Drug WarRant

Fight the Power – Jacob Sullum takes on supposed “Constitutional Conservatives” who nevertheless support federal bans on drugs and other powers not given to the federal government in the Constitution.

UNODC makes the case for decriminalization? – Transform found this gem of a page within the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime site that actually makes a strong case for decriminalization! How’d that slip in?

David Sirota: Rogues are dominating President Obama

Rather than personnel changes reining in the out-of-control agency, the president has nominated the acting Bush-appointed DEA administrator, Michele Leonhart, to a full term.

The message, then, should be clear: If you’re looking for who is “in control” of our military and police forces, don’t look to the established chain of command and don’t look to constitutional provisions that mandate civilian authority over the government bayonet. Look to the most reckless rogues — it’s a good bet they’re the ones running the show.

Doug Bennett: The ‘drug war’ mentality still rules

To many medical marijuana patients and objective observers like myself, it appears that the “Be afraid, be very afraid!” hyperbole and “Drug War” mentality has permeated the cultures of Redding City Hall and other local governments.

This will end badly. U.S. to embed agents in Mexican law enforcement units battling cartels in Juarez by William Booth

This, however, is just mind-boggling stupid. Declare War on Mexico? – 760 Talk Radio

Reason.tv: Pot Wars—Battlefield California

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.

A recent exchange in comments got me thinking about the drugs and terrorism connection again. You know, the one you keep hearing about from public officials.

Of course, drugs and terrorism really have nothing in common.

• Drugs are designed to be part of a peaceful exchange between willing participants for private use.
• Terrorism is designed to be a violent action imposed on innocent victims for political gain.

On the other hand, the drug war and the war on terrorism have a lot in common.

• Both are structured so as to preclude an end to the war. They’re designed not to win, but to last forever.
• Both provide for the development of lucrative government structures that benefit from the war.
• In both cases, the war actually benefits the supposed enemy.
• In both cases, the entity declaring war actually creates and nurtures additional enemy soldiers. (In the drug war, arresting one dealer creates a job opening to bring in a new one. In the terrorism war, violent responses by us (such as bombings, torture and killings) actually work to recruit new terrorists.)
• Both wars depend on fear — not making the enemy afraid, but making their own people afraid.
• Both are tools for the government to convince the people to give up more of their rights, and give government more power over them.

I think that most informed drug policy reformers are likely to also oppose the war on terror, particularly as it is being conducted today. Just like the fact that we’re able to see the similarities between today’s prohibition and alcohol prohibition, we can see the dangerous similarities between the war on drugs and the war on terror.

We’ve watched for years as the government has said that they need to have more powers to fight the war on terror and use the powers that they’ve already stolen to fight the war on drugs as an excuse to grab even more power. Then later, we find that 90% of the use of the new anti-terrorism powers have been in the war on drugs. Each feeds the other, and the promotion of fear (of drugs, of street gangs, of underpants bombers) helps convince the people to shred the foundations of their freedom… in exchange for… nothing. Less than nothing.

It’s not that we support terrorism — quite the opposite. It’s that, just like with the drug cartels, we find that the war, the blunt instrument, and vastly increased government power, are not the right tools to use.

I’m guessing that not everybody was quite clear on the plan…

Members of the Interstate Interdiction Unit pulled over a tractor trailer on Feb. 10 that contained 1,700 pounds of marijuana, according to a Memphis Police Department travel memo obtained under Tennessee’s public records law.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials asked that the load be delivered to its destination in Louisville while officers trailed the shipment. MPD officers and two Shelby County sheriff’s deputies accompanied the load, according to the memo.

OK, I see where they’re going with this. Their idea is apparently to let the shipment continue under close guard and then try to arrest the people who receive it.

So I guess the way this would go down is that they’d deliver the truck, keep an eye on it, and when the bad guys arrived to take over the shipment, they’d move in and nab them.

Let’s see how it went…

According to law enforcement officials with knowledge of the delivery, officials watched the tractor trailer travel to its intended destination. Soon after, several vehicles pulled up, left and then came back. They stayed several hours and then left. When officials later checked the tractor trailer, the drugs were gone.

Oops.

Federal agents are on the hunt for more than 1,700 pounds of marijuana that disappeared during a controlled drug delivery from Memphis to Kentucky.

Yeah, um, no, I don’t think that’s the way the plan was supposed to go…

I’m sure they can explain what happened…

“DEA is conducting an investigation into drug trafficking, and I can’t comment any further than that,” said Keith Brown, resident agent-in-charge of the Memphis DEA office.

