Drug WarRant

In the Irish Examiner today:

US ends ‘war on drugs’
By Cormac O’Keeffe

THE United States has “ended its war on drugs” and is now moving its focus to prevention and treatment, the US drugs chief has told top Irish drug officials.

The former police chief said the US had formally ended its much heralded – and hugely expensive – “war on drugs”.

“We’ve talked about a ‘war on drugs’ for 40 years, since President Nixon. I ended the war,” said Mr Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

Someone needs to tell the Irish, or at least Cormac O’Keeffe, that the Drug Czar doesn’t actually say, you know, true things.

It’s one of the things that’s slipped by on this blog, but there’s quite a drug war situation in Jamaica right now.

Nina, from Drugs, Law and Conflict was there recently and has a good report on the situation: State of emergency in Jamaica: new place, same story

Basically, what you have is a big shot named Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who could very well be a drug trafficker, but also certainly is much more:

Dudus is a well-known businessman with a consulting firm that receives numerous state contracts. West Kingston residents are rising up (some allegedly under pressure) to defend the man who goes by “President” and provides services for locals, including food, money for school and dispute resolution.

Now the U.S. wants to step in and extradite Dudus. The Jamaican justice and police system is known to be corrupt and could not possibly handle putting someone like Dudus on trial, yet the idea of the U.S. stepping in with its drug war and taking away one of their own doesn’t sit well with Jamaicans. And the government of Jamaica is torn between it’s love of U.S. money and its connections to Dudas.

An explosive situation.

Peter Moskos at Cop in the Hood has also been following the story, and notes that when government breaks down and is unable to provide basic services for poor people, or protect them from basics like being raped, the drug lord becomes their government, providing handouts… and rules.

As one of the women behind the dons says (see if you can at least get the gist of what she’s saying through the Jamaican dialect):

Inna this area we feel safe, because man from outside and even dem whey live ya cyaan come in and rape we…. If any rape a gwaan, a when we go out a road and man try a thing. Up ya so nuh come een like a place like over Seaview [Gardens] where them don’t have no don in charge and everybody do as them like. Up ya so we have a one man who run things and when anybody bruk the rules, we report him and the boss deal wid him.

Well, the Prime Minister finally issued a warrant for Mr. Coke’s arrest last week, and now the violence comes.

At least 26 people were said to be dead after a third day of violence in Kingston, Jamaica, as security forces assaulted the slum stronghold of armed groups believed to be defending accused Jamaican drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke. […]

Shooting, looting and attacks on Jamaican police soon followed. On Sunday, the government declared a state of emergency. […]

“Security forces are under extreme pressure now,” said Mark Shields, the island’s former deputy police commissioner, who now runs a private security firm. “We have urban war going on.” A spokesman for Jamaica’s police department declined to comment on Tuesday’s events.

Later reports have casualties up to 60 or higher.

His heavily armed henchmen outgunned the cops and turned the capital city into a war zone, with terrified civilians trapped in their homes and the innocent falling in crossfire. […]

Even Kingston Public Hospital “has come under tremendous fire,” with patients forced to lie on the floor under their beds for safety, said Health Minister Rudyard Spencer. […]

Kingston students taking important regional exams had to do it with bullets whizzing by outside, because education officials refused to excuse them.

“We are doing the best we can to reassure the students. We have provided them with lunch,” said Education Minister Andrew Holness.

The drug war. Everything it touches…

Some really good reading:

President Obama’s war on his own ‘youthful irresponsibility’ by Gene Healy in the Washington Examiner

Unthinkable? Repeal drugs laws — a very strong editorial by The Guardian.

ONDCP on the defensive as drug war exposed to mainstream media critique — an excellent point-by-point takedown by Danny Kushlick at Transform

Pot laws just put criminals in charge by SSDP’s Amber Langston in the Columbia Daily Tribune

The new numbers are out from SAMHSA, so expect a variety of efforts to get the press to report that marijuana is so dangerous that more and more people are being admitted to treatment for marijuana addiction.

Which, of course, is a complete misreading of the facts (or lie, if you prefer).

Some preliminary reporting is now coming out:

Marijuana admissions rose from 13 percent of total admissions in 1998 to 17 percent in 2008…

But as Paul Armentano notes:

In 2008, 57 percent of persons referred to treatment for marijuana as their ‘primary substance of abuse,’ were referred by the criminal justice system. For adolescents, nearly half (48 percent) were referred via the criminal justice system.

By contrast, criminal justice referrals accounted for just 37 percent of the overall total of drug treatment admissions in 2008.

“Primary marijuana admissions were less likely than all admissions combined to be self-referred to treatment,” the study found.

Of course, this is not news to us. But I’ve gone through and re-analyzed the data, using the new 2008 figures, cross-referencing primary substance with principal source of referral. Here are the results.

