Drug WarRant

The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs 2010 is taking place this week in Vienna (program).

There has been outstanding blog-by-blow coverage at CNDblog, a project of the International Harm Reduction Association.

CND is the UN body tasked with overseeing global drug policy. However, despite this important mandate, the Commission chooses to work in relative secrecy. Its meetings are not webcast, nor are minutes or summary records made available to the public. The final reports of the meetings are extremely limited. The CND never votes, so it is difficult to find out what position your government has taken on key issues. CNDblog is an attempt to fill this gap, and provide hour by hour records of the debates and decisions rendered during the 53rd session of CND in March 2010.

While the UNODC has made a point of saying they wish to be inclusive, they’ve really tried to shut out any other views.

Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which will actually have a session connected to the CND event, has a wonderful report on the lengths that UNODC’s Costa will go to marginalize other views.

For a start the Executive Director of the UNODC deliberately slandered a whole section of the NGO community in his opening speech, calling groups who support a debate on wider drug law reforms/regulation “pro-drugs”, despite Transform specifically writing to him, requesting that he desist with this childish and unwelcoming slur, on the basis that it was inaccurate, pejorative and offensive. Would he call the US Government “pro-drug” for supporting the regulation of tobacco and alcohol? No. We wrote to him about this after the last CND – see “Reformers are not pro-drug” – and got an acknowledgment of our concerns, but no actual response.

I can’t resist showing this… The NGO’s (non-governmental organizations, including Transform, Harm Reduction Association, etc. many of whom are there to try to reform) tend to get shut out of key portions. However, they were promised a location to make their materials available to delegates.

The 160 representatives from 55 NGOs were given this table.

…

Our own drug czar is also, of course, in Vienna. His opening speech was full of the usual stuff — multi-pronged balanced approach, no marijuana legalization, no “harm reduction,” etc. and full of the usual lies as well (treatment numbers being proof of the “significant consequences of marijuana use” etc.)

Here’s the kicker. Kerlikowske is conducting one session himself. On Wednesday at 2 pm, he’s conducting a session on… “Understanding the Threat of Drugged Driving.”

Oh, yeah, he’s using the same false information that he’s been using before. Reuters is running a teaser about the session…

“If you think about driving on an American road on a Friday or Saturday evening about 16 percent of the vehicles – one in six of the cars – (the driver) will be under the influence of an illicit or licit drug,” Gil Kerlikowske, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said.

“Drugged driving is a significant problem.” he told reporters at a week-long U.N. drug policy review meeting.

It’s the same lies he told Ashley III Halsey

Remember, he is basing his entire drugged driving fear campaign on a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And does the NHTSA study support Kerlikowske’s claims?

“The reader is cautioned that drug presence does not necessarily imply impairment. For many drug types, drug presence can be detected long after any impairment that might affect driving has passed. For example, traces of marijuana can be detected in blood samples several weeks after chronic users stop ingestion. Also, whereas the impairment effects for various concentration levels of alcohol is well understood, little evidence is available to link concentrations of other drug types to driver performance. “

and

“Caution should be exercised in assuming that drug presence implies driver impairment. Drug tests do not necessarily indicate current impairment. Drug presence can be measured for a period of days or weeks after ingestion in many cases. This latency of drug presence may partially explain the consistency between daytime and nighttime drug findings.”

I wrote to Reuters and suggested to them that perhaps the real story is the fact that the Drug Czar is in Vienna conducting a session about drugged driving, and he has no actual evidence that the problem exists!

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Consider this an open thread.

The International Students for Sensible Drug Policy conference is taking place this week in San Francisco.

Full Program is available online.

I wish I could be there with them. Should be a good (and educational) time. If anyone there is reading this, feel free to pass on your reports and I’ll be happy to publish them here.

From Reason TV — a must-watch.

James Gray has been out there for some time making a difference. This former Superior Court Justice is author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed: A Judicial Indictment Of War On Drugs, which has been for almost nine years one of the best books out there for introducing people to the notion of ending the drug war. The recommendations section at the end is a bit dated, but the book still holds up.

Popular Science has made its archives searchable, and this has led to finding gems such as this article, from May of 1968

This was 42 years ago, an era when the science of marijuana was incomplete, yet they oddly seemed to know more than “we” do today. It was a time before science had been turned to proving an agenda, back when it was about learning the truth about stuff.

Let’s take a look at some of Popular Science’s conclusions about marijuana…

Though medical men agree that marijuana is not physically addictive (unlike cigarettes and alcohol), many classify it as “psychologically addictive” — a term that Dr. Malleson considers “extremely imprecise, misleading, and unuseful… In practice it means nothing more than the statement, ‘I want.'”

Clearly before the treatment folks turned curing “I want” into a massive industry.

