Drug WarRant

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.

Update: The AP article is getting huge distribution. It’s completely dominating my drug war news feed this morning. Check to see if it shows up in a paper in your area — could be a great opportunity for a follow-up letter to the editor.

AP: IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.” […]

From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement — no matter how well funded and well trained — could ever defeat the drug problem.

Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has since watched his worst fears come to pass.

“Look what happened. It’s an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia,” he said. […]

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

— $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

— $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

— $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

— $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

— $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

Pretty intense stuff to be seeing from the AP.

Woman Hospitalized Following Botched Raid

An elderly Polk County woman is hospitalized in critical condition after suffering a heart attack when drug agents swarm the wrong house. Machelle Holl tells WSB her 76-year-old mother, Helen Pruett, who lives alone, was at home when nearly a dozen local and federal agents swarmed her house, thinking they were about to arrest suspected drug dealers.

“She was at home and a bang came on the back door and she went to the door and by the time she got to the back door, someone was banging on the front door and then they were banging on her kitchen window saying police, police,” said Holl. […]

“My mother has had a heart attack. She has had congestive heart failure and she is in ICU at the moment. She is not good condition and her heart is working only 35 percent,” said Holl. […]

Police say they have had her mother’s home under surveillance for two years.

Holl says if that’s true, how could police get the wrong address?

Here’s another instance of a reader taking it upon himself to write about an issue.

You may have heard that Utah started encouraging snitching on suspected marijuana cultivators with a special website: http://www.illegalutahmarijuanagardens.com/ (as of this writing, the website is unavailable due to exceeding bandwidth limits).

So Larry wrote a nice, polite letter to the various email addresses listed on the site before it crashed:

Dear Stalwart Investigators,

I do not live in Utah, though I have visited your lovely state. I certainly share your goal of protecting the spectacular countryside of Utah.

However, I am very skeptical that your efforts are doing any good and in fact suspect that they are making a bad situation worse. You see, marijuana cultivators anticipate that a certain percentage of their crop will be seized and they plant extra to compensate. As you step up your eradication efforts, so do they step up the planting. In other words- what little pressure you are able to exert on growers only causes more devastation to the forest.

The futility of the effort is clear once you realize that despite ever-increasing numbers of plants seized by law enforcement the retail price of marijuana has remained steady for a decade. This clearly indicates that “eradication” (quotes are quite appropriate here) has done nothing to alter the balance between supply and demand.

My suggestion to Utah is to concentrate on less harmful routes of law enforcement with regards to marijuana.

Best regards,
Larry Simpson

Nice, and well-reasoned. Excellent arguments. What kind of a reply might he get?

From: Jim Whitcomb
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 10:19 AM
To: Larry Simpson
Subject: Re: Utah marijuana eradication

Think what you might, but until you have seen what garbage your suppliers leave at one of these site, and what it does to our spectacular countryside, don’t condemn us for doing our job. It is against the LAW to grow Marijuana and is being done by mostly Illegal Aliens. I am proud of this COUNTRY and I am proud to be an AMERICAN.

I will do my job to protect this Country and its citizens, even dope smoking, baggie pants and earring wearing shit heads like you. You have no clue what is going on in the real world and probably never will, so don’t tell us what we should or should not do.

Wow. Read that again!

As Larry indicates to me, this official probably got fed up with getting a lot of emails on this and started copying and pasting his response without even reading the email, but still, that’s really over the top — especially to be sending on official email.

So Larry wrote back:

Dear Mr. Whitcomb,

Using such an uncivil tone in response to a civil letter is frankly disturbing coming from a public servant. Accordingly, I have copied the Commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety and the Sherriff of Millard County, who should be aware of your attitude towards the public.

For the record, I am conservative in appearance and politics, and am a productive member of society. Please be aware that I am as outraged as you are about the destruction of public lands by illegal growers. We simply disagree about the economic incentives that contribute to the situation.

Best regards,
Larry Simpson

Again, excellent job. Try to diffuse the anger and get a real dialogue.

The official did calm down and responded:

From: Jim Whitcomb
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 6:27 PM
To: Larry Simpson
Subject: Re: Utah marijuana eradication

One thing you must try to understand a especially about drug and narcotic investigation is they are what you would probably say ” it’s not cost effective”. But legalizing or allowing the growing of Marijuana infuriates me.

Marijuana is the gateway drug to the rest of our drug problems. The THC content is 5-7 times higher than when Marijuana first came on the scene. If people don’t think that is a problem, they should have to deal with these people who smoke Marijuana and see what it does to their brain.

I have been working drug and narcotic investigation for the last 10 years and I get the responses like yours a lot. I just wish you could see if you haven’t how this affects people who use.

I have been outdoor person my whole life and I have seen first hand what these people who grow Marijuana do to our countryside. I want to try to keep spectacular for the rest of the public to enjoy as well.

So I guess as long as it is illegal to grow Marijuana and I am enforcing the law, economics will have to take a back seat. I just want to keep our public lands safe and spectacular for the future and I think it is very hard to put a dollar value on what that will cost to make it happen.