Look at the chart on that page and you’ll immediately see that for marijuana, not only were 57% of those admitted referred by criminal justice, but only 15% were self-referred (including individual, family, friends). And that 15% also includes people who voluntarily signed up for treatment so it would look better to the judge.

For comparison (just showing the two referral categories for a select set of drugs):

So when the 2010 National Drug Control Strategy spends an entire chapter talking about the need for more treatment opportunities and better treatment opportunities for those in trouble, the drug czar’s office should be taking the blame for policies that lead to wasting a significant portion of the treatment resources that currently exist.

Remember that

According to federal figures compiled by SAMHSA in 2009, some 37 percent of the estimated 288,000 thousand people who entered drug treatment for cannabis in 2007 had not reported using it in the 30 days previous to their admission. Another 16 percent of those admitted said that they’d used marijuana three times or fewer in the month prior to their admission.

If any treatment professionals are reading this post, I’d love to hear your reactions to this data. I would also like it if you could answer a question I’ve been wanting to ask:

If you accept criminal justice referrals, how many of them (where payment was no problem) have you refused because they didn’t actually need treatment, but were there simply to avoid punishment?

Police clean out a city park.

Police later hauled away 300-400 medium-sized plants that they also believed was marijuana.

If fact, officers only stopped collecting the plants because it got too dark, and planned to return in the morning to look around for more.

However, after spending more than an hour removing and tagging the hundreds of plants, then hauling it all down the police department downtown, testing revealed that none of it was marijuana at all.

No word yet on what the plants actually were, or how it will be disposed of now.

Also no word on the street value of the seized weed.

Ah — brings back memories of the hibiscus incident.

Update: Turns out the weed was mentha longifolia (or horsemint). Here’s some pictures of that dank weed for your enjoyment (note: these are not actual pictures of the weeds the police removed, but file photos of that species — I don’t know if they were flowering or anything).

Apparently it has an aroma similar to oregano. Which now makes every search in that town that was based on officers “smelling” pot suspect and perhaps even inadmissible as evidence.

Radley Balko talks about a recent O’Reilly show with Charles Krauthammer on to talk about the Missouri SWAT raid.

I really loathe this about cable news. They bring in the same personalities to talk what’s going on in the news. It doesn’t matter if those personalities have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. They’re on TV not because they have specialized knowledge about a given story, but because they’re talented at applying standard partisan talking points to a wide variety of issues. And now, Dick Morris will talk about the Federal Reserve. Joining us to explain what the drug war violence in Mexico means to you, here’s Democratic strategist Bob Beckell. Their job is to tell the portion of the audience that already agrees with them what the audience already thinks it knows. Everyone is stupider for it.

What the hell does Charles Krauthammer know about the drug war? He knows he’s in favor of it. That seems to be about it. What does he know about the increasingly militaristic way the drug war is being waged? Judging by this video, absolutely nothing.

I stopped watching cable news long ago for that very reason, but I realize that many people get their view of the world from idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about.

The Bizarre Universe of Drug Prohibition by Charles Shaw for openDemocracy.net

International drug policy is at a tipping point. Emerging from a forty year repressive dark age following the excesses of the 1960-1970s, the world seems ready to begin making serious changes in response to problems that have not been getting any better. But has the world learned enough to craft a saner, more compassionate approach to drug use?

Depressing quote, but way too common.

While Treviño and other local officials would not call the drug war a failure, they admit much progress needs to be made in the fight against drug trafficking and abuse. None said the battle should end. And those interviewed said they do not favor legalization.

“We can’t just pull out,” Treviño said. “We must continue fighting drug gangs. The stakes are way too high and we are in it too deep to quit.”

“… we are in it too deep to quit.”

Wow.

It’s like driving the wrong way on the expressway all night, knowing something is wrong, but refusing to get directions because you don’t want to face the fact that you’ve wasted all that time, so you continue heading the wrong way.

This is an open thread.

We really made an impact here. I don’t know if he’s saying it because he thinks it’ll get the protesters off his back, or because he really does see the value of it, but it’s good either way.

Via Morgan Fox at MPP:

During a press conference yesterday, Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton went out of his way to state his support for ending marijuana prohibition.

“I applaud your efforts,” he told a reporter who asked about campaigns to change marijuana laws. “If we could get out of the business [of going after marijuana offenders], I think there would be a lot of police officers that would be happy to do that.” […]

Chief Burton also acknowledged that violence surrounding marijuana is often associated with the illegal market created by prohibition, and not the drug itself. “Crimes do occur because of marijuana,” he said. “And you may make the argument that it’s because it’s not legal, and you may be right.”

Of course, he’s not going to stop enforcing the law, but he’s indicated that he’s behind efforts to change the law.

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.