Most experts also agree that marijuana does not in itself lead to more potent drugs. But because it is illegal, the criminal underground may be aiding in its distribution — the same underground that distributes heroin. So in that sense, some experts call marijuana “criminogenic,” a word that is applied, explains Dr. Fort, “to certain laws which through the nature of the law generate crime as a direct consequence of that law.”

Criminogenic. Now there’s a word we don’t hear much today. That entire concept has been erased from public discourse. Interestingly, the word today seems to have a range of meanings, none as specific as Dr. Fort implied in 1968. But certainly the concept of a law that generates crime as a direct consequence of that law is sound today, and perfectly describes the drug war.

Marijuana is not a narcotic; it is neither physically addictive (no withrawal symptoms), nor does one work up to a tolerance to it so that more and more is needed for the same effect. Psychiatrist Fort says, “The marijuana smoker is able to assess the degree of desired effect as he continues to smoke, so that after reaching whatever he is seeking… he ordinarily stops any further inhalation.”

Yep. And before someone jumps in and says that there are indeed withdrawal symptoms, I believe that the threshold necessary to be considered withdrawal symptoms was much higher in 1968 than today where “I want” becomes a withdrawal symptom.

One California medical study complete last year concluded that the “rowdy” type prefers alcohol, the “non-aggressive” prefers pot. Marijuana users “are not troublemakers and they try to stay away from trouble,” the report stated. “They do not engage in delinquent behavior – other than in their use of marijuana.”

A massive 1947 study of marijuana users in India – where the drug is smoked or drunk in “taverns” much like our local bars – concluded that because marijuana tends to make a man timid rather than aggressive, its use in India led not to more crime, but less. In today’s hippie communities, in fact, where a perpetual haze of burning hemp hangs overhead, the crime rate is amazingly low.

True. Also interesting. I was not aware that India had that policy then. I learned today that the policy changed in 1985.

[Move breakables away from the computer now.]

Cliff Kincaid. That’s all most people need to hear to know that they’re about to get a real load of crap. And boy, oh boy, does this man know how to give you top shelf crap.

I’m not even going to take it apart. It’s beyond….

Was the Pentagon Shooter an Obama-approved Pothead? by Cliff Kincaid at Right Side News.

The left says he was a right-winger; the conservatives say that he was a leftist. What is abundantly clear, from reading his Internet commentaries, is that Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell was a psychotic pothead. […]

But rather than try and make silly ideological points by accusing Bedell of being either left or right, there is an urgent need for the blogosphere-and the major media-to address the question of how he became criminally psychotic and a patsy for conspiracy theories. The answer is marijuana, which alters the ability of the mind to comprehend reality but which is depicted by most of the media as safe and harmless.

This connection-between pot and mental illness-is a matter of the medical record but is conveniently being ignored in the many stories about this young man’s strange journey and tragic end. […]

The public laughs at the old propaganda films such as “Reefer Madness,” which depict marijuana smokers as crazed zombies. However, the Pentagon rampage was likely triggered by marijuana-induced psychosis. Bedell was not only a heavy marijuana user and had been busted for possession and growing the drug, but dedicated much of his life to glorifying the substance. […]

The “Medical Marijuana” Scam

The rampage at the Pentagon has also raised disturbing questions about the Obama Administration’s policy of allowing “medical marijuana” dispensaries in such places as California, where Bedell was living, to operate free from fear of federal prosecution. President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder have been accused of encouraging marijuana use by refusing to use federal resources to prosecute “medical marijuana” users and the “dispensaries” which supply them with the illegal dope. […]

One can hope that the tragic story of John Patrick Bedell and his victims will cause our major media to review the dangerous implications of allowing more and more people access to the drug, on the spurious grounds that it is somehow medicinal, and start a much-needed examination of the billionaires and organizations pushing drug legalization in America.

Billionaire George Soros has been called “an extremely evil person” by Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation for putting millions of dollars into groups like the Drug Policy Alliance dedicated to legalization of pot and other drugs. […]

Although drug legalization has been mostly a left-wing cause, funded by “progressive” billionaires such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, the libertarian Cato Institute has been promoting legalization of dope for many years. It, too, has been funded by Soros. […]

Rather than publicize the marijuana-psychosis connection, the major media have shied away from it, probably because some journalists use pot themselves as a “recreational” drug. […]

[Joyce] Nalepka noted that, during the meeting with senior Department of Justice staff, the group of anti-drug activists was told that the federal government did not have the resources to go after the problem of “medical marijuana.”

Nalepka countered, “That’s why we’re here-we want the government to get the resources. It is well-known that marijuana is both physically and psychologically addictive and is a definite stepping stone to many drugs.”

She concluded, “Allowing this to continue is treason, i.e., a betrayal of trust, against our own children and grandchildren.”

