Drug WarRant

I’ve talked about how the drug czar is trying to cover up the failures of supply side drug war (and all the other aspects of the national drug control policy) by simply saying the word “balance” as much as possible. “It’s a balanced approach,” they say, and that’s somehow supposed to make us go “Oh, well, then, that must be OK. I thought we were spending $15 billion on failed policy. I didn’t know it was balanced.”

Expect to hear this mantra over and over again. From President Obama

Speaking to reporters yesterday afternoon in the White House Rose Garden, Presidents Obama and Calderon stressed the unwavering partnership between the two nations. […] the President highlighted the Strategy’s important balance of enforcement, prevention, and treatment.

Or from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Department of Health and Human Services

One key health objective in this new blueprint is to prevent and treat substance abuse before it becomes life-threatening, and the strategy we unveiled last week calls for a balance of prevention, treatment and law enforcement to accomplish our collective goals.

I was talking to my friend George a week ago about this, but he thought the whole “balance” concept was great and decided to implement it at the restaurant where he worked.

I saw George again earlier this evening and asked how his experiment was going.

“Well, first I told my boss that I was starting a new program that would put valuable balance into my work,” George said. “And then I struck a balance between selling food to customers, testing the quality of our food to insure customer satisfaction, and mentally preparing for future customers so they get the attention they deserve.”

I asked George how that went over.

“I was quite pleased with it,” he replied, “but for some reason my boss wasn’t. After just one week, he confronted me and said ‘So far all I see of your balance is that you’re eating more food than you’re selling and you’re taking twice as much time on break as you are working.’

Clearly he didn’t get it, so I explained to him that it was unfair to micromanage the specific aspects — that the important thing was that it was a balanced approach.”

George is now taking a balanced approach to job hunting.

Of course, the Drug Czar won’t lose his job, despite the fact that his “balanced” approach is actually destructive.

Here’s just one of many examples:

Creating New Soldiers in Mexico’s Drug War: How U.S. drug policy is making Mexican cartels more deadly by Marcelo Bergman for Foreign Policy Magazine.

Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, once said that he wanted to retire the phrase “war on drugs.” But on the U.S.-Mexico border, where the drug war is less metaphorical, the United States remains an enthusiastic ally — and the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to show it.

Yes, we know that supply-side doesn’t work, but it’s OK, it’s part of a balanced effort, so we’re going to continue spending money on it like crazy.

The more than $50 billion it has spent on interdiction efforts over the past quarter-century have barely made a dent in this demand.

The efforts have, however, altered the structure of the drug trade. The production of marijuana and heroin in Mexico through the 1960s and 1970s was the province of small-time operators, many of them family-type organizations, which could move drugs across a laxly policed U.S.-Mexico border without much risk of capture. […]

As the United States stepped up its enforcement efforts at key transshipment points — the Caribbean and the U.S.-Mexico border — and paid its Latin American drug war allies to do the same elsewhere, moving product into the United States became more difficult. Traffickers today must outwit American soldiers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and Border Patrol officers. […]

None of this has slowed the drug trade — demand, remember, has remained mostly constant. Instead, the cost of getting into the business has risen. To escape stringent enforcement, today’s smugglers need deep pockets to run the sophisticated logistics needed to escape detection and seizure, pay the necessary bribes, and absorb substantial losses of their product when seizures do happen. These barriers to entry have winnowed the trafficking business down to a handful of major players: first Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels in the 1980s and 1990s, and now the five key Mexican cartels. Smaller outfits, meanwhile, have found new, less daunting lines of work as suppliers and service providers for large syndicates. […]

As a result, a business that once enjoyed a certain degree of market competition is now an oligopoly. […]

As the cartels have shrunk in number, the pressure on them — from U.S. and Mexican authorities, and from their own competitors — has increased apace, forcing the organizations to become better equipped and more violent. Today’s Mexican cartels spend millions of dollars a year on assault rifles, explosives, armored high-end SUVs, and sophisticated intelligence operations, with the aim of avoiding interdiction and eliminating competitors.

