Drug WarRant

We see this all the time…

80% of Puerto Rico Murders Called Drug-Related

SAN JUAN – About 80 percent of the murders committed in Puerto Rico are directly linked to drug trafficking, authorities and academics say.

So despite the headline, it’s not really drug-related. It’s more accurately drug-war-related, or drug-trafficking-related, but it’s easier for headline writers to say “drug-related.”

But it does make me wonder why, when there are various violent religious conflicts around the world, headline writers don’t refer to those deaths as “God-related.”

Some people have so totally lost touch with reality that all I can do is laugh.

Here’s the American Patrol Report writing at Right Side News about the recent El Paso conference.

Critics say the people at the conference missed the 800-lb guerilla in the room. “The Mexican drug war was triggered by the construction of the new fencing and vehicle barriers,” said Glenn Spencer of American Border Patrol, “But the people at this conference, including academics, are so delusional that they refuse to face the facts.”

Spencer said the same sort of delusion has taken over many in Washington, D.C., including DHS Secretary Napolitano.

“The American people understand that if we finish the fence we will finish the cartels,” Spencer said. “Next fall they will let politicians know of their displeasure if they don’t wake up and stop drugs at the border by completing the fence project,” he added. Spencer says putting an end to cartels will go a long way toward solving Mexico’s problems.

A fence? You’re going to stop drugs with a fence? A fence will finish the cartels?

What incredible delusion.

Assuming that you were able to completely fence the 7,477 miles of land boundaries and the 12,380 miles of coastline, and then you somehow managed to keep the drugs from going over, under, or through the fence, you’d still have to deal with the simple fact that the United States imports over 2 trillion dollars of goods each year and the cartels only need to piggyback the drug shipments in with legal shipments. If we shut those down, or even slowed the legal shipments down enough to inspect more than a tiny fraction, the economy would be damaged drastically.

A fence.

Robert Almonte, executive director, Texas Narcotic Officers Association and El Paso police deputy chief (retired), had a different view of the war on drugs than most of the learned participants in the recent conference in El Paso (surprise, surprise): ‘War on Drugs’ conference got the issue wrong

It’s a pretty bad piece of dreck, full of standard stale prohibitionist misdirection, strawmen, and cherry-picked statistics. I particularly noted the ending:

Our children deserve better; El Paso deserves better. O’Rourke, in calling for the public to exert pressure on our elected officials to legalize marijuana, has stated: “As evidence, I point to the 3,200 people who have been killed in Juárez.”

I say to you, Mr. O’Rourke, as evidence against legalizing marijuana and other dangerous drugs, I point to the countless Americans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by drugs and the over 38,000 Americans who die from drug overdoses each year.

Let me get this straight. As a defense of prohibition, we should ignore the 3200 killed in Juárez under prohibition, and instead focus on the 38,000 Americans killed by overdoses under prohibition.

Right.

Arthur Salm at San Diego News Network has the creative juices flowing

All of the complications, headaches and frustration we’re grappling with right now spring from nearly a century of American society’s ground-level, fundamental bungling . Cannabis was demonized for a goulash of reasons we won’t rehash here, but not one of them passes the Martian test: Could you explain this to a Martian and not sound like an idiot?

That’s a good test. And no, there’s no way that you could truthfully explain marijuana prohibition to a Martian without sounding like an idiot.

Salm’s closing is poetry. Evocative, powerful, and absurdly beautiful…

Somewhere, another dog has bitten another man. The sun has risen so far in the east that it’s now practically in the west. And, so long as men shoot elephants from helicopters, and have their hearts broken by women and vice versa and any combination therein, and loved ones and pets die, and the rent is due, and life is just too damn complex and weird, folks are just naturally going to want to get high.

Sometimes they do it just for the merry hell of it. And when we don’t want to face this hard fact, when we delude ourselves into thinking there’s something inherently evil about it, we end up spending time and money appointing task forces to look into the matter.

Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. And while you’re at it, stop shooting elephants from helicopters.

Massachusetts: Marijuana law has had little effect on schools

After the recent partial decriminalization of marijuana in the state, this article takes a look at how it has affected schools. Other than the occasional Principal who uses the change to complain about the law (“From our standpoint, (the law is) sending a terrible message to kids,” said Welch.), the actual result is that there hasn’t been a change for the worse.

There is no epidemic of pot smoking in schools that didn’t exist prior to the decriminalization law.

The concluding line was the point that I’d like to emphasize:

“Kids have learned that alcohol and drugs aren’t acceptable here…they may do them, but it won’t be here,” said Fleury.

One of the things that oppressive prohibition does is remove incentives for increasing the appropriateness of use.

Back when I was in college, even though marijuana was illegal, local enforcement had its own version of decriminalization. It went like this: Smoking pot on campus (in dorms, at the soccer field, etc.) was fine (not the football field because of alumni) as long as you never gave or sold it to high school students.

This actually worked well. Nobody in college would even consider selling to high school students — they would be not only subject to immediate arrest, but would be ostracized by the rest of the campus.

Give people an opportunity to use drugs responsibly and give them reasonable restrictions as to when and where, and most people are happy to comply.

Legalization gives us opportunities that few can understand.

In Redding, California, a group of property owners were meeting, in part, to discuss their concerns about medical marijuana collectives expanding.

Moments before Wednesday’s Mission Square property owners meeting, someone dressed in a green Grinch costume with a giant imitation penis attached stepped out of a limousine and walked into Giff’s Steakburger – the site of the meeting.

