Drug WarRant

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.

By now, the entire internet knows about the SWAT raid in Missouri that ended up with a dead dog. It woke up a lot of people, and angered a lot more who were already awake.

Almost nobody believed that it was right, regardless of political viewpoint. In this sense, the video (which was obtained by the Columbia Daily Tribune through a public records request) has served an incredibly important function.

It also got a lot of people wanting to blame someone. The question was “Who?”.

Von at Obsidian Wings writes

Folks talk about the banality of evil. It’s one of those cliches that you hear from time time. But I don’t think that folks stop very often to think about what that phrase means. Or what it looks like in action. Evil becomes banal when people — good people — stop recognizing it, stop appreciating it, and come to accept it as normal. When evil becomes so routine that good people accept it as the way of doing business.

I am not comparing the cops in the video to Nazis (whence the phrase comes). But it’s hard for me to see their actions, here, as anything other than evil. […]

This is what evil looks like. On this night, these cops decided to be thugs.

John Cole at Balloon Juice says:

I Hope These People Go to Hell […]

This is what happens when you give a bunch of cowboy assholes heavy weapons and fill them with a God complex.

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic takes a different focus

Short of multiple homicide, I’m having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action. And you know, I doubt the police could either. But they weren’t busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.

And in the end, that is our shame, not theirs.

Jonathan Perri of SSDP points out that the law is to blame:

“By making it illegal, you are making it criminal,” Perri said. “If a local liquor store breaks a law, you are not going to see a SWAT team raid the place and kill a dog. … You still have the alcohol abuse but don’t have people killing each other over it.”

And David Bordon points out the excesses of SWAT use today:

“The idea of SWAT was created for hostage situations and when military-style power is required and there is no other choice,” he said. “When going into a situation that the purpose is to preserve evidence, it’s not a good enough reason to put these thousands of people that are served search warrants each year through the aggressive and traumatic experience of a para-militarized police squadron entering your home.”

So who is responsible?

The answer is… everyone. And it’s complicated.

The politicians are to blame. Every day, they pass more bad laws, and refuse to correct the mistakes of the past, turning a blind eye to the destruction they cause. All the while, they fret about some non-existent 30-second attack ad, and take campaign contributions from drug war profiteers. Without the bad laws, the vast majority of these paramilitary raids wouldn’t have a reason to exist.

The federal bureaucrats are to blame. Every time they tell another lie about the drug war, they provide cover for the craven politicians, and blunt the outrage from the citizenry.

Local leadership is to blame. Seduced by the gift of toys from the military, local officials have gleefully accepted the tools of warfare in the hopes that people would think they had big dicks. Worse yet, they’ve actively made the decision to use SWAT-style raids in situations that are absolutely wrong. Their decisions have made it more dangerous for police, suspects, and the general citizenry.

They have failed to learn the difference between fighting a war and having a functioning police force. Once you decide to fight a war instead of policing, you have decided that the residents are acceptable collateral casualties of war.

The proof of this failure is evident in the statement by Deputy Police Chief Tom Dresner:

“If we were searching for stolen televisions in his house, there is no reason for SWAT,” he said. “He can’t flush televisions.”

He doesn’t even get the wrongness underlying his statement.

The entire philosophy behind SWAT-style drug raids is that the death of a mother, a child, or the family pet is an acceptable risk to prevent flushing. (Deep Thoughts)

What makes it worse is that you can’t actually flush large amounts of marijuana.

Local cops and SWAT officers are to blame. It can be convenient to say they’re just following orders, but the truth is that they do have some choice in not only choosing their job, but in how they actually perform that job. Even in the midst of a SWAT raid (even when it shouldn’t have happened to begin with), it’s possible to be safe and firm while still treating the suspects like human beings who are going through a traumatic experience and minimize both the trauma and the collateral damage.

The automatic shooting of a dog that is merely doing its job isn’t the sign of a cop that’s trying to balance safety with serving the public. A responsible cop could ask for better tools in dealing with such situations.

Unfortunately, too many of these cops have had the “war” mentality reinforced non-stop for them, like the cops that are part of the Illinois Task Force 6 in my area. When you see yourself this way every day at work, it’s hard to think of the citizenry as anything but the enemy.

Even without the reinforcement imagery, there’s a natural problem that crops up when you’re a cop doing mostly drug busts (and it does get compartmentalized that way). It’s the same problem that many treatment professionals have — generalization based on skewed personal experience.

My dad is a retired minister. He never used alcohol or went to places where alcohol was used or served. His total experience with alcohol was from those who were at the end of their rope and were coming to him for counseling and help. Alcoholics, domestic violence, etc. He didn’t really realize that there were people who used alcohol responsibly and was understandably upset when I started playing the piano in bars.

For drug cops, it’s too easy to get in the mindset that all drug suspects are non-human scum, and that affects how they do their job.