This is the grand paradox of drug enforcement. Unless enforcement agencies can intercept virtually all of the drugs crossing the border — something that approaches impossibility — their efforts are likely to simply produce more formidable opponents.

But at least it’s a balanced approach.

Edward Schumacher-Matos in the Washington Post:

The best thing that can be said about the 23,000 people who have been killed during Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s campaign against drug cartels in the last three years is that it proves that the war on drugs will never work.

President Obama calls Calderon Mexico’s Elliott Ness and is receiving him today in an official state visit. […]

But Elliott Ness never stopped illegal liquor. The lifting of Prohibition did. Similarly, the only solution to the drug trafficking and violence on both sides of the border is to legalize drugs.

That, however, won’t be on the agenda in the talk between the two presidents.

Nice to see this kind of frank talk in the media at least, even though it’s not happening in official meetings.

So with the huge AP story about us having wasted a trillion dollars on a failed drug war hitting almost every media outlet this week, I was wondering when the Drug Czar would start “pushing back.” (Oh, wait, that was the old name of the “blog.”)

Well, the ONDCP’s ofSubstance “blog” has responded: ONDCP Agrees: A Balanced Approach is Needed, But Mischaracterizing Our Progress Helps No One

The ONDCP seems to think that if they say the words “balanced approach” often enough, they’ll actually be both true and effective. Truth is, it’s neither.

The budget piece is fair to focus on, but we told AP that we objected to the article’s mischaracterization of current policy. A fairer and more nuanced observation would have been: This does look/sound a lot different, but the budget scenario hasn’t changed overnight (it never does, in any realm of government) and it will take some time to test the Administration’s commitment to the new approach.

OK, that might have been nice for the AP to say from the Drug Czar’s perspective, but it would have been nonsense. What’s the point of a commitment to a new approach if you’re still asking for funding for the old approach?

It’s like saying that you’re committed to dramatically reducing your fat intake, and then going out and filling your shopping cart with bacon, eggs, ice cream, doughnuts, oreos, and two extra-jumbo cans of lard.

The Drug Czar goes on to mention some of the things that should have been discussed in the AP story.

The article did not address whether legalizing/decriminalizing drugs, posited in the story as a responsible alternative – works, or why, if it does, more countries haven’t taken this approach.

Are you saying that the U.S. would stand idly by while a country legalized drugs? With the ONDCP and the UNODC looking over most countries’ shoulders, it’s a wonder that we have the examples like Portugal and the Netherlands that we do, and, in fact, there are more and more that are taking little steps toward that direction. Not to mention that we’d have more states going that route if the feds weren’t constantly a threat.

The greater use of today’s high potency marijuana has probably been a critical factor in the unprecedented surge among those seeking treatment for marijuana and ER mentions.

Now there’s an old and tired out and out lie. Notice the pathetic attempt to avoid responsibility for the lie by using the word “probably.” Once again, for those who haven’t been paying attention, the entire reason for the surge in those getting “treatment” for marijuana is because of criminal justice referrals (essentially people who don’t need help signing up for “treatment” to avoid jail).

This Administration is trailblazing a commitment to strengthened international partnerships – witness the unprecedented global support for US goals at the recent UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Right. You put the worst drug warriors around the world in a room, and they like what the U.S. is doing. That’s supposed to make us feel better about these new goals?

Obviously, no one story can cover everything, but we should engage in a new discussion on why drug abuse policy is so important and what evidence-based strategies are at our disposal (there are a lot of them) to reduce its deadly toll.

Guess what, we finally are engaged in that discussion, and it turns out that prohibition isn’t one of those evidence-based strategies at our disposal, and anybody who relies on it as 2/3 of a “balanced” approach has nothing to add to the discussion.

Family values conservative and sadomoralist Mark Souder (R-Ind) to Resign Amid Allegations of Affair With Staffer

Eight-term Rep. Mark Souder was announcing his resignation Tuesday after admitting to an affair with a female aide who worked in his district office.