Thanks for your reply back.

OK, finally we get to see a little bit about what makes him tick. Of course, there’s that cognitive dissonance — he’s so sure about the evils of marijuana that any argument showing that what he is doing doesn’t help but actually makes things worse falls on deaf ears.

And there’s also the generalization based on skewed personal experience (which I touched on in this post). As a narcotics investigator, he’s seen some damaged individuals who also use marijuana. He makes the wrong assumption based on that correlation, and thinks it’s the marijuana to blame.

He even goes so far as to say “I just wish you could see if you haven’t how this affects people who use.” Um, we have. Every day, with bright, contributing members of society in all walks of life. The ironic thing is that he probably has friends he admires who use marijuana (but just don’t tell him that).

Mr. Whitcomb, and people like him, are going to be tough nuts to crack. We may not succeed in convincing them. But if enough people like Larry keep showing themselves to be polite and reasoned advocates for legalization (not to mention LEAP, et al), even Whitcomb could develop a tiny whisper of self-doubt.

…

(Note: Larry and Jim’s names have been changed in this post. I was more interested in the dynamics of this discussion than in having the names show up in Google. Paragraph breaks were also added for easier reading.)

In case you missed it in comments, I just wanted to point out readers here doing some important work.

In my post about the Judge Napolitano video, I suggested:

Now, find out who your local alderman is, or whatever the most local unit of government is in your area. Send them the link to this video, and say that you’re concerned that something like this could happen in your town. Ask him/her to find out what the local policy is regarding use of militarized raids against citizens, and urge that the policy be examined in light of this.

Maria took advantage of the opportunity:

Sent this link to all the FOX biz and FOX news watchers in my life who lean towards more conservative and business values – check (promising feedback so far..)

Sent links to original video and links to left leaning commentary and media to CNN and and MSNBC – check

Will be sending to local conservative, good ol’ boy mayor once I track down email – check

Gift horse rode – check

Dano gave it a shot

Well, I contacted all my government reps: city, county, state, federal. Only took a few minutes to draft an email and then fill in all those forms for each. I don’t expect my simple email to make a difference, but if there are enough of us making noise the government tends to at least feign listening. It’s a step…

and guess what happened almost immediately…

I sent email out to all of the local city council, which in turn forwarded the request for more information to the local PD. As long as they know we are watching it makes it harder for them to let controls deteriorate to the level of this video.

Here’s the PD spokesperson response:

I am a captain with the our local city Police Department and I’m in charge of the Support Services Division which includes our SWAT team. Councilmember Friedman referred your inquiry to the police department for response.

I have reviewed your email and the Fox News video. To say the least, the video is shocking, and I understand your fears about a similar situation potentially occurring in our local city. I would like to provide you with some information about out policies and protocols for the use of SWAT.

First of all, our SWAT team was formed in late 1997. Since that time the team has served numerous high-risk search and arrest warrants and handled many barricaded dangerous suspect incidents. I am probably jinxing out record by saying this, but in all of this time our SWAT team has not been the basis for a lawsuit against the City of our local city.

This is my home town and I have worked for the police department for 29 years. I would prefer to not have a SWAT team, but in this megalopolis of 10M+ people and our proximity to high crime areas of Los Angeles, a SWAT team is a necessity. Statistics show that when a SWAT team is properly used, the possibility for injury or death of an officer, citizen or suspect is decreased. This is because a properly trained and equipped SWAT team takes extraordinary steps to avoid direct confrontation with an armed and dangerous suspect.

In our local city, all SWAT deployments, except in an immediate emergency, must be approved by the chief of police. Our SWAT team is not used for “routine” search warrant service – even in drug dealing circumstances. The video of the Missouri SWAT team appears to be a “routine” warrant service that would not be approved in our local city. While the following is not an exhaustive list, SWAT is essentially deployed only in the following circumstances:

Where an armed suspect is barricaded, refuses to surrender and is believed to be capable of killing or inflicting serious injury on a citizen or a police officer Where a location of a search/arrest warrant is fortified, barricaded or reinforced in such a manner exceeding the capabilities of regular police officers to carry out the warrant service and other means of gaining entry to the location are not viable
Where a suspect is believed to be armed, dangerous or threatening and there is a likelihood of an armed confrontation if conventional police tactics are employed

I’m not sure how search warrants are issued in Missouri, but in California an untested, unreliable informant cannot be used as the sole basis for a search/arrest warrant. The police must independently establish probable cause substantiating that evidence of a crime is at a particular location. The probably cause is then presented to a judge (in writing except in extreme emergencies where an oral/recorded affidavit is presented) who then makes a determination as to whether or not probable cause exists for the issuance of a warrant. Once a warrant has been issued by a judge, it must be served by a peace officer in a timely fashion.