We’re all to blame. By not rising up and forcing change, we’re at fault for the death of that family member.

Yep. And that’s one of the reasons that I continue to spend so much time on this blog after almost 7 years.

It’s complicated.

In addition to calmly analyzing blame (and realizing that there’s plenty to go around), it’s also important to take a look at where focusing blame assignment will do the most good. That’s simple reality.

While it’s easiest to react viscerally to the images in that video and blame the specific cops in that house, that is the least valuable approach toward achieving real change — change that will save someone else’s family member in the future.

Whenever one of these tragedies happens — Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, Jonathan Ayers — I find myself torn when it’s announced that an investigation has been opened into one or more of the cops involved. The problem is, as soon as a cop is being investigated for wrong-doing, it generally means that the policy itself, and those who implemented it, will get a free pass.

Even if a cop rightly gets in trouble for his or her actions, it does very little to prevent future abuse.

I’m guardedly optimistic about the fact that, in the case of Columbia, the Tribune is talking about policy instead of individual cops, partly due to the efforts of SSDP and David Borden, among others. If we can keep the policy in the spotlight, we might do some good.

So yes, the answer is that pretty much everyone is at fault, but if we want it to change, we need to focus our blame on the policies and the laws.

We need local politicians besieged by concerned citizens who are afraid their homes will be invaded and their pets or children killed. And we need federal politicians fearing the votes of a motivated and concerned block of constituents.

We’ve talked often about the importance of jury nullification — the power of individual jurors to judge the law as well as the guilt of the defendant. It’s not an easy task — the court system is often stacked against the would-be nullifier.

But there’s another kind of nullification — judicial nullification. This is essentially when a judge says that he or she has had enough.

Of course, judges don’t have the same kind of power as a jury. They’re constrained by mandatory minimums and other limits on their ability to reduce or eliminate sentences. But they can still make a powerful statement.

A case in point is Federal Judge George Wu (thanks to Salem-News).

Federal District Judge George H. Wu issued a revised 41-page written sentencing order this week for former medical cannabis provider, Charles C. Lynch. In addition, the Judge also granted the defense’s request for reduced supervised restrictions as Lynch remains out on $400,000 bail pending appeal. Lynch’s Federal Public Defender filed an appeal Thursday, May 6.

“[T]his case is not like that of a common drug dealer buying and selling drugs without regulation, government oversight, and with no other concern other than making profits. In this case, the defendant opened a marijuana dispensary under the guidelines set forth by the State of California . . . . His purpose for opening the dispensary was to provide marijuana to those who, under California law, [were] qualified to receive it for medical reasons.”

The sentencing order states that Lynch was “caught in the middle of shifting positions” on the issue and that, “Much of the problems could be ameliorated…by the reclassification of marijuana from schedule I”

Of course, the feds don’t want to recognize that there’s a difference between Charlie Lynch and a criminal, but once a real human knows the facts, it’s hard to remain silent in the face of such injustice, and George Wu couldn’t.

There’s another important aspect to this case. Smart judges know the history of law, and understand that some bad laws end up living long after they have ceased to be supported by the country.

So what we do as individuals can have an impact here as well.

“While simple popularity is not a factor to be considered, the Court notes that it has received more letters in support of Lynch in this matter than in any other case in the undersigned judicial officer’s 16 years on the federal and state benches.”

Moms for Marijuana are proud women who are calling for the educated regulation of marijuana. Kudos to them.

Now remember, it’s Moms for Marijuana, not Marijuana for Moms. Don’t show up to dinner tomorrow with an eighth for her, unless she’s expecting it. I recommend lillies — that’s what I gave my mom.

A City Attorney who really knows his stuff. City Attorney John Russo from Oakland has an outstanding OpEd on the legalization of marijuana in California.

He hits a whole range of important points in a very clear way.

The Drug Czar will be talking about the new National Drug Control Strategy (to be officially released Monday) at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, will address a Speakers Press Conference at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, May 12 in the Fourth Estate Restaurant.

Kerlikowske will speak on the Obama administration’s new national drug control strategy, due to be announced May 10. His remarks will be followed by a moderated question-and-answer session.

I wonder if any of the press will be willing to ask the tough questions, and who will be moderating.

If you don’t buy this drug war, we’ll kill this dog.

Really strange thinking from across the pond. Kathy Gyngell calls for stopping the reliance on evidence and science-based drug policy, and instead using your personal experience and reason to create policy.

Evidence is over-rated, experience and reason underrated. These are the clues to the poisoned chalice of secular, morally unimpeachable thought that the Conservatives must avoid drinking from if they are to make real change.

Of course, the mere notion that drug policy has been based on science and needs to change is absurd. That’s the problem. It hasn’t been evidence-based at all. Yet she wants to throw out what we need to do and instead advocate “for policy makers to draw on the real life, non laboratory, experience of those who have recovered from addiction.”

Yeah, that’ll work.

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

This is an open thread.