Souder, who will step down on Friday, said in remarks obtained by Fox News that he “sinned against God, my wife and my family by having a mutual relationship with a part-time member of my staff.”

Since Souder was the one who pushed for students to lose financial aid if they had “sinned” in the drug area, I wonder if he will forego all future financial benefits from his government service since he “sinned” while he was a Representative.

Ha! I crack myself up sometimes.

Good riddance. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. I only wish the taxpayers could bill you for the damages.

Update: Link

“Personally, I really don’t care what Mark Souder does in his private time,” said Tom Angell, a former senior SSDP official who’s now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “But now that he’s made a big mistake of his own, I hope he’ll begin working to undo the harsh drug laws he has championed and that have prevented people from moving on with their lives after making mistakes. I’m sure that the more than 200,000 students who have lost college aid under Souder’s Higher Education Act drug penalty would be glad to have his lobbying help now that he’ll have some more free time.”

Radley’s new crime column is another must-read. He nails New York’s finest for their arrest quotas that end up with massive infringements on civil liberties, tons of marijuana busts, and actually downplaying of real crime.

An editorial that just doesn’t get it. From the Delaware Online: Drug war can’t succeed without refocusing

Most taxpayers may not want to hear it, but waste should not automatically trigger the end of government funding a program of good intention.

This is a tough argument to make, considering the recent news that America has spent a $1 trillion fighting a losing war on drugs for the last 40 years.

Yet there are intangibles not measured by this mis-focused effort to alter the tremendous damaging effects of illegal drugs.

Uncounted are lives saved through drug enforcement raids and police surveillance operations, despite the rampant street drug violence. And the rehabilitation of hundred of thousands of users can’t be ignored.

What an absolute failure to understand the dynamics of prohibition. There are, on balance, no lives saved through drug enforcement raids. It is the enforcement that causes more violence. And the rehabilitation of “abusers” is not a function of the drug war (it’s certainly the worst way to go about it). In fact, the drug war exacerbates the degree to which we see problem usage, because the drugs are not regulated.

It’s too early to wave the white flag. Instead, we need the courage to rethink the approach.

Ending prohibition is not waving the white flag. I really hate that mentality.

What is it about California? Check out Hughes4Governor

This guy is batshit crazy, with glimpses of sanity. He practically foams at the mouth about the evils of drugs (including marijuana), spouting the tired old incorrect statistics, yet actually understands economics well enough to come up with a plan that appears to be based on the economically sound heroin maintenance model. But he does it in a way that makes it seem dirty:

Take the profit out of drugs. By the elimination of current drug supply system high dollar profit. As Governor, I will enforce a program that gives addicts three choices:

1. To buy drugs from the state for ½ price of the street price.
2. Buy drugs from the street at full price.
3. Accept rehabilitation.

All those who have been arrested for illicit drug use will be notified of the government purchase program. The current arrest system will be changed so that confiscated drugs are placed in the State’s selling program. I will have as many drugs confiscated as possible and create a price war for only repeat offenders with criminal record rap sheet. Illicit drugs will only be sold under the State’s program to those that buy the drugs every day and are the dregs of society.

I guess you have to walk in and say, “Hi, I’m a dreg of society. Can I buy some 1/2 price government crack?”

Oh, by the way, he also has a plan to turn Santa Rosa Island into a penal colony for pedophiles.

Regardless of how the fungus hit the poppies in Afghanistan, you know what the local view is… Killer fungus is no mystery to Afghan poppy growers.

This is an open thread.

Patrick Corcoran, writing in Mexidata: The DEA and its Fallacious Reasoning on Drugs in Mexico

As you pick apart comments like [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence boss Anthony] Placido’s, the futility of the DEA’s objectives comes into ever-starker relief. An actual death blow for drug traffickers en masse in Mexico is about as likely as a dinner of unicorn tacos. Beyond body shots and other ephemeral victories, once you look further into the future, whether Calderón or his polar opposite is in power in Mexico, whether ten capos a year are arrested or zero, the results of the drug war can be measured only by different magnitudes of failure.

