Drug WarRant

Partly because it’s just so satisfying to give Mark Souder another kick in the pants… Lee at HorsesAss reminds us why it’s so right to publicly enjoy and point out Mark Souder’s fall from “grace”: Abstaining from Reality – The Mark Souder Legacy.

Analysis: the awesome power of the illegal high — mostly a great headline and lede, but still a good article

BOGOTA, Colombia — “Drugs win drug war.”

That was the prescient headline of a 1998 dispatch in The Onion. “Despite all our efforts,” the satirical newspaper reported, “the U.S. government has proven no match for the awesome power of the illegal high.”

Funny stuff. But a dozen years later, serious news outlets are writing pretty much the same story.

Department of bad sources of advice… The U.S. and England have been taken to task for being too soft on their supply side drug war…. by Iran… by a policeman from Iran. Police Chief Unveils US, Britain’s Support for Drug Rings

This call for more effort in the proven unworkable supply side drug war approach from a country that is unable to control its own drug use despite the fact that Iran (with the population of about three large U.S. states) executes 100-200 people a year for drugs (that’s 2-4 people per week)!

Via NORML — Beer company attempts to cash in on marijuana’s reputation through spoof ad.

MPP gets mayor to back off a bit on statement

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak recently made some pretty outrageous statements about gang violence in that city:

“When you pay for marijuana, you are paying for the bullet that goes into the head of someone on the streets,” he said. “Too many people have winked sideways without being honest that it’s white middle class Minnesota that’s paying for the drugs that put profit into gangs that kill people.”

MPP put out a statement reminding him that it’s prohibition — and any elected official who supports it — that is to blame.

The mayor was apparently pissed… but also open to discussing it, which is a good thing.

Obama repeating the mistakes of the drug ‘war’ by Rhonda Swan in the Palm Beach Post (and picked up elsewhere)

Mexican drug cartels wouldn’t exist if the U.S. decriminalized drugs. There would be no drug wars. And far less drug violence. Sure, it sounds radical. But isn’t it insane to keep doing what we’ve been doing and expect different results? […]

President Obama promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new policy that, like Portugal’s, treats drug use more as a public health issue than a criminal justice one. It’s also been a stated priority of Gil Kerlikowske […]

The Obama administration, however, has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels – $10 billion of the $15.5 billion drug-control budget. Where is the change Mr. Obama promised? I don’t expect him to call for the decriminalization of drugs. That would be too bold and politically risky. I do expect him to put our money where his mouth is.

This is an open thread.

I’ve been peripherally following the hysteria the Brits have been having over mephedrone — a legal synthetic stimulant that started gaining some popularity with clubbers.

In March, two young men died (aged 18 and 19) and the media widely reported the cause of their deaths as mephedrone. This, of course, led to national hysteria (directly led by the media) and within a month the government (over the objections of its scientific committee) had taken action to ban the drug.

And now… the toxicology tests on the two teenagers have just come out and show that the youths had not taken the drug.

Professor Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said: “This shocking news should be a salutary lesson to tabloid journalists and prejudiced politicians who held a gun to the heads of the ACMD and demanded that this drug should be banned before a single autopsy had been completed. The only good that might emerge from this fiasco is a long-overdue review of drug control policy.

“The politicians talk about using drug classification as a way of sending ‘messages’ to young people. I fear that the only message that will be sent by the hasty decision on mephedrone is that the drug laws deserve no respect.”

Exactly.

…

One of the things that makes it hard for me to report on drug news from the U.K. is the tendency for the media there to make up the most bizarre names for drugs.

The use of “skunk” for high-potency marijuana was primarily a media invention, and the term for mephedrone is… “miaow miaow.” Yep, that’s right. miaow miaow. As Wikipedia notes, it was a term that UK newspapers started using in late 2009 — “a name that was almost unknown on the street at the time.”

It makes it really hard to take news reports seriously when everybody is bent out of shape over miaow miaow. Of course, then again, it’s really hard to take anything the Mail says about drug policy seriously.

