obtain their medicine.

By attempting to reduce the level of public discussion of matters of public policy in general, Margaret harms children because then public policy isn’t getting the proper analysis, and more bad policy ends up as law, harming everyone.

And by supporting prohibition, Margaret Polovchak harms children by being part of a system that fuels violence and voluntarily puts drug regulation in the hands of criminals.

So if your child is ever offered a Margaret Polovchak, be sure to tell them to just say “no.”

That’s the only conclusion I can gather from this article in the Pioneer Press: Legalization talk cited in teen pot use spike

A discussion of legalizing medical marijuana in Illinois is likely fueling an increase in the number of Park Ridge teenagers using the substance, the Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation contends.

Margaret Polovchak, executive director of MCYAF, said increased dialogue about marijuana legislation in the state leads to a greater public perception that the substance is not harmful, resulting in a growing number of users.

“It has impacted our students’ use rate, as we anticipated,” Polovchak said. […]

During recent meetings MCYAF has been encouraging members to contact state legislators to express their opposition to the bill.

What a bizarrely un-American view! Because Margaret Polovchak thinks (without any causal evidence) that discussions of medical marijuana have caused an increased of marijuana use among teens, we not only shouldn’t pass medical marijuana (regardless of its value or the lives that can be saved), but we shouldn’t even talk about it.

What other conclusion can there be?

Not only is Polovchak opposed to the 1st Amendement, guaranteeing free speech, but she feels that our legislators shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it either.

If Ms. Polovchak really gave a damn about any of those kids at Maine Township, she’d learn enough to realize two critically important things:

1. Keeping children from learning is not the job of our educational system.
2. If you really want to reduce availability of marijuana to kids, you need to regulate it.

Oh, and a note to Jennifer Johnson, who wrote the article. I’m guessing you must have studied at Maine Township yourself given your ignorance of proper journalism. To allow Polovchak’s bizarre and unsupported (in terms of causality) assertion to stand unopposed is some of the worst journalism I’ve seen.

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to water down Miranda just a little bit more in Berghuis v. Thompkins.

Here’s how it used to work…

1. Police inform you of the right to remain silent.
2. You remain silent.
3. Police must stop questioning you.

Here’s how it works with the new ruling…

1. Police inform you of the right to remain silent.
2. You remain silent.
3. Police keep questioning you for hours if they wish and if you finally break down or get frustrated and say something, that can be used against you.
4. If you unambiguously inform police that you wish to observe your right to remain silent (other than just remaining silent), then questioning must stop.

So the ironic thing is, in order to get them to shut up, you must speak up to say that you want to remain silent.

It makes it all the more critical that people understand their rights, and learn the simple phrases that are so well presented in FlexYourRights.org’s excellent video: 10 Rules for Dealing with Police:

• I don’t consent to searches
• I’m going to remain silent. I’d like to see a lawyer.
• Are you detaining me or am I free to go?
• I can’t let you in without a warrant.