Supply-side drug warriors have generally taken the position that the idea behind eradication and interdiction is that you drive up the price of the illegal drugs (and in fact, people like John Walters used to get extremely excited over isolated local reports of increased prices for some drugs).

Problem is, they never really took it past that step. It was almost like an underpants gnomes version of drug policy

1. Reduce supply
2. Prices go up, making it harder for people to buy it.
3. ???
4. Win the drug war

The problem is, that any first year economics student could tell them that step 2 is not an end result, but rather a temporary economic glitch. If step 2 actually happens, then that sends information into a feedback loop that stimulates supply.

The actual formula looks a little more like this…

1. Reduce supply
2. Prices go up, making it harder for people to buy it.
3. Increased demand and higher profits attract additional producers, increasing the supply
4. Prices go down, making it easier for people to buy it.

Rinse and repeat. … at great cost.

At the same time, supply-side drug warriors have told us that if they didn’t constantly slow the supply of drugs, there would be an almost infinite expansion of drug use — that more drug availability would always equal more drug users (and thereby abuse and social costs, etc.).

Again, someone who didn’t sleep through the last half of their beginning economics course, could tell them about a thing called elasticity of demand. Now this one’s a little more complicated, and there are a lot of factors involved, such as substitution, etc., but basically it says that a product that is more price elastic is more likely to have demand affected by price (a higher price, people stop buying it; a lower price, people buy more), whereas a product with price inelasticity is less likely to be affected by price.

With illicit drugs, most are relatively inelastic (except for the substitution factor), so that a drop in price will increase use somewhat, but only to a point, at which time no more people wish to use that drug or consume more of it.

These basic economic lessons that destroy the entire concept of the billions of dollars we spend on supply-side drug war were almost perfectly demonstrated in two unrelated articles recently.

Mysterious Blight Destroys Afghan Poppy Harvest

Up to one-third of Afghanistan’s poppy harvest this spring has been destroyed by a mysterious disease, according to estimates revealed Wednesday by United Nations officials, potentially complicating the American and NATO military offensives this summer in the country’s opium-producing heartland. […]

Besides fueling the propaganda war, the blight might also help the insurgency by giving prices a boost. Reduced production is causing prices for fresh opium to soar as much as 60 percent, after years of declining prices, according to the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa.

While there is no evidence that the disease will return next year, the rising prices may make it harder to persuade farmers to give up the crop, he said.

The price increase is also raising by hundreds of millions of dollars the value of opium stockpiles held by traffickers and insurgents. The opium trade is believed to provide the Taliban with a large portion of their budget. […]

While farmers were suffering, [Costa] said that if the increased prices persisted, they would deliver “a very significant windfall” for drug barons and insurgents who control thousands of tons of opium stored in Afghanistan and other locations.

Yes, even the head of the UNODC recognizes that even a “naturally-occurring” temporary reduction in supply does no good, because it encourages more producers to enter the market and makes the black market more profitable for the criminals who control it.

And yet, the US is spending 2/3 of its drug war budget on supply-side efforts.

… and on the other side of the drug war economics lesson…

Plummeting Marijuana Prices Create A Panic In California by Michael Montgomery at NPR

The war on drugs and frequent raids by federal drug agents have helped support the local economy — keeping prices for street sales of pot high and keeping profits rich.

But high times are changing. Legal pot, under the guise of the California’s medical marijuana laws, has spurred a rush of new competition. As a result, the wholesale price of pot grown in these areas is plunging. […]

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says some growers can’t get rid of their processed pot at any price.

“We arrested a man who had … 800 pounds of processed,” Allman says. “Eight hundred pounds of processed. And we asked him: ‘What are you going to do with 800 pounds of processed?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.'” […]

“What’s happening is the people that don’t have quality product aren’t selling it,” Blake says. “So they’re the ones that are creating this panic. So it really comes back down to that, just like in every other agricultural industry. When you get too many vineyards and too many people growing vines out there, then only the good ones make it.”

And now you know more about economics than our government.