San Jose union begins organizing pot workers

A major California labor union is organizing medical cannabis workers in Oakland, a move that analysts say will help efforts to legalize marijuana and open the door for the union to organize thousands more workers if state voters pass a measure in November to allow recreational marijuana use by adults.

The 26,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5 in San Jose is believed to be the first union in the country to organize workers in a marijuana-related business. It is considering new job classifications including “bud tender” – a sommelier of sorts who helps medical marijuana users choose the right strain for their ailment.

Mmmm…. jobs.

If California voters in November approve the Control and Tax Cannabis initiative, which would legalize marijuana possession and use of small amounts of marijuana for those over 21 and tax it, there could be thousands of new workers ripe for unionizing, said Dan Rush, a Local 5 organizer. […]

Getting unions involved may help destigmatize the legalization issue for union members who don’t already support it.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if marijuana — the plant that’s supposedly single-handedly destroying productivity in this country — could end up helping solve the economic crisis by creating jobs?

Oh, and something I’d really like to see… an unemployed prison guard standing in line for an application to be a union bud tender.

Norfolk, Virginia

Two Norview High School teachers were placed on paid administrative leave this week after a parent complained that they distributed classroom materials that gave advice on how to deal with police if stopped.

What material did they show these High School Seniors in government class? The movie Busted from flexyourrights.org.

Let’s see now. Senior year in High School. Government class. Nope, that’s not the time to teach them about their Constitutional rights as American citizens. We need to wait until… never?

The really disturbing part for me was reading the comments to the article (and I did not read all of them). Fortunately, there were a number of good commenters about the situation (and more joining in all the time), but a disturbing number of early commenters seemed to feel that teaching this material was completely inappropriate.

Now, I’ll say that the teachers probably should have found a slightly better vehicle, given their geographic location and the volatility with which people deal with controversy in the public school system (I would have recommended flex your rights’ new film, which is more professional in appearance than “Busted” and less likely to be able to be described as a video that “teaches kids how to avoid getting caught for pot” (it isn’t, I know, but it’s going to be described that way).

I would never teach anywhere but in College, because I don’t want to put up with the bullshit of oversensitivity (or zero tolerance policies, for that matter).

Still, this is teaching the Bill of Rights in a government class!

I grew up believing that the Bill of Rights was the default position — that everybody (except a few weirdos) at least believed in that… it was so… basic, so true, so logical, so critical to freedom.

Yet it’s been said that the Bill of Rights wouldn’t pass if brought up for a vote today, and after years of political reading and writing, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Sad, scared, and depressed, yes. Surprised, no.

It’s why we can’t depend on simply telling people that the drug war is a violation of their rights and expect them to come running to our side. We have to find the buttons to push to get them involved (whether it’s the environment, medical marijuana, harm reduction, prison reform, violence in Mexico, etc., etc.), and then, once they realize that everything they’ve been taught about the drug war is wrong, we can teach them more (like how rights are not given by the government, and how rights make us safer, and how rights are for the innocent, and how rights are essential to freedom).

It is also another reason why our battle is so important, because the drug war is one of the prime mechanisms for dismantling the Bill of Rights. If we allow the drug war to win, our rights are in further trouble. If we can stop the drug war, then we have a chance of at least partially reversing the damage to the Constitution over time.

And it’s why we should be supportive of others who keep an eye out for authoritarian over-reach in a wide variety of areas (why Glenn Greenwald is often a must-read, for example).

Keep an eye on Flex Your Rights for more details on this story as it develops.

The AP has a piece out about fences on the Mexican border: Fence isn’t a cure-all for America’s porous border

The best known TV spot features Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain kicking along a dusty road in this hilly border city, fuming to his companion, the Pinal County sheriff, about drugs and immigrant smugglers and kidnappings. Wearing his Navy baseball cap and squinting into the sun, McCain could be rounding the corner to the gunfight at the OK Corral.