Tom Gorman, assistant special agent-in-charge of the Louisville district office of DEA, also had no comment. […]

Harvey Kennedy, chief administrative officer for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, said he has no records related to the case. Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Shular referred calls to the local office of the DEA.

Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin said he didn’t think it was appropriate to comment on an ongoing DEA investigation and referred questions to the local federal office.

Well, it looks like they got Plan B down perfect: No Comment.

According to the Galveston County Daily News…

‘Major drug dealer’ taken down in La Marque raid

By T.J. Aulds
The Daily News
Published February 21, 2010

LA MARQUE — A man La Marque police said was one of the city’s “major drug dealers” was arrested during an early morning raid Saturday, Chief Randall Aragon said. […]

Kevin Germane Britton, 33, was arrested at his home in the 100 block of Porter Street in La Marque about 4 a.m. He was charged with manufacturing and delivery of a controlled substance

Wow. This must have been some bust. I wonder how much was involved?

Britton’s booking sheet showed his charge was for less than 1 gram of narcotics.

Oh.

When I whole-heartedly agreed to publishing Danny Chapin’s guest post on marijuana addiction (Marijuana Addiction – guest post and a discussion), I was looking forward to a strong and intelligent response in the comments section from my readers, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least.

If you haven’t had a chance, please go and read the comments (60 to date), and you’ll see what I mean (with a few exceptions).

But I promised to respond, and I will do so now, with the understanding that in many cases, I’ll be repeating what has already been eloquently pointed out by readers.
Continue reading →

And the winner is…

Roger Morgan, Chairman and executive director of Coalition for a Drug-Free California, with Drug czar’s office keeps drug use down

Before one throws the “drug czar” out with the bath water (“The drug czar should go,” Commentary, Feb. 8 ) he should look closely at the critics.

Teenagers who laugh at the anti-drug ads are probably part of the 33 percent of high school dropouts who will cost the nation $470 billion a year as they burden public health and welfare, turn to crime because they can’t sustain employment, fill our prisons and contribute to the 3,200 monthly drug-overdose deaths.

Wow, that’s quite fact-free accusation (and note that it’s aimed at least partially at “critics”).

It would actually be just as true (if not more) to say that teenagers who laugh at the anti-drug ads are probably part of those who get straight A’s and go on to become community leaders.

More teens smoke pot than tobacco in many places because of the hoax perpetuated on society by legalization proponents that marijuana is a medicine and legal in some states.

How do we perpetuate a hoax that medical marijuana is legal in some states? Did we just make it up and then hypnotize people into thinking that a referendum had passed?

Both pot and tobacco lead to an early grave and a rocky road getting there.

Pot may lead to Rocky Road but not an early grave.

Because today’s pot is 10 percent to 20 percent stronger than in the “flower power” days of the 1970s, it is a factor in 26.9 percent of accidents with injuries and sends more than 100,000 people a year to the emergency room. That’s about the same as cocaine.

I think he meant to say 10 to 20 times stronger — that’s the scare figure they usually like to use (not true, but that doesn’t stop them). 10 to 20 percent stronger is nothing — just a minor variance. If you have pot with 3% THC and make it 10% stronger, then it would have 3.3% THC. 20% stronger would be 3.6% THC.

The emergency room business always gets me. They love to say that marijuana is sending people to the emergency room, but they never say… for what? (Of course, we know that it’s not marijuana that sends them to the emergency room – it just gets mentioned as part of the visit.)

What is the treatment for a marijuana visit to the emergency room?

“Well, we gave the patient 250 CC’s of water in a cup to treat his dry mouth, showed him some pictures of gall bladders to stop the giggles, and then sent him with an orderly to the coffee shop for some rocky road ice cream.”

Back to Roger Morgan:

Because of the Office of National Drug Control Policy past and present, drug use actually has decreased. If the office has a shortcoming, it is its failure to focus on prevention and to stop the corruptive monetary influence that drives legalization efforts, with George Soros at the helm.

There’s that boogey-man George Soros again. I’d like to meet the man that has funded all my legalization efforts…. oh wait, that’s right, I haven’t gotten a penny from him. Yet, it seems to me that I did read about a corrupt monetary influence… right — that would be the $15 billion of taxpayer money that the drug czar gets each year to fight this stupid drug war.

No time to post tonight. Keep the conversation going in the Marijuana Addiction post (great discussion there, both on DrugWarRant.com and on Facebook).

I’ll give my response soon, hopefully.

In the meantime, use this thread to talk about what else is going on.

…

Oh, and can I just repeat how much I despise spammers?