Here’s a nice little turn. A primary race for Attorney General where it becomes important to show your drug policy reform bona fides.

The presumed Democratic frontrunner for attorney general is facing questions from critics who accuse her of flip-flopping on a progressive touchstone: Rockefeller-era drug law reform. […]

[Kathleen] Rice, Nassau County’s district attorney, insisted at a recent candidates forum in Brooklyn she has always supported efforts to roll back parts of the ultraharsh 1973-era laws.

That claim startled reform advocates, who quickly noted she was a board member of the state District Attorneys Association when it lobbied against the most recent reforms enacted last year. […]

Rice spokesman Eric Phillips insisted Rice “disagreed with the [DA] association’s overall opposition to the reforms” – but he admitted she didn’t “publicly rebuke” its anti-reform efforts.

Phillips said Rice would have voted “yes” to the 2009 reforms if she had been in the Legislature. He said she has “always” supported alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders and started a successful community-based diversion program in 2008.

“We look forward to working with the [Drug Policy] Alliance on these issues in the future,” Phillips said. “It is my hope that they will take a moment to look at her record, which I believe they will find incredibly innovative and progressive on the issues they care most about.”

I like this. I have no opinion of Rice, but I love the idea of politicians feeling the political heat to be known as drug policy reformers and to want to please drug policy reform organizations.

Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton:

“I hate the Internet”

Radley Balko notes that referring to forced entry SWAT raids as “militarization” may be an insult to… the military.

Remember the botched drug raid that sent the old lady to the hospital with a heart attack? Police say it wasn’t a botched raid — that they merely knocked on her door, invited themselves inside to ask her some questions, and rendered assistance when she fell ill.

Police have confirmed that Pruett has no connection or relationship of any kind to Washington.

Dodd said Pruett’s home was never part of the drug investigation, but was on the warrant because the DEA, which was in charge, had obtained information leading agents to believe Washington lived at the address.

“We were there to serve an arrest warrant. While we were there, she had a heart attack. We rendered aid,” Dodd said.

So… 12 police surrounded a home because the DEA thought a bad guy lived there, even though the home was never part of the investigation, and the bad guy had no connection to the lady who lived there. Nope. Not botched at all.

Why Africans are Dying for a Drink

A combination of bad policies and the lack of legally allowed local alcoholic drinks in large parts of Africa has caused situations where imported taxed alcohol is so expensive that moonshine stills are proliferating — many of them causing blindness and death.

Repealing the chang’aa ban has also found strong support in the National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NACADA). “If the ban on chang’aa is left to continue, people will continue to die because no one knows exactly what the chang’aa they are drinking is made of,” said NACADA’s head, Jennifer Kimani. “The Government cannot control standards for something that is illegal.”

Sound familiar?

Speaking of prohibition, Mike Meno at MPP notes that the Drug Czar is still having problems with big words:

The drug czar chuckles. “No,” he says, “we’re not exploring prohibition.”

Um… then what are you doing with that $15.5 billion? Office parties?

Moronic columnist of the day: Michael Coren in the Toronto Sun with Why they call it dope

Make silly jokes about munchies, pompously explain why you smoke up with your kids because that’s the mature thing to do and even be self-righteous about the drug war, but don’t complain when cancer eats away your body and the children become moronic. Remember, it’s harmless and cool.

Jeralyn at TalkLeft: Why Don’t Marijuana Bills Progress Past Initial Committee Referrals?

Good question.

New Prime Minister David Cameron calls for more liberal drug laws.

David Cameron […] believes the UN should consider legalising drugs and wants hard-core addicts to be provided with legal “shooting galleries” and state-prescribed heroin.

He also supported calls for ecstasy to be downgraded from the class-A status it shares with cocaine and heroin and said it would be “disappointing” if radical options on the law on cannabis were not looked at.

Actually, that was five years ago. We’ll see what happens now that he’s Prime Minister. Still, it’s encouraging that he once expressed those views.

Drug War Chronicle – weekly update of drug war news and analysis from Stop the Drug War.org.

This is an open thread.