“Complete the danged fence,” he spits, his jaw drawing into a knot.
The government has spent $2.4 billion since 2005 to build the fence as it presently stands. And the prevailing political sentiment would appear to be, build it faster and higher.

But what McCain and other politicians often fail to point out is there’s no shortage of ways to get past the fence. Immigrants scale it with ladders. Smugglers use blowtorches and hacksaws to penetrate it. They use trucks with retractable vehicle ramps to roll pickups full of marijuana over the fence. They knock down vehicles barriers and erect lookalikes that are made out of cardboard and easy to move.

There are two reasons people clamor for fences along the Mexican border: immigration and drugs. Since this is a drug war blog, I’ll address the second.

1. Beginning economics lesson: when there is demand, supply will follow. It’s a law of nature. No matter how you try to build the fence, they will go under, over, around, or through it.

2. There are 1,969 miles of border between the U.S. and Mexico, and if you somehow covered all that, there are 5,525 miles of border between the U.S. and Canada to worry about, plus 12,479 miles of U.S. coastline.

3. Even if you could fence it all and somehow make it impenetrable, the drugs would come in through the legal entry points — the amount of international trade needed to keep this country going requires too much quantity each day to inspect it all.

4. For those who think a fence will keep drugs out, just remember that we have been unable to keep drugs out of prisons.

There’s an excellent post by washunate at the progressive blog FireDogLake: The 2010 Drug Control Strategy is still Anti-Science

The article picks apart the new drug control strategy and also takes a look at the media coverage (and government spin) around it.

The perspective I want to bring tonight is the specific assault on science enshrined in the drug war. We Democrats like to condescendingly snub our noses at those ignorant backwater redneck moran hillbillies – aka Republicans – who are so gosh darn awful for their scientific silliness of [insert view here]. We reference studies like the one conducted recently by the Pew Center which found that only 6% of scientists openly identify as Republican.

But the trouble is, that comes off as pretty elitist, and ridiculous, when we have such blind spots ourselves on certain policy areas when it comes to science. And the drug war is particularly interesting for this kind of perspective because it involves absurdities in both the ‘hard sciences’ and the ’social sciences’.

It’s heartening to see this kind of self-awareness building within pockets of the progressive community (particularly at FDL). Democrats have had a history of being portrayed as more progressive on drug laws, when in fact their actions have generally been little different than Republicans. For decades, liberals have been demonized by social conservatives as being soft on drugs, yet they’ve been afraid to speak out about drug policy lest the social conservatives demonize them for being soft on drugs. If you can’t win the perception battle anyway, then perhaps it’s time to just support good policy based on science.

The “Oh yeah? Well, we’re as tough on drugs as the Republicans.” approach hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked politically and it’s been disastrous in terms of policy.

Anyway, this post at FDL is definitely worth reading. Some very nice work.

Drug-sniffing dogs show students they’re ‘ruff’ and ready

The drill was part of the school system’s proactive approach to keeping the school drug-free, police and school officials said. […] There was no specific incident that prompted the new policy, school officials said […] The district has a zero-tolerance drug policy. […] Nothing was found, Lt. Paul Satkowski said.

Good training for students. Help them get used to the idea of suspicion-less government searches at any time. This way they’ll grow up to be good little subjects, ready to defer to authority as a way of life.

We haven’t heard a whole lot from John Negroponte in a while, but he surfaces in this AP story

Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who has been working on drug control for 35 years, urged legislators to not be discouraged by the increased violence or drug availability.

“Problems with narcotrafficking remain with us today notwithstanding the enormous blood and treasure that has been expending up and down the length of the hemisphere to deal with these issues,” he said. “So we just all agree that this is a long-term issue to which there are no quick fixes.”

Doesn’t anybody out there actually read this stuff with comprehension? Re-read it. He is saying that we shouldn’t be surprised that all the lives and money spent would result in greater violence and drug availability. And that somehow proves that we should unanimously agree to keep doing it, without considering any other options.

What a loser.

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.