I was averaging about 100 spam comments a day — not too bad to sort through (I like to check them out just to make sure no legit comments get caught). Then about a week ago it shot up to 500, and today it was 940. Thank goodness for the Akismet spam filter.

Addiction. It’s a loaded word. Lots of baggage, lots of uncertainty in its meaning. It gets tossed around a lot in reference to marijuana, from those who claim that marijuana is provably addictive, to those who say there is no such thing as addiction.

Regardless of those views, I think most people would agree that there are some marijuana users whose use appears to most people to be excessive. And whether that’s reality or perception, it’s still a very real hurdle.

Making this all even more topical, we now have a very real and current controversy regarding the definition of addiction: War Over Addiction: Evaluating The DSM-V

You’ve heard about the Drug War? Well there’s a war being fought over addiction by the Task Force revising the psychiatric bible in the United States.

Called DSM-V, it will be referred to by every therapist, child development specialist, and family court considering mental health issues, as well as criminal court concerning psychiatric defenses. […]

This template for diagnosing our “mental disorders” has been struggling with addiction – like so many of us. The term “addiction” does not appear in DSM-IV. Rather, “dependence” was introduced as a replacement for addiction in the hope of defining the syndrome more precisely and less emotionally.

DSM-V plans to reintroduce addiction.

This is a roundabout way of leading to the real post, here.

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

I thought it was a brilliant idea. I wanted to hear what he had to say and also get a chance to respond.

So here we go. I’ll let you have first crack at it, and I’ll respond tomorrow, probably asking Danny for a follow-up post.

Continue reading →

NPR has the first of a three-part series titled The Case Of A Confidential Informant Gone Wrong by Carrie Kahn.

It’s the story of one of the uglier episodes in the ugly business of using informants in the drug war. The U.S. government paid and worked with an informant with full knowledge that he was, on an ongoing basis, participating in brutal murders in Mexico, all so they could try for a higher level collar. And they did so without informing the Mexican government about the murders or where the bodies were buried.

The informant would bring the duct tape to bind the victims and the quicklime to dissolve their bodies to the House of Death, whenever called by his cartel boss to prepare for a “barbeque.” He even held victims down while they were being murdered.

For this, he was paid a quarter million dollars by the U.S. Government, and encouraged to continue. Once the story broke, now the U.S. wants to deport the snitch in the hopes that he’ll be killed in Mexico.

The lawbreaking went high in our government, but they’ve tried to pawn it off as just the actions of a couple of agents (as though a couple of agents could organize a cross-border operation with a well-paid snitch involving major cartel targets and murder without higher-ups knowing).

This case needs more visibility, and it’s good to see NPR covering it.

Eventually, U.S. officials told Mexican authorities about the bodies buried at the House of Death.

Lorenza Magana, who works with victims of violence in Juarez, sat vigil with relatives of missing family members outside the house the night that Mexican authorities began unearthing the remains.

“We stayed there all night and watched as they pulled out bodies,” Magana says. “It was so horrible. With every new body, the smell would hit us — it was horrible. We came back night after night to see how many they dug up.”

In all, there were 12 victims. Magana says she couldn’t believe it when she found out that Lalo, the gatekeeper of the death house, was a U.S. government informant.

The story probably wouldn’t be out there at all if it wasn’t for Bill Conroy’s tireless coverage for years at NarcoNews.

Update: Here are the other two parts of the NPR series on informants.

• Part 2: Critics Blast Informant System Cloaked In Secrecy
• Part 3: Retired Drug Informant Says He Was Burned

Great editorial in the Aurora, Colorado Sentinal after the recent medical marijuana raid.

Sweetin’s comments raise serious questions about just who’s in charge of this federal agency, and how inappropriate it is for this agency to usurp state’s rights in contradiction to the will of the president. […]

As to Sweetin’s remarks about the medicinal properties of marijuana, he’s clearly out of his league as a law enforcer to be taking on the role of a medical research scientist.

All of his comments should be worrisome to state residents, no matter how they feel about the recent medical marijuana controversy.

Of course all of this points to the fact that instead of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a useless war against marijuana and sending hundreds of billions of consumer dollars into the hands of murderous Mexican drug criminals, Colorado and the rest of the United States could be taxing and regulating a huge industry that will never go away.

And even numbers created by government officials who’ve come down closer to Earth on the matter make it clear that, just like alcohol, prohibition only serves to enrich criminals, while regulation and legalization could be made to serve us all.

Until common sense prevails, however, reasonable federal law and chain of command will have to suffice.

It would be nice if this started the kind of ruckus that got people in authority thinking it would just be easier if Sweetin wasn’t around — like maybe transferred to a weather station in the Antarctic.