Fortunately, Cliff Kincaid is himself considered to be a raving lunatic by virtually all of the population that doesn’t rely on forwarded emails as their only source of news.

Kincaid’s biggest fear is that someone will tell his readers the web address of snopes.com.

Cliff is part of my Who’s Who in Drug Prohibition page.

In Defense of Willie Nelson

Willie and Family now have an unlikely new champion: State Sen. Charlie Albertson, who just cut a song defending the outlaw singer. […]

The song, called “Leave the Man Alone,” refers to the Jan. 28 citations issued to six members of Nelson’s band on either possession of marijuana or possession of non-tax-paid alcohol. The band’s bus was outside the Duplin County Events Center in Kenansville.

Not bad. But here’s my favorite song written about Willie:
I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again – Celebrity bloopers here

What passes for journalism…

The gunman who charged into the Pentagon Thursday and opened fire was intelligent but troubled, and had struggled with a longtime marijuana addiction, a family friend said today.

Letter-writer extraordinaire Robert Sharpe:

For non-violent offenders with chronic substance abuse problems, drug treatment is a cost-effective alternative to incarceration. Unfortunately, drug courts are being misused for political purposes. Record numbers of citizens arrested for marijuana possession have been forced into treatment by the criminal justice system. The resulting distortion of treatment statistics is used by shameless drug warriors to claim that marijuana is “addictive.”

Zero-tolerance drug laws do not distinguish between occasional use and chronic abuse. The coercion of Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis into taxpayer-funded treatment centers says a lot about government priorities, but absolutely nothing about the relative harms of marijuana. For an objective take on marijuana, look to Canada.

After months of research, the Canadian Senate concluded in 2002 that marijuana is relatively harmless, marijuana prohibition contributes to organized crime, and law enforcement efforts have little impact on patterns of use. In the words of Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, “Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue.”

Students debate drug policy — it was The Libertarians, College Democrats, College Republicans and College Socialists.

I loved this part.

The students also debated the merits of medical marijuana use. The Republicans were the only students opposed to using it for medical purposes.

Instead, they suggested harnessing substances in marijuana used for medical reasons to eliminate the negative effects of smoking.

The other debaters fired back, defending their stance in favor of medical marijuana.

“The Republicans keep stressing a safe way to harness the [medical substances] — it’s called a vaporizer,” said Socialist Paige Heimark (freshman-history and psychology).

Sanitizing history

How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson’s crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.

When this AP story came out, it pissed me off for the same reason, but I didn’t get around to writing about it. Scott Morgan took care of it, instead. How Can We Stop Drug Gangs From Growing Pot in the Woods? Legalize Pot

This Associated Press report is over 1,200 words long, yet does not contain one single idea for addressing the problem. Not even a stupid hopeless drug war idea like “we need more funding for eradication,” or “we need to get everyone to stop using marijuana.” Apparently, the AP is simply content to point out to us that our most precious natural resources are being slowly destroyed by Mexican marijuana cartels and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it.

But, of course there is.

DrugSense Weekly – a weekly review of the most interesting or relevant articles in the press and on the web related to drug policy reform.

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

…. consider this an Open Thread

In case you don’t read Radley Balko on a regular basis… which you should.

The Baltimore Sun reported on the use of SWAT in Maryland.

Heavily armed tactical police in Prince George’s County raid more homes than any other law enforcement agency in the state, according to newly released data from the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention.

In the last six months of 2009, police there conducted 195 tactical entries, 105 involving crime deemed nonserious felonies and misdemeanors. That’s compared with 84 such raids in Baltimore

This was the subject of Radley’s crime column this week: 4.5 SWAT Raids Per Day: Maryland’s SWAT transparency bill produces its first disturbing results

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war. […]

Lawmakers in other states should take notice. It’s time to have a national discussion on the wisdom of sending phalanxes of cops dressed like soldiers into private homes in search of nonviolent and consensual crimes.

The Baltimore Sun article also led to this:

Ex-Cop Chides Calvo for Questioning the Cops Who Nearly Killed Him

This is an excellent take-down by Radley of a real jerk who had an LTE in the Baltimore Sun this week. This ex-cop attempts to justify all the excess SWAT use and thinks that Cheye Calvo should support it!

Great bit at the end with Radley responding to the ex-cop:

Perhaps if Mayor Calvo had ever had to face such danger he would understand.

