Drug WarRant

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.
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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.

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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.

Rather amusing train-wreck of a rant. He suggests parents rip apart their kids’ bedrooms and kick them in the balls if they find marijuana. He’s also quite convinced that all drug policy reformers are stupid. His logic is unassailable unavailable.

There’s a great editorial in the New York Times yesterday: A Blue-Ribbon Look at Criminal Justice

The nation’s criminal justice system is in need of an overhaul. This is particularly true of its incarceration policies. Too many people are being put behind bars who do not need to be there, at great cost to the states, and not enough attention is being paid to helping released prisoners re-enter society.

It goes on to endorse the Jim Webb blue-ribbon commission to review the Justice system. Is it possible that people are finally waking up to the notion that we shouldn’t be incarcerating everyone? For years, the default position in society has seemed to be that putting more people in jail was by definition somehow always good. But views are changing, and perhaps the Times has an idea why:

The high imprisonment rate has long been troubling as a matter of fairness, but with the recession it has become an enormous financial burden. States have begun, out of fiscal necessity, to parole prisoners faster and in larger numbers, and to look for alternatives to incarceration. This scattershot approach is far from ideal. It would be better to have experts address these issues at a national level in a more methodical way.

And yes, they even mention the drug war:

The commission also would look at sentencing policies for drug crimes, including their impact on minority communities, something that is long overdue, as well as the involvement of foreign-based gangs in crime in the United States.

Their conclusion:

The Senate leadership needs to push it to a vote, and the House needs to get to work on passing a companion bill. A broad consensus has emerged that the system is broken.

Very nice. I hope it gets a lot of play. It isn’t just that we need the blue-ribbon commission, but we need the discussion and the realization by the public that incarceration isn’t necessarily a good thing. Wouldn’t it be nice someday if we reached a point where the public demanded legislators, police, and prosecutors to defend the specific benefits to society of each use of what should be limited prison resources?

Now, is it just the New York Times talking about this?

No.

In a speech today before the house and Senate, [Missouri Chief Justice William Ray] Price [Jr.] said Missouri’s “broken strategy of cramming inmates into prisons” isn’t working and costs the state millions of dollars each year.

He said the state should focus on rehabilitating nonviolent offenders, instead of sending them to jail. Jailing nonviolent offenders, Price said, frequently leads to higher recidivism rates. 41.6 percent of nonviolent offenders who are jailed, then released, return to jail within two years, he said.

Perhaps we are making real progress. Perhaps people are ready to talk.

But what about leadership?

I was astonished to read this speech delivered yesterday by Attorney General Eric Holder to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives:
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