Generally, if SWAT is requested for the service of a search warrant, the situation must be evaluated and meet the above criteria. The SWAT team and detectives then conduct database searches and actual reconnaissance of the location to determine if there are factors which might indicate that a warrant should NOT be served – such as the presence of children, elderly persons, etc. SWAT always looks for alternatives to serving a “dynamic” warrant such as the one depicted in the Fox News video. Two common alternatives are (1) placing a location under surveillance and following away suspects when they leave so that they may be arrested on the street, away from a location. Detectives may then return to the location and serve the search warrant, presumably, on a vacant location. And (2) where use of a SWAT team is warranted, SWAT may surround the location and “call out” any suspects. When the suspects come outside, they are detained and the SWAT team then slowly and methodically searches the location, which is presumably empty.

I think I’ve provided more information than you requested, but I wanted to give you comfort that the our local city Police Department does not have a SWAT team that is used indiscriminately. In the proper situation a SWAT team can save lives – and that is the primary mission of SWAT.

Good work, team.

How about the rest of you? What are you doing? Are you getting results?

Fun with referral logs…

Surfing from a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services computer (hhs.gov) came the following google search:

geroge washington and cannibis

Fortunately, teh Google was smart enough to take help them find my Why is Marijuana Illegal? page, despite my use of correct spelling.

Update: OK, I apologize for making fun of the bureaucrat’s spelling. I was trying to break things up a little. I guess I’ll have to go back to talking about dead dogs.

From the press release:

“The Obama administration deserves credit for vocalizing a commitment to moving away from the failed and unconstitutional policies that have defined America’s war on drugs. But any strategy aimed at reversing the mistakes of the drug war must both fund treatment and ensure that enforcement efforts preserve civil rights, and ONDCP’s budget and strategy do neither. Attempting to reduce demand by continuing to focus on the search, arrest and conviction of street sellers rather than importers will further erode the Fourth Amendment, exacerbate the crippling financial effects of our nation’s addiction to mass incarceration and is no substitute for an effective public health-based strategy that promotes public safety while preserving communities’ constitutional rights.” — Jay Rorty, Director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project

Radley Balko’s crime column is on the Columbia, Missouri drug raid we’ve been talking about.

The officers in that video aren’t rogue cops. They’re no different than other SWAT teams across the country. The raid itself is no different from the tens of thousands of drug raids carried out each year in the U.S. If the video is going to effect any change, the Internet anger directed at the Columbia Police Department needs to be redirected to America’s drug policy in general. Calling for the heads of the Columbia SWAT team isn’t going to stop these raids. Calling for the heads of the politicians who defend these tactics and promote a “war on drugs” that’s become all too literal—that just might.

Police review board prepares for crowd

Residents who want to voice their opinions about the Feb. 11 SWAT raid at Jonathan Whitworth’s southwest Columbia home will have an opportunity […] The 7 p.m. [today] meeting has been moved to the Columbia City Council chambers at the City Hall Addition, 701 E. Broadway, to accommodate the large crowd board members expect. Concerned residents, bloggers and commenters on the Tribune website have organized on social networking websites to form groups and spread the word of the opportunity for their voices to be heard.

Burton touts restrictive policy

More changes have been made to Columbia police search warrant protocol in response to a Feb. 11 SWAT raid that Police Chief Ken Burton said was flawed. […] Effective yesterday, the narcotics sergeant and SWAT commander involved in investigations have been removed from the decision-making process about whether and how a drug search warrant will be served.

From Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: New Obama Drug Strategy Just Like Old “Drug War” Approach

“The drug czar is saying all the right things about ending the ‘war on drugs’ and enacting a long-overdue balanced strategy focused on a public health approach,” said Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore cop and incoming executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Unfortunately the reality of the budget numbers don’t match up to the rhetoric. Two-thirds of the budget is dedicated to the same old ‘war on drugs’ approach and only a third goes to public health strategies. My experience policing the beat tells me that it’s certainly time for a new approach, but unfortunately this administration is failing to provide the necessary leadership to actually make it happen instead of just talking about it.”

The strategy devotes 64 percent of the budget to traditional supply reduction strategies like enforcement and interdiction while reserving only 36 percent for demand reduction approaches like treatment and prevention. And, due to accounting changes made under the Bush administration and maintained by Obama, the budget ratio doesn’t even take into account some costs of the “war on drugs” such as incarceration.

Drug policy reform advocates are pleased, however, with the strategy’s support for syringe exchange programs and its criticism of laws that bar people with drug convictions from receiving public benefits like student aid.

“It’s great to see the administration starting to talk like they want to actually change failed drug policies,” said Franklin. “But we can’t let them get away with claiming that they’ve ended the ‘war on drugs’ while we continue to arrest 800,000 people a year on marijuana charges alone.”

Must-see TV: Gary Johnson on The Colbert Report

This is an open thread.

Watch this. Seriously.

Did you watch it? Good.

Now, find out who your local alderman is, or whatever the most local unit of government is in your area. Send them the link to this video, and say that you’re concerned that something like this could happen in your town. Ask him/her to find out what the local policy is regarding use of militarized raids against citizens, and urge that the policy be examined in light of this.