The Grinch announced to Mission Square owners that a new cannabis shop – Hampton Collective – would open in the former Humor Shop space on the north side of the shopping center.

I would have loved to have been there to take a picture of that moment, but… really? limousine, Grinch, giant penis? What was the thought process there?

“I don’t know, I was just trying to be funny. I guess it didn’t work out,” Bobby Martin, who dressed up as the Grinch, said by phone Thursday.

Good guess.

I think there’s a lesson here for us. One of the things we can do as drug policy reformers is to be aware of how we present ourselves.

Maybe Bobby Martin is a Grinch with a giant penis at home, but when going to talk to the property owners association, he should think about how they might feel about an endowed Grinch (rather than just whether he thought it was funny) and he could decide to change outfits. He could always put on his Grinch outfit again later when he goes out on the town with his friends.

The key here is to be aware of your audience. This doesn’t mean you have to sell out — you just need to know what makes them tick.

The easiest thing, of course, it to be right for your audience. Obviously, if you’re a LEAP member who is a former police officer and you look like a police officer with short hair while you stand in front of the Kiwanis Club talking about reform, you’ve got an advantage.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to be a police officer to talk to Kiwanis. I have had successful Kiwanis talks. It means that you need to understand what interests them and talk to their interests. You don’t need to lie or hide anything. Just simply tie back your long hair, put on a clean, pressed shirt, and talk to them earnestly and intelligently about issues that concern them.

Consider Tommy Chong. He has a lifetime of his entire persona being pretty much the ultimate stoner joke. And yet watch him sometime when he’s seriously talking about drug policy. He’s intelligent, articulate and engaging.

I have a workshop that I’ve conducted with others and by myself called “Elevator Arguments.” (Here’s the handout (pdf)) Part of the idea is to be able to come up with cogent drug policy reform argument in 30 seconds. Concise and to the point. But part of it is also to tailor that argument to your audience. And I let the workshop participants put me on the spot (I love this part). They call out a type of person and, on the spot, in 30 seconds, I tell that person why they should support drug policy reform.

It’s a good exercise, and a good skill to have.

How many of these could you speak to about drug reform in a way that would resonate with them?

• Soccer mom
• Parent who lost a child to drug overdose
• Republican party leader
• Democratic party leader
• Business leader
• Someone who just lost their job to the economy
• Police officer
• Teacher
• Rush Limbaugh
• Hillary Clinton
• Conservative Christian
• Abortion rights advocate
• African-American leader
• Farmer
• Poor family in the inner city plagued by crime
• Rich white guy
• Senior citizen
• Union member
• Your mom

You don’t have to stop being yourself to do this. You can still be a Grinch with an enormous penis. But you do have to pay attention to the interests, needs, fears, and desires of the people you want to convince. And not just in a superficial, caricaturized way, but to really understand them.

Understanding how other people tick doesn’t lessen your sense of who you are, it enriches it.

I got this rather… interesting… email today:

Hello and Good Day,

My company runs a network of online users in the United States looking online for medical marijuana.

I reviewed your site and felt it may be an excellent source to direct our members to when they are searching online for medical marijuana or dispensaries.

I would like to discuss this with the person that makes decisions for your institution. So that we can possibly work to simply direct our network of online users looking for your service.

I look forward to talking with you soon.

Best Regards,

Eddie Perez
Sr. Medical Marijuana Search Agent

Sorry, Eddie. That’s not really what we do here. But I love your title!
(And thanks for calling me an institution.)

Texas DA Accused of Stealing From Motorists Wants To Defend Herself With Money She’s Accused of Stealing From Motorists – Radley’s got another one of those true stories you just can’t make up.

ALL Medical Marijuana Dispensaries to be outlawed by City of LA. This would require any marijuana patients in L.A. to drive somewhere else, or grow their own. This is bad news, but, to put it in perspective…. medical marijuana patients in Illinois were heard jointly playing the world’s tiniest violin for them.

SANHO TREE: The drug war has failed, so what’s next?

Get Serious about Decriminalizing Drugs; Others Are by Tim Lynch and Juan Carlos Hidalgo at Cato

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.

Via LEAP’s blog is this video from a press conference held by Police Chief George Gascon of San Francisco.

The press conference was about shutting down illegal marijuana grow operations, but someone actually asked him whether legalization might be an answer to some of our problems, and he noted:

Obviously, it’s speculation… we can go back to the days of prohibition — you know, when alcohol was prohibited — people found ways to deal with the manufacturing and production of alcohol and a lot of violence came as a result of that. Alcohol was legalized; some of that went away. It’s hard to tell.

Could you have imagined an active police chief answering in that way 10 years ago?

Yes, the United States leads the world once again, and I’m sure when they go up to the podium to accept their award, the first one thanked will be the War on Drugs.

That’s right — the latest worldwide incarceration figures are out.

The United States has the highest prison population
rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national
population […]

Almost three fifths of countries (59%) have rates below
150 per 100,000. […]

More than 9.8 million people are held in penal
institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial
detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners.
Almost half of these are in the United States (2.29m),
Russia (0.89m) or China (1.57m sentenced prisoners). […]

Prison populations are growing in many parts of the
world. Updated information on countries included in
previous editions of the World Prison Population List
shows that prison populations have risen in 71% of
these countries.

Check out the numbers…
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