Schweinsburg saves his most callous, oblivious comment for last. Calvo has faced such danger. He faced it when a bunch of armed idiots stormed his house and indiscriminately fired off rounds into his Labradors. He thought he was being invaded. If he’d had a gun in his home for self protection, he’d almost certainly be dead. That the danger in Calvo’s instance came from incompetent cops instead of thuggish drug dealrs wouldn’t have made him any less dead. The utter tone-deafness of this line from Schweinsburg is appalling. How dare this mayor question the cops who nearly killed him. It suggests that all cops, no matter what they do, should be immune from public scrutiny. It’s similar to a letter in response to Calvo’s case from a Milwaukee cop that we saw in National Review a while back. No empathy whatsoever. You get the feeling they believe Calvo ought to thank the Prince George’s deputies for having the courtesy not to kill him.

Of course, when it comes to SWAT, any amount of violence is OK because it’s the “law” doing it, whereas something like having a little marijuana is considered “dangerous.”

In this case that Radley talked about last week, a SWAT team descended on a home, stormed it with guns, fired seven rounds at the family’s dogs as a seven-year old looked on, found a small amount of marijuana, and charged the parents with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

It’s bad enough that SWAT seems to think they always have to shoot the dog.

I worked a job for a while that involved going house to house, often cutting across lawns and stumbling into the mean dog on a 20 foot chain right by the side of the house 2 feet away from me. I didn’t have a gun to shoot them, so I learned how to deal with them. There are specific, effective techniques (even if your police department can’t afford a tranq gun, because you spent all your money on tanks and black hoods) that can allow you to proceed without shooting the dog or getting bit. I was able to teach these techniques to minimum wage part-time delivery personnel, so I assume the smarter cops would be able to absorb the lesson as well.

As for this cop? … I don’t know.

A police officer trying to make an arrest at a Minneapolis home shot the neighbor’s dog.

The dog’s owners are angry and confused, but police officials say the officer acted responsibly.

William Knapp said his rottweiler/yellow lab mix Wilson was in his fenced yard, located in the 3200 block of Bryant Avenue N, Friday morning as police tried to arrest someone at at house next door.

Knapp said, “I heard my mom yelling, ‘They shot our dog they shot dog.'”

Knapp’s brother Allen said the dog did not try to attack the officer and wasn’t even barking when it was shot.

Neighbors backed up the Knapps’ version of events. But police said the dog was barking viciously and tried to jump the fence toward the officer.

And there was another case of wrong address drug raid, where a man and his father (who was in bed recovering from cancer treatment) found themselves at the point of a gun, forced to the floor and handcuffed. Police had the wrong half of a duplex. Neighbors now say that the police scraped off the “A” on the house number of one side of the duplex after they made the mistake in order to cover it up. Best line in the video is from the victim:

If the mailman can distinguish that this is two addresses, I’m pretty sure the police could, too.

We’ve been having a fabulous conversation about the meaning/validity of the phrase “marijuana addiction” and how that has been and should be addressed.

Danny Chapin, the managing editor of AllTreatment.com, a directory for drug rehab centers and substance abuse information resource, originally approached me about having a dialog about marijuana addiction with all of you, as he searches for understanding himself.

1. Danny Chapin’s original post
2. Pete Guither’s response

If you haven’t had a chance to read those, I recommend that you do so — the comments were extraordinary — and it leads to this one.

Danny Chapin has now responded to my response. Check it out and take your shots. I’ll react later.
Continue reading →

If any of you thought that it should be easy to change the formula of funding for the drug war, this piece will help demonstrate the sad reality.

Remember when the drug policy budget for 2011 came out? Despite constant messages from the White House and the Drug Czar that the emphasis needs to be on treatment rather than on enforcement, on demand rather than supply, the new budget the unveiled showed increases in every major category of supply-side and enforcement-side drug war with just some shifts within those areas. It’s like they gave in entirely to the lobbying pressures to keep the drug war fully funded even when we’re broke.

And yet, check out the grillinggiven yesterday to the Drug Czar in the House:

At a March 3 hearing of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) asked, “Were you consulted, Mr. Kerlikowske, or anyone else here, when the administration proposed to cut the Coast Guard positions by 1,100, to mothball five recently upgraded helicopters, reducing the Coast Guard’s anti-drug operations in Florida, where I just happen to live, and the Caribbean – which we just cited was the main source of these people putting this crap in – that would dramatically reduce our nation’s capability? Were you consulted on these cuts?” Mica asked.

“No,” Kerlikowske said. […]

“Actually, both sides of the aisle were just stunned at the administration’s proposal,” Mica said of the proposed cuts. […]

“The Coast Guard is also stretched thin – responsible for carrying out a range of missions, from port security to disaster response, drug smuggling interdiction, and the protection of our maritime resources,” Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said at the Feb. 24 hearing where Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified about the budget.

I hate to be right, but, in my initial post on the budget, I said:

Because there are so many entrenched interests in law enforcement, well organized interests with lobbyists and guns, that nothing can ever be cut. The only question when this bill reaches Congress is how much they try to increase the law enforcement/supply side